It would never cross your mind that a Disney ditty would be subconsciously promoting fear of Muslims, also known as Islamophobia. Yet, that is exactly what the signature tune to Walt Disney's Aladdin does.
For the Disney uninitiated, here are the lyrics: "Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place/ Where the caravan camels roam/ Where they cut off your ear / If they don't like your face / It's barbaric, but hey, it's home."
For Shirley Steinberg, one of Canada's top experts in integrated studies, this is the image of Arabs relayed by the media.
"We are constantly bombarded by the image of violence and barbarism," she said during a public lecture held at the University of Malta, titled Teaching Against Islamophobia.
"Our cultural education has been mainly through movies. We grew up with Lawrence of Arabia and how Peter O'Toole helped the Brits save the world," said Prof. Steinberg, who lectures at McGill University in Quebec.
The media helped cultivate the way people looked at the Arab world as dark, mysterious and exotic. Over the years, and especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in the US, the western perception of Arabs gradually became a phobia.
"We live in an age when Arabs and Muslims are considered as one homogenous frightening group," said Prof. Steinberg, highlighting the fact that most people did not understand that not all Arabs were Muslim and not all Muslims were Arabs.
Although she herself is Jewish, Prof. Steinberg finds Islamophobia terribly upsetting, more so because of the politics behind it: "Part of the way one stays in power is to have enemies. The new enemy now is the Arab and the Muslim, to the extent that Islamophobia fronts most of our news headlines."
She said superpowers may benefit politically not to have peace in the Middle East and keeping oppressed people at each other's throat.
The power of the media further aided the critical way of seeing the world, said Prof. Steinberg who wrote the book The Miseducation Of The West: How Schools And The Media Distort Our Understanding Of The Islamic World.
She pointed out how in movies audiences never got to see a Danish terrorist, and how Arabs tended to be associated with the role of the baddy.
More recently, she said, prior to the US presidential election, major newspapers in the US distributed a DVD carrying an abridged version of the movie entitled Obsession, a film which claimed to highlight the global radical threat of radical Islam.
It was mainly considered as an attempt to swing votes, through fear, against liberals. While showing the trailer on YouTube, Prof Steinberg said, the message was far from discreet: grainy images were used for footage of the Arab world; mistranslations abounded; and the movie made use of deceptive newscaster endorsement.
"It's a movie posing as a documentary with the aim to promote the feeling that a threatening Arab is right round the corner. The impression is that the intent of Islamic people is to bomb and to kill," she said.
Unfortunately, this does not help the plight of the Arab refugees, especially in societies with an influx of Islamic or Arabic refugees. Intolerance towards cultural differences was on the increase.
"Take the wimple (headdress worn by nuns) and the hijab (head scarf worn by some Arab women). What's the difference essentially? And yet there have been no outcries to ban the nun's veil."
She believes banning veils in several western countries - France, Belgium, and parts of Spain - was tantamount to the gradual legislation of Islamophobia.
"Even worse, in some countries banning the hijab comes under the guise of feminism."
She explained how in Quebec, women who wore a veil could not get health insurance or hold a public post. This was a fascist way of treating the cultural differences of Islam.
So how can Islamophobia be countered?
"We have to teach against Islamophobia in a language which is understood by adults and children: through the use of image, symbol and media," Prof. Steinberg said.
She stressed the importance of authenticity in education, particularly in politics and history.
"We have to make sure we are fair. History cannot be a unilateral white Christian way of seeing the world," she added.
She also said ideally school curricula should always include the teaching of all the different religions, with the awareness that it was not "us" and "them".
"In the west, religion seems to always come on top of everything. We need to stop 'the other' from being 'the other'," she said.
Are you an Islamophobe?
According to a report by the British Commission on Islamophobia, these are the most common Islamophobic perceptions:
• Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
• It is seen as separate and the "other". It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
• It is seen as inferior to the west. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
• It is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism, and engaged in a clash of civilisation.
• It is seen as a political ideology used for political or military advantage.
• Criticisms made of "the west" by Muslims are rejected out of hand.
• Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
• Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural and normal.