There's a movie coming out with Muslims in it! Quick, someone fire up the CAIR e-mail alert!

Time to join the boycott group on Facebook with 8 people in it!

Don't get me wrong, there are TONS of terrible portrayals of Muslims in movies in our history. Executive Decision, The Siege and True Lies are just a few.

But I started reading about this new spy movie with Don Cheadle coming out this month called Traitor. I'm actually excited for it. Cheadle, famous for his leading role in Hotel Rwanda, plays an Muslim CIA operative working undercover for a terrorist group. Throughout the film, the lines blur as to which side Cheadle is on as he also struggles spiritually to figure out who he even is.

Sounds baller.

The "old days" of Hollwood only gave small roles to Arab/Indian/Muslim characters, normally villians that scream and yell with AK-47s before getting kicked in the head by Chuck Norris or Jean Claude Van Damme (by the way, if you've never seen the Van Damme movie that takes place in Palestine, you're in store for an awesomely bad treat).

These days, even tho there are still "Muslim" terrorist roles in movies, these characters actually have some depth to them.

Look at the influx of movies with positive portrayals these past few years. Earlier this summer, You Don't Mess With the Zohan came out, a mediocre Adam Sandler comedy involving a love story between an Israeli secret agent and a Palestinian hair dresser. Rendition, another mediocre flick focusing on the United States’ flawed interrogation policies, involves a terrorist character that worries about bringing the girl he loves to close to his lifestyle that he realizes is despicable.

Hey, they weren’t amazing flicks, but I’d rather watch movies like this than the old days of Habib the Whacky Gunman riding a camel with a rocket launcher.

Maybe I'm getting too naive and optimistic, but I think the days of screaming Muslim terrorists in movies are behind us. If not, they're definitely close to being over.

But I think we definitely need to give credit where it is clearly due. There have been amazing civil rights groups like CAIR, MPAC and activists like Jack Shaheen that have tirelessly fought on our behalf trying to erase the one-dimensional terrorist roles in Hollywood.

Proof? Look at the Fox show 24, about a federal agent named Jack Bauer that tries to prevent a terrorist attack each season. Season 4 involved a terrorist Muslim family living in California. Muslim rights groups got Fox, a multibillion dollar company owned by Rupert Murdoch, to run disclaimers saying this show is not representive of mainstream Islam!

The fact that our voice is being heard speaks volumes to the progress we've made in the entertainment industry.

But make no mistake about it, we need to make so much more progress, and I speak especially for myself making a living as an entertainer (aka living in a crappy studio apartment in New York and performing at comedy clubs nightly with about 15-20 people in the audience).

We're getting movie directors to sit down with us and listen to our concerns, but now we need to take the wheel. We need to be making the movies ourselves.

We need more shows like Little Mosques on the Prairie, a smash hits about Muslims and most importantly, created by a Muslim.

After all, who better to tell our story than ourselves?

Keep in mind this is only my opinion, silly goose.

Email me at aman@amanali.net