Talk like an Egyptian: is Arab popular culture uniformly anti-American?

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Rant

IN AUGUST The Washington Post ran a front-page story about the rising popularity of anti-American themes in Egyptian pop culture, offering as its lead example the latest work by Egypt's best-known filmmaker, Youssef Chahine. Entitled Alexandria ... New York, the movie is "a cinematic divorce paper," according to the Post. "Chahine said he had long admired the United States and its biggest city," wrote reporter Daniel Williams, "but now be has made a film brimming with resentment."

Is that so? Spare me Chahine's supposedly lost admiration. The last time I saw Chahine take up the subject of the U.S. he once "admired" so much, he portrayed the country as an old whore pandering to Jews.

That's the concluding scene of his 1978 "masterpiece," Alexandia ... Why? That film, which attempts a series of parallel plots, offers the story of a young Egyptian actor in the 1940s who wants to come to the U.S. At the movie's end, he's on a ship approaching New York. But when Chahine shows us a close-up of the Statue of Liberty (the shot involves an actress in costume), she turns out to be an overage, overweight, overpainted harlot, and she's welcoming not the Egyptian student but an arriving group of European Hasidic Jews, complete with long side curls.

The whorish Ms. Liberty laughs lasciviously, exposing her mouthful of bad teeth, while a Jewish chant is playing on the soundtrack. That's what Chahine thought of the U.S. some 25 years ago.

Yet in its effort to demonstrate that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has turned the whole Arab world, including such one-time "admirers," against the U.S., the Post allowed Chahine to strike a self-serving pose of regretful lost love.

Here's a sample passage: "'I don't know if this is a final divorce,' Chahine, 78, said as he smoked cigarettes against the wishes of attentive aides. 'I think about the friends I have had in America every day. It was in New York where I saw the greatest plays. I saw Sinatra at the Paramount.'" Please.

Most of the rest of the Post's story was about singer Shaaban Abdel Rehim and his anti-American songs. Abdel Rehim, a former wedding singer who has cornered the subgenre of paranoid hate...