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Film & TV, Love island
Opinion: The war on terror is alive and well on Love Island
Text Eman Alali
As many of you can relate, I’ve been obsessed with Love Island USA. I got sucked in after Season 6, but not just for the usual messy drama (though that’s fun too). This time around, I noticed something darker happening that I couldn’t unsee, so I put my anthropological and sociological lens on and began to investigate, reaching enlightenment. There’s a precise way certain women get systematically torn apart on this show, particularly the women of colour. Which brings an Arab-Iranian woman such as myself, who grew up in a post 9/11 North America, to think: I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending…
I’ve had the same racial stereotypes regurgitated back at me since I was a wee kid. I’ve watched people make extremist jokes at me in all kinds of places – I could never catch a break, from the school bus all the way to the queue to get into the club. This so-called “niche dark humour” isn’t niche at all; it’s omnipresent, a direct inheritance from a national security apparatus that normalised suspicion and dehumanisation. 9/11 didn’t just greenlight invasions abroad; it recalibrated culture. Brown bodies became suspect. Brown femininity became threatening.
What does this have to do with Love Island, you ask? The literal playbook that has infested everything one consumes will unsurprisingly end up in a villa on a remote island in Fiji… why? Because the same policies that taught society to view all SWANA people as inherently suspicious are now determining who is the villain on Love Island.
I was genuinely confused where all the hate towards Iranian-American Leah Kateb (Season 6) and Palestinian-American Huda Mustafa (Season 7) was coming from. Their treatment on the show is not just a result of interpersonal drama, but it is a consequence of racialised surveillance. These women were love-bombed by men who later turned on them, deploying pseudo-therapeutic language and manufactured sensitivities to manipulate and gaslight them into emotional collapse.
As many of my MENA queens can relate, especially those in the diaspora, we are always on the receiving end of the drama. I have never seen a Middle Eastern woman in cinema who was not somewhat evil or conniving. The moment we take our first breath, we are being monitored and surveilled, constantly viewed as a threat. Time and time again, SWANA women are continually labelled as evil and toxic. As I watch Leah and Huda’s time in the villa, I can’t help but see myself reflected in these racial politics as they are being live-streamed in front of me.
Twenty-four years after 9/11, the “war on terror’s” biggest impact isn’t its military gains, but rather how the effects of its dehumanisations have seeped into everyday life, including our brain-rot reality TV. SWANA people are deemed to be extremists or barbaric, and therefore ultimately untrustworthy. The infrastructure of suspicion has become so normal that we deploy it unconsciously, even in spaces designed for absolute brainrot.
Deep-dive:
Leah’s story: When confidence becomes “toxic”
Leah entered Season 6 as this powerful, confident character. But the moment other contestants realised she wasn’t going to play small, both the villa and online audiences started tearing her down. Production capitalised on this hatred.
They would cherry-pick tweets to make it seem like the entire world thought she was toxic. Her fellow contestants – particularly white contestants like Liv, Kaylor, and Rob – kept painting her as a manipulator and liar.
When she tried to defend herself, she got ganged up on and backed into a corner until she had a completely legitimate emotional response.
Subsequently, her behaviour was branded as “aggressive.” These same white contestants, who were equally loud (if not louder), tried to paint her as scary and violent. I was genuinely confused. To this day, I believe these people were let off too easily.
Leah’s iconic comeback – “it’s giving white-woman scared” – was chef’s kiss perfection. But not everyone has the tools to recognise these dynamics or shut them down as quickly.
Huda’s nightmare: Surveillance and sabotage
Now in Season 7, Huda went through the same hell. First, her connection with Jeremiah was relentlessly monitored and sabotaged by other contestants, leaving her with what seems like genuine PTSD. Next up, with Chris, she visibly flinched away from intimate moments in public because she’s terrified they’ll be weaponised against her again.
The bullying got so bad that The New York Times had to document the patterns. Production issued unprecedented warnings about cyberbullying. Host Ariana Madix had to tell viewers: “Don’t be contacting people’s families. Don’t be doxxing people.”
