The Middle East has become deep-rooted in the U.

S popular imagination

as compared to other parts of the world. This Embedding can be traced

back to the Puritans who went to the Holy Land approximately four

centuries ago and brought with them enthralling accounts on Muslims as

well as some Jews who lived there. In the 19th century, the Middle East

witnessed flourishing waves of American missionaries, tourists, and

merchants who were fascinated by Eastern landscapes, yet; they were

confounded by the depraved societies they saw while roving from

Constantinople to Cairo which led to the creation of an ambivalent attitude

towards the Middle East. These earlier cultural and racial stereotypes

were transformed into travel accounts, memories, remarks and comments

by American diplomats, oil men, and soldiers who looked after U.S

interests in the Middle East during 20th century. They produced such

intellectual shorthands with the objective of collecting knowledge about

Muslims and therefore finding out a way to manipulate them. In this

regard, American movie directors and writers rely on travel accounts as

productive sources of imagination to create artistic works such as films

and novels. For instance American movies draw on existing Muslim

stereotypes in travel accounts and perpetuate negative images in early

cinema which have had a profound impact on the American psyche.

Furthermore, Douglass Little refers to the assumptions made by the

anthropologists Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins to further illustrate how

orientalism made its way into U.S popular culture. In this sense, Luz and

Collins believe that widespread U.S maganzines such as National

Geographic are responsible for widening the gap between the west and
the east because they generate and dissimenate orientalist images of

third world countries namely Africa and Asia. As a matter of fact, the

Arabs, Africans, and Asians who fill the pages of National Geography are

portrayed as primitives, backwards, exotic, in addition to many other

dehumanizing attributes, the main aim of which is to promote the idea

that Third World countries are in constant need of U.S help as if these

countries were out of time and history. During 1950s, the orientalist

mindset represented by National Geographic pervaded all spheres of

American society which had a powerful impact on the U.S policies and

attitudes towards the Middle East. As stated by Little, U.S. policymakers

from Harry Truman through George Bush tended to dismiss Arab

aspirations for self-determination as politically primitive, economically

suspect, and ideologically absurd. It can be said that U.S policymakers

delibrately adopt these cultural and racial stereotypes as a pretext to cut

out diplomatic relations with the Middle East, and to guarantee Americas

superiority over the inferior east. At the end of twentieth century,

Hollywood declared that the orientalist American style has become well

established in U.S popular culture. Anyone who suspects the American

prejiduces against Arabs has only to listen to the lyrics in a song from the

animated movie Aladdin that was released in 1992, It's barbaric, but hey,

it's home. Apparently, Hollywood movie makers tend to portray a whole

region with this kind of tongue-in-cheek bigotry, mainly in a movie that

target children to normalize mythical stereotypes on the Arabs.

Furthermore, Little attempts to trace back the origins of American

Orientalism by making allusion to other influential factors like the Arabian

Nights, the King James Bible, and Mark Twains account The Innocent

Abroad that contributed in the shaping of U.S perception on the Middle

East. The discovery of the Orient was extending because of the discovery

of various oriental texts, although perhaps no other work contributed as

much as the Arabian Nights. In this context, the Americans deem the

Arabian Nights as a powerful source of inspiration and imagination. Thus,

the Arabian Nights was much admired for its exoticism and oriental

themes.