"Oh my god, he's an Arab!
Is that a bomb? IS THAT A BOMB?!"
Now surely in 2006 this was unacceptable. It just shows the ignorance of a nation.
I'm seriously still trying to figure out if that was a joke or something, but racist, and pretty damn racist at that.
NYC of all places probably gets a pass on that. The WTC was truck bombed and then run into by a couple of planes by, of all people, Arabs, killing more than few NYers.
And 2006 was in the middle of the Iraq war and the hype machine about internal threats, especially against NYC, was in full force.
Plus, the comment wasn't being made by a rational person analyzing the situation, but at the height of emotion by a more ordinary person.
The movie is about the soul of NYC and the history of genocide. one of the most interesting things about the movie is the way it portrays heroic and positive characters in a warts-and-all manner. Many heroic characters express racist ideals in the story. I really liked that element. It made everything so much more complex.
shareAgreed
At first I was rolling my eyes, it felt like an attempt to shoe horn it in to add forced "depth"
But it completely ties into the entire plot and overall point of the movie. The more I think about the movie, the more I like it.