9 Wrestling Heels Who Were Totally Justified
2. Surveilling And Profiling
From December 2004 to July 2005, there was arguably no heel in WWE with more heat than Muhammed Hassan (and, to a lesser extent, his sidekick Daivari). The pair debuted on RAW during a Mick Foley promo segment, with the Hardcore Legend bigging up his upcoming appearance in front of the Iraq-based US troops. Hassan and Daivari introduced themselves as Arab Americans sick of the way in which they'd been treated since the horrendous events of 9/11.
Hassan claimed that they'd been the target of massive prejudice since the attacks because of their families' ethnic origin, that they'd been profiled, harassed, and abused, kept under surveillance by the government of their own country, and that they were sick to death of it. They were fed up with the jingoistic, blinkered support of US troops overseas, as it related directly back to the same prejudices and reactionary action that had been causing them so much grief at home.
The characters attracted nuclear levels of heat with their subsequent insistence on interjecting themselves into seemingly every other promo on Raw and SmackDown. Part of the problem was that the pair were attracting massive heat through portraying angry Muslim Arab Americans, not necessarily through heelish actions of their own. It was their fury over their supposed treatment as bad guys which caused their bad guy status, a Catch-22 that was made more morally questionable due to the fact that this had been WWE's objective in booking the pair in those roles in the first place: they intended to take advantage of the mainstream American audiences inability to tell the difference between Muslim Arab Americans with a justifiable beef, and Muslim Arab fundamentalists with an extremist axe to grind, to create perfect heel heat.
As time went on, Hassan and Daivari would tone down or eliminate the Muslim references, gestures and rhetoric from their promos, due to serious complaints from genuine Muslims who recognised what WWE were trying to accomplish. The pair would be involved in red hot feuds with some of WWE's biggest names: Shawn Michaels, Hulk Hogan, Batista, John Cena, and The Undertaker all faced Hassan before he was removed from WWE programming in July 2005. The reason? WWE took it all a step too far, introducing actual terrorist imagery into Hassan's angle with The Undertaker when paramilitary style, balaclava-clad men assaulted the Dead Man on Hassan's behalf on SmackDown. The episode was taped on the same week that Islamic extremists detonated bombs in London.
Hassan's career never recovered from the controversy, which was exactly the kind of heat that WWE didn't want of course. Had they not played with fire by mining anti-Islamic prejudice and bigotry to create a new heel character for their programming, none of that would have happened.