Even with the latest Democrat mid-term election win I'm still angry about the irritating comments made by RFK Jr. about 500 million Arabs being a useless people who produce no science and literature. It started me on a mental tirade, wanting to remind him of his own grandfather’s minority bootlegger background. On further reflection, I was reminded of my own initial reactions to a famous French science fiction martial arts movie, Banlieue (or District) 13 (2004). There, an Algerian gangster 'finds' a neutron bomb timed to go off and tries to blackmail the French government, while a secret agent and escaped vigilante try to save the day.

By Emad Aysha
The movie was modelled on America’s own variety of inner-city dystopia subgenre, with Escape from New York (1981) and Firepower (1993). How ironic that the French movie got recycled into a cheesier American version with Paul Walker: Brick Mansions (2014).

An Egyptian student had got me a copy of B13, and I was angry at the portrayal of Arabs. The bad guy steals the vigilante’s sister and makes her his sex slave, with chains.

The student, however, explained to me, very correctly, that the movie was trying to say racism and classism were responsible for this situation. True enough, the French government are the ultimate culprit here.

GLOBAL SOUTH BITES BACK: The penultimate scene from 'Dune: Part Two' (2024). By the end of this article, you'll learn that there's more to the Arab world than sand and parasites.

The vigilante was at war with that gangster and got betrayed by the cops – even handing over his sister to boot. The central government, meanwhile, planted that neutron bomb to begin with, to clean out the neighbourhood, and while supposedly handing over the blackmail money to the gangster, hacked into his account and stole all his money!

It ‘could’ be that the bee in RFK Jr.’s bonnet is what Arabs get up to when they’re abroad. My mother explained to me how she wouldn’t give charity money to Arabic beggars in England, compared to a Romanian beggar, because while in Paris she saw an Algerian beggar spitting on a French woman.

ART once exposed how Arabic men in Scandinavian countries were deliberately unemployed to get welfare, while forcing their wives to work. (I won’t tell you the horror stories I’d heard about what Egyptian labourers got up to in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War!)

A journalist-lecturer friend once explained that Egyptian counterfeiters in New York can produce an Egyptian passport better than the real thing. Still, both the bottom and the ‘top’ of society in poor countries migrate.

Hence, the ‘brain drain’. This explains why the top surgeons in America are Indians, Pakistanis and Egyptians. The top mathematicians are Germans and Russians.

All these people thrive in America and benefit the host country more than their own countries back home, which booted them out in the first place. People like Farouk Al-Baz, the Egyptian geologist who made it safe for the Apollo astronauts to land on the moon.

People like Mustafa El-Sayed, an Egyptian nanoscience researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was the first Arab to receive the 2007 National Medal of Science. President George W. Bush awarded him the prize in person for using gold particles to kill cancer cells.

Dr Mustafa then received the Priestley Medal in 2016, the highest honour the American Chemical Society (ACS) confers. The man speaks Egyptian Arabic with a ‘provincial’ accent.

AS GOOD AS GOLD: The one good thing George W. did was reward Mustafa Al-Sayyed for targeting cancer cells with nano-tech.

Not to forget the dearly departed Ahmed Zewail (from Caltech), who got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for doing the seemingly impossible. Filming molecules and atoms as they interact in real-time.

Zewail then became President Obama’s science advisor. His final innovation was the 4D electron microscopy (4D-UEM) that allows you to watch what goes on inside a cell- chemical interactions- in real time. His discoveries are revolutionising the whole way biology is done, going from a qualitative science to a quantitative one – counting genes, chemicals and interactions.

You’d think RFK Jr. would have heard about that, being a Democrat himself. Obama was from his party, after all. We’re not so distinguished in science back home, true enough, but we still have our fair share of international awards in the less expensive world of literature.

Has RFK Jr. really never heard of Naguib Mahfouz? Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The International Booker Prize also includes winners such as Egypt’s Youssef Ziedan (2009) and Palestine’s Ibrahim Nasrallah (2018).

We’re making international strides even in SF. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s Utopia was shortlisted for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards in 2012. Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue got the 2014 English PEN Translates Award.

Then there are the Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Egyptian President Sadat and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. (No comment, since warmongers tend to get this award!)

TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE: President Anwar Al-Sadat, Nobel Prize winner, with Farouk Al-Baz, the geologist genius who helped the Americans get to the moon and back - in one piece!

Moviemakers in the West are more attuned to what’s actually going on at the street level than our so-called leaders, who’ve become as predatory as the government in Banlieue 13. Check out the new movie The Uprising (2026), with Andrew Garfield as a simple ploughman during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

When the angry mob enter London, they go on a murderous rampage against the wealthy. (They also complain about Dutch merchants stealing their jobs!)

The ploughman gets betrayed like the Vigilante in District B13, since the English king goes along with them, at first, to eliminate his rivals. Then he beheads the peasant leaders. (France, of course, has a much worse history, with Madame Guillotine.)

Action movies like Falcon Rising (2014) exposed the international cartels responsible for child-trafficking long before the Epstein scandal. The hero there, not coincidentally, is a disaffected US Marine.

Michael Keaton and Michael Caine’s thriller Quicksand (2003) exposed prostitution and sado-porno rings run by Russian gangsters and corrupt cops in Monaco long before Luc Besson. He typically dumped the blame on Muslims in Taken (2008).

CHILDHOOD FAVOURITES: Who would think that a Disney superhero movie from the 1980s anticipated everything wrong with Europe today - from illicit Russian finance to Arab oil sheikhs. Just minus the heroes!

Hell, the Disney comedy adventure Condorman (1981) has KGB people living it up in Monaco even during the Cold War, along with sleazy Arab oil sheikhs. I’ll take serious works of art over social science any day.

I’d advise RFK Jr. to watch Dune: Part Two (2024) on how imperialism births fanaticism. Although the sandworms might remind him too much of memory-consuming tapeworms!!