Steve Clemons has posted a video on his blog he says was sent to him by an Al Jazeera anchor. The video, called “Reel Bad Arabs,” purports to show what the American Prospect‘s Matthew Duss says is “Hollywood’s villification of Arabs.” Clemons says the video is “worth learning from” but doesn’t bother to tell us what (if anything) he learned from it.

Bypassing the obvious questions raised about the validity of anything forwarded along by an Al Jazeera journalist, Ross Douthat nevertheless very smartly writes that nearly all of the movies depicted in the documentary are at least fifteen years old. He also points out that “America’s most deadly and dedicated enemies tend to be, well, Arabic,” a fact which no doubt offends the tender sensibilities of Clemons and Duss. I imagine both of them would prefer that Hollywood change the scripts of movies so that, for instance, Arab terrorists become European neo-Nazis hell-bent on world domination. Everyone knows, after all, that the latter are a grave threat to humanity and the former are mere holograms created by the neocon war machine.