To attempt to answer this question, director Bassam Hassad crisscrossed the Middle East, the United Kingdom, and the United States, interviewing top officials, academics, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, attempting to gauge public opinion on the topic of Arabs and terrorism.

While the documentary does shed some very revelatory light on American academic/policy makers attitudes towards Arabs and terrorism, and rightly points out that Arab/Islamic terrorism occupies thelionshareof American's attention even though it is far from being the sole source of global terrorist activity, it falls short in many other aspects.

Perhaps the best part of the documentary came in the third segment, where the director engaged in some rather provocative and revelatory film-making. He filmed his interview with figures such as key leaders of Hizbollah, and then showed the interview to an American policy official, usually of a conservative nature (it is worth noting that most of the American officials he interviewed seemed to slant towards the right), and filmed their reactions. He then did the same using their reply with the person who had originally been interviewed. Though the words these people speak say plenty, it is their facial expressions, unguarded, that provided the most telling glances into their thought processes.

One of my major critiques of this film is that too many of the interviewees are of the academic/intellectual nature - certainly, these are the people who help interpret and shape policy and attitudes towards terrorists and Arabs, but at the same time, if the director's aim was to attempt to discern what motivates people on an individual level to turn towards terrorism, logically, more of the film should have focused on interviewing ordinary people.

With regards to the intellectuals they did interview, most presented compelling points of view (from both sides of the spectrum, liberal and conservative), but I wonder why they did not interview the British journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk is known for his coverage of the Arab world and has written an extensive book on its history (and how that history and present-day reality of the region is largely ignored in the Western media), so to not have him is a little strange to me.

However, my main quibble comes from something else entirely. As far as I can tell, the filmmakers (for reasons best known unto themselves) avoided paying a visit to Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure whether this was due to them being denied permission to film in the Kingdom, or whether it was an intentional or accidental oversight, but it seems to be a rather glaring omission to me.

Saudi Arabia is one of the key actors in the global Islamist (not Islamic, Islamist, there is a difference) terrorist movement, especially in terms of funding and the spreading of Wahabi extremist ideology. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden is originally from Saudi Arabia as well, though the government stripped him of his citizenship. Therefore, for the film not to include, reference, or interview Saudis in any significant way seems to be an almost inexcusable lapse.

Ultimately, the film concludes that the daily living conditions faced by many Arabs are a potent source of discontent - a conclusion I accept and agree with, but given the proposed scope of this documentary, the conclusion seems a little simplistic. It also occupies about 30 seconds of airtime just as the film closes. A more nuanced and intellectual conclusion as to the relationship between Arabs and terrorism would have made this film much richer one by far.

Overall verdict: Impressive in its scope, the film falls short on depth.

3/5 stars