muslims – they’re just like us!: representations of islam in traitor
Omar (again, al-Nathir’s 2nd-in-command) doesn’t know the most basic things about bombs – for eg that a bomb without a detonator is completely harmless.
Except for a brief meanwhile montage, no attempt is made to explain what motivates the terrorists characters to do what they do. Isn’t character motivation a basic element of plot writing? I suppose we should take this up with Steve Martin – that whacky guy co-wrote the script!
The only non-terrorist Muslim characters are all American or English Muslims.
This made me laugh out loud: when Samir makes contact with the terrorists-in-waiting, he identifies himself as a member of al-Nathir by saying…wait for it…As-Salaam-Alaikum. For serious.
Omar is the only terrorist character who appears to have depth and complexity (And he’s really the only compelling part of the movie. Or maybe that’s just because Saïd Taghmaoui is so swoonsome…) but despite that his death is completely glossed over.
Traitor has drawn many (undeserved) comparisons to The Bourne films, but it really has much more in common with John Le Carré’s 1983 novel Little Drummer Girl, which was later made into a film starring Diane Keaton.
Little Drummer Girl also deals with a spy under deep cover and the ethics of infiltration, and also tells the story from the point of view of both a Western anti-terrorist unit and Islamic terrorist group. But it does so with much more historical context and intelligence. If anybody wants to share their thoughts on Little Drummer Girl, I’d love to hear them.
Try again, Traitor.
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* thanks gatamala!
** Ahem! Contrary to the movie’s dialogue is not the “ass-end of Canada” but rather the cultural centre of Eastern Canada and the home of Africville.
*** This story line perturbed me in particular because it reminded me of Project Thread, an anti-terrorism sting operation that led to the 2003 arrests of 24 South Asian Muslim men living on student visas in Toronto. The 24 were held in maximum-security prisons without access to lawyers.
They were arrested on charges of terrorism and widely reported in the media as terrorists – but no hard evidence that any of them were involved in terrorism was found. Nonetheless their names were never cleared and many of them were forced to return to their countries of origin.
Why were they suspected of terrorism in the first place? It appears the fact that they were South Asian Muslim men living on student visas was enough to rouse serious suspicion.
For more info you can access Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s article on Project Threadbare, the Toronto group that formed to try to protect the 24 men. Project Threadbare’s website is here.
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