The Arabic iceberg

A while ago I saw the political thriller Syriana and was really taken by how deeply it affected me. And it wasn't just writer/director Stephen Gaghan's revealing cross-section of the global oil industry (similar to the one of drug-trade in Traffic, a screenplay he also won an Academy Award for writing).

No, what touched me more was the unusually honest portrayal of the countries around the Persian Gulf, without the prejudice usually applied in expensive Hollywood-movies.
You get to see a rich culture, a diversity in languages (I think it's the first western movie I've seen that makes a difference between persian and arabic) and most importantly the life of ordinary people.

I realized that this is just the tip of an iceberg. This movie is in fact evidence that the western culture is becoming more and more influenced by Islamic countries.
Ironically, this is because of the war US has been fighting against this very culture since the fall of the Soviet powers. The eyes of the world has been turned towards the middle east and we have slowly taken its culture in and assimilating it into our own (read the US's) through movies and music.

Here in Sweden the influences come from another side as well; the huge amount of refugees from around the Persian Gulf. They are asked to immediately asked to let go of their culture and language, which of course they won't. Instead their culture, as always happens with big groups of immigrants, will become a part of our own and there's nothing we can do about it.
And why should we?