It has been the norm with movies about Middle Eastern events, or Middle Eastern themes, that Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern suffering is treated with a few words or lines by a character. But suffering by someone who is white, Western, Jewish or Christian is treated with powerful imagery, often done at half-speed, with wrenching detail in every drop of blood spilled and accompanied with dramatic minimalist music.

A good example of this was Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” which he announced with much fanfare as his “prayer for peace,” but which in reality was just another piece of pro-Israel crap off the assembly line.The image of the Israeli athletes taken hostage and killed are played over and over; meanwhile as some of the characters are having moral reservations over murdering PLO operatives in Europe, one of the agents sums up 60 years of dispossession and oppression with, “we weren’t so nice ourselves.” Cinema is a visual art form; images are more than the byproduct of the camera, they also convey ideas that the director wants you to see.That’s where “Rendition,” starring Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin, Jake Gyllenhaal and Igal Naor, seems to go right. Instead of blasting away nameless and faceless terrorists, or showing piles of dead American or European victims, the image centers around chemical engineer and Egyptian native, Anwar el-Ibrahimi (Metwally) who is arrested and then “rendered” to Morocco by CIA officer Corrine Whitman (Streep.)Much of the movie is centered on el-Ibrahimi’s torture, while his wife, Isabella Fields el-Ibrahimi (Witherspoon), frantically tries to locate him. The torture includes being put in the “hole,” waterboarding and electro-shock, until he confesses to participation with the terrorist network’s attempted assassination of Moroccan intelligence official Abasi Fawal (Naor), who is also el-Ibrahimi’s interrogator. His torture, in fact, is given more visual play than the terrorist bombing, which ended up killing CIA analyst Douglas Freeman’s (Gyllenhaal) co-worker, and 19 others.Where it goes wrong is another norm in this political subgenre – the depiction of the terrorists themselves. While terrorism — the Al-Qaeda mass casualty brand, in particular — is a cruel and ugly affair, it’s also a political affair and it does no one any favors when their political program and demands are sidelined in favor of portraying them as single-minded religious fanatics, whose sole motivation is going to heaven.That’s what happened in the movie, “The Kingdom,” which portrayed the Saudi terrorist leader, Abu Hamza, as being motivated purely by religious conviction. The death and destruction meted out against the largely American foreigners in their secluded compounds was explained through Abu Hamza’s fundamentalism, and not at the privileges the foreigners receive, the squandering of the country’s oil resources, the Saudi dictatorship, etc.The same thing appears to be at work in “Rendition.” Al-Hazim, the Salafist group responsible for the attack, is viewed through a similar lens and it’s this de-politicization that not only detracts from the movie’s authenticity, but also functions as a form of propaganda, where the terrorists hate us because of who we are. The logic of this Islamophobic thinking seems to have infected “Rendition,” not on purpose, but I believe unconsciously as participants in the Islamophobic propaganda machine known as Hollywood.During a protest involving Fawal’s daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach) and her secret lover, Khaled el-Amin (Mohammed Khouas), the young demonstrators are attacked by government forces, but the details of the demonstration are vague, save for a visible sign saying “America Out!” While this refers to American involvement in the region, the American film audience is largely ignorant of the politics and history of American involvement in the region, or the extent of this involvement and its consequences.Another point of contention is how the process of extraordinary rendition is treated. In a movie that promises a thorough critique of extraordinary rendition — where a non-U.S. national is officially “disappeared” and shipped by the U.S. to a third country to be tortured for information — the movie seemed to focus on the practicality of it, while the moral issues took a back seat.During a tense exchange between Whitman and Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an old friend of both Anwar and Isabella and Congressional aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), Whitman, while denying any knowledge of el-Ibrahimi, justifies torture by recounting how it saved 7,000 lives, while Smith brings up constitutional issues. El-Ibrahimi confesses and gives names, which turn out to be members of the 1990 Egyptian national soccer team, the year el-Ibrahimi left for America.This leads Freeman to conclude that the prisoner is innocent and, going against his superiors in Washington, he gets el-Ibrahimi out and sends him on a boat to Spain, and onto a flight home to Chicago. This leaves a fundamental question unanswered; is the war on terror just, or is it a war for empire? Instead, the question is one of balancing national security with civil liberties, which gives credence to the overall politico-military apparatus, even if torture and rendition are rendered obsolete.Finally, there’s Anwar el-Ibrahimi himself. Granted, anyone in his position — which is based on the real life rendition of Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, kidnapped by the U.S. and rendered to Syria on false Canadian intelligence — would be terrified. But Anwar el-Ibrahimi is a crying, blabbering wimp, just a little overdone; at one point, he screams like a woman.How about a defiant Anwar el-Ibrahimi? An Anwar el-Ibrahimi who shouts back and tells them to F$%! themselves? Denounce the regime and the United States, even going so far as spitting on Freeman for being a part of the system, or at least retaining his manhood and humanity in the face of a system trying to deprive him of both? Instead, we have an Anwar el-Ibrahimi begging for his life, at the mercy of the Arab torturer and the enlightened American who does the right thing and saves his life, thereby becoming the hero, because the hero always has to be an American.”Rendition” is an example of Hollywood at its best, just like “Syriana.” Unfortunately, that’s not saying much, and it’s time for Hollywood to stop telling the stories of others and allow those others to do their own storytelling.