Hollywood should be ashamed of the way it treats Muslim actors

[Commentary] Being an actor is hard. Everyone knows that the movies, while glamorous, are a difficult and stressful business to break into, no matter your background. But actors of Middle Eastern origin face an even more unpleasant prospect: they must go through the same stress and competition, but are often restricted to a range of roles that can be narrow, degrading, and offensive.

Jon Ronson has an excellent GQ profile of a group of Muslim and Middle-Eastern actors working in Hollywood. They all told him the same thing: that there were essentially no roles available to them other than terrorist villains. And the terrorist roles, unsurprisingly, were mostly just two-dimensional stereotypes -- plot devices, not characters. Ronson writes that the men he profiled in his story "are going through something that future generations will regard as outrageous. They're the bloodthirsty Red Indians surrounding the settlers' wagons in 'Stagecoach'. They're the black savages in 'The Birth of a Nation' (who were played by white actors in blackface). They are the people Hollywood will be apologizing to tomorrow." They deserve that apology. I hope they get it. But in the meantime, maybe they could get some better parts?