Tapestry, a branch of the Intercultural Student Services Office, hosted “Arabs, Muslims, and the Media” in the Henry West Banquet Room Wednesday, Jan. 25.

Nate Sayegh (jr) and Margaret Busch (so) co-led the Arab/Middle Eastern thread of Tapestry and decided that the event would be most appropriate for January, the Middle Eastern Heritage month.

ISS Director Don Lawrence, who approved the event, said the office seeks to foster global unity, and members  believe that all students “should be knowledgeable and sensitive about intercultural relations.”

Sayegh and Busch designed the event to further that goal specifically between America and the Middle East. Busch, a TESOL education major, said that complications between the two created a faulty Middle Eastern stereotype that the current generation is prone to accept.

“We’re not only the post-9/11 generation, but we’re the generation that lived through the Iraq War. We lived through the Afghanistan War.

Through those periods, especially, there was a lot of negative coverage of the Middle East. And what happens that’s negative is that the Arab Americans, and even the American Muslims that are in this country, become casualties of the media,” Busch said.

The hour-long event centered on a nine-minute media clip followed by a panel discussion. The clip included a range of media clips – from news coverage to Walt Disney’s “Aladdin” – that highlighted what Sayegh and Busch considered discriminatory.

The panel included Sayegh and four members of a non-profit Christian organization called the Crescent Project. The discussion was designed to help engage participants in considering how to use their skills to build relationships with the Arab population.

“One of the things that has struck me is that, as Christians, we are really good about defending Christianity from public criticism,” said Sayegh.

“Those are skills we develop because Christianity’s always under attack, but when something else is under attack, we just let it go. We have all these skills, but we only apply them to ourselves.”

The Globe Theatre doesn’t usually sell out a show, but on Nov. 18 and 19 each one of the 198 seats was filled for both showings of “The Help.”

“The Help” is the only movie at The Globe this semester with a PG-13 rating and joins “Tangled” as the only movies to sell out any showings in the last year.

It is set in 1960s-era Jackson, Miss., where African American housekeepers are struggling to survive in the midst of racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws. The movie follows one group of women who, even with all the pressures they were under, break all the rules to try to change their world.

Regardless of the redeeming aspects in “The Help,” there was some doubt that it would even be allowed in the Globe because of it’s “moderate” use of profane language.

In order to ensure that students weren’t offended by the obscenities, Rev. Dr. Kyle Huckins and Don Lawrence, director of Intercultural Student Services read a “disclaimer” at the beginning of each showing that warned students of the potentially offensive language and some difficult thematic elements.

“It’s wise to address issues of language in a film we’re going to show here,” Lawrence said. “We have students from all sorts of backgrounds, and we don’t want to take it for granted that students are just going to be OK with language. It may have caught a few students off-guard because there’s not usually a disclaimer out before, but I think it was the right way to go.”

Maggie Slusher (sr) said while she understood the reason for the disclaimer, it wasn’t absolutely necessary. “We are all adults,” she said. “A few bad words are not something that would catch us off guard.”

Chelsea Pickslay (sr) didn’t mind the unusual opening. “I think it kind of set the tone [for the movie],” she said. “I kind of came like, ‘OK, this is a good movie,’ but it’s so much more than that.”

Brittney Hilgemann (sr) saw the disclaimer differently.

“I didn’t feel like it was necessary. The movie set its own tone,” she said. “I kind of felt like it ruined it. I felt like a freshman again, being told ‘This is how you’re supposed to think.’ I’m going to learn what I’m going to learn, and I did. It was really good.”

“At first I was caught off-guard by the statement,” Slusher said. “But [then] several people in the theater laughed and I forgot all about it.”

Globe Theater Manager Lindsey Smart (jr) said she’s glad the theater showed the movie.

“It’s a movie that you always hear people laughing and crying, and rightfully so,” Smart said. “It’s funny and there’s issues that are going to be emotional, in a good way.”

According to Lawrence, the movie was a great opportunity for students to think about social issues and the importance of diversity.

[Movies like this] “create an environment that it’s OK to discuss and engage in matters that might, in other settings, be very awkward and difficult,” Lawrence said. “I heard students talking after the film saying, ‘Man, that film was so good. I had no idea things were like that.’”

“I think it would be easy to walk away from the movie and think, ‘That’s the past and everything is fine now,’” Pickslay said. “But this stuff still happens. This is something we still need to fight for.”

Hilgemann thought “The Help” was just going to be “another cute Emma Stone movie.”

“I didn’t even know it was going to be this powerful,” Hilgemann said. “I cried most of the movie.”

Due to the success of the show, Lawrence said he talked with Jim Taylor, student center manager, about playing “The Help” again, potentially next semester.

“I think students expect there to be more films like [‘The Help’],” Lawrence said, “films that will challenge them intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually. In fact, I think that’s what our films should be doing. I’m glad we showed it.”