When Huda’s harassment became unmanageable, her child’s father had to beg for basic human decency publicly-“She has a daughter, and a life”- we’re watching entertainment become indistinguishable from systematic oppression.
Even as concerns mounted about her mental health, producers continued orchestrating scenarios designed to make her “crash out.” Like the “stand on business challenge” where multiple contestants ganged up to humiliate her, weaponising private confidences, hoping to provoke an extreme reaction.
And for what? Because she kissed someone she’s coupled up with.
Then there’s the double standard of the heart rate challenge. After a season of criticism for not participating fully, the moment Huda did exactly what everyone else did, the entire room’s energy shifted. Suddenly, she was accused of going “too far”.
SWANA women are perpetually monitored and surveilled – damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
This isn’t just reality TV
Our personal relationships are political. The “war on terror” has fundamentally changed how we love, trust, and connect with each other. Global audiences have been conditioned to view Middle Eastern suffering as background noise, acceptable collateral damage.
This indifference doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it’s been manufactured through decades of media representation that consistently portrays Middle Eastern people as either threatening villains or disposable victims.
We’ve been trained to tear apart these women, and most of us do it under the guise of “justice.”
The hatred of these girls is coming out of left field, as though the patterns of toxic male behaviour being presented are not something we’re all familiar with. This level of “crash out” is completely justifiable after a man love-bombed her and then pulled the rug from underneath her. The way people lose their minds over these women having normal human reactions to being manipulated and isolated is mind-boggling.
But what is really sinister is watching both the production and the audience pit Black women and Palestinian women against each other. Rather than realising that the real villain is the production team, we’re seeing people become obsessed with crowning one of them as the ultimate ‘mean girl’. What we’re missing is the fact that just like colonial structures, production truly mimics the ‘Empire’ and deploys a ‘divide and conquer’ playbook.
Distracting you from the fact that reality TV brings the “mean girl” out of the audience, because solidarity and empathy have never been profitable. Every clip and every scene is carefully crafted to build a narrative, and the entire season has been a ping pong match between who’s the worst. Behind the scenes, producers are orchestrating these conflicts – whispering suggestions into contestants’ ears, designing challenges specifically to trigger certain reactions, determining which conversations make it to air and which get buried in the editing room. They control the outcomes while maintaining the illusion of authentic drama.
I can’t help but see how this is also reflected in society. Division has never been so apparent, and as much as I hate to romanticise the past, I see the strength in solidarity movements in the ’60s. The entire ‘Global South’ came together, realising that our struggles are interconnected and that we’re all fighting against the same villain. The Third World Women’s Alliance understood that racism, sexism, and imperialism were not separate battles but interlocking systems of oppression. Angela Davis, Dolores Huerta, and Palestinian activists like Leila Khaled recognised that liberation movements across the globe shared common enemies – the same imperial structures that justified violence against Black communities in America were enabling dispossession in Palestine.
This was revolutionary thinking: the understanding that your freedom is bound up with mine, that challenging white supremacy at home meant challenging settler colonialism abroad. These movements built bridges across geography and identity because they understood that divide-and-conquer tactics had always been the empire’s most effective weapon.
The patterns we’re observing reflect a broader truth – women consistently face harsher criticism than men, and this disparity intensifies exponentially for women of colour. The relentless scrutiny these women endure reveals a fundamental reality – we are inherently political beings, and politics determine our capacity to exist. These women’s very presence challenges established power structures, which explains why they are scrutinised for behaviours that, when performed by white contestants, are praised. Love Island serves as a mirror for how systemic oppression operates, focusing attention on conflicts between oppressed groups while protecting the institutions and individuals who create these conditions from accountability
Both Leah and Huda, just by existing and refusing to be broken down, are doing something revolutionary. Every time they resist campaigns to isolate them, they expose the infrastructure of suspicion that has been normalised as common sense.
The “war on terror” was a ploy under the ruse of supposedly protecting American values of freedom and democracy. Still, rather, it birthed a new genre of scapegoating that has affected the SWANA diaspora across the world.
The war on terror isn’t over – it just entered our brain-rot reality TV. And it’s time to address it.