The story of Arabs and Muslims and the Western and especially the American media has been told too many times before. The history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films, in television programs, on network news, or in major and minor American print media has been studied, analysed, criticised, and defended in books, research papers, and media commentary for decades. This also applies to the more virulent Israeli Jewish racist representations of Arabs and Muslims, not only in the Israeli media, school curricula, and all cultural artifacts that Israeli Jewish society produces, but also by actual and ongoing Israeli Jewish policies towards Arabs inside and outside Israel.
Just as Israeli racist representations of Arabs are a reflection of an overall Israeli Jewish structural racism that pervades every aspect of Israeli Jewish society, American media racism is also just a branch of a larger American racism and racialism on which much of American culture, history, and national identity is based. Still, this need not sway the casual observer from analyzing the dynamism of white American nationalist fantasies about their internal and external racial others as represented in the news media or in televised fiction.
If in the 1970s, American children were taught on the American children’s TV program “Sesame Street” that the word “danger” connotes “Arabs” by showing a drawing of an Arab with a headdress next to the word, a more recent and very popular American program titled “Homeland” hardly deviates from this formula, except to add that Arabs are so dangerous that even all-American White men can be corrupted by them and become equally dangerous to America. That “Homeland” (broadcast on the Showtime cable channel) is an American adaptation of an Israeli series titled Hatufim (Hostages) that airs on Israeli television station Channel 2 will surprise no one.
In September 2012, the show’s Israeli creator Gideon Raff, who also works on the American series, accepted the award for best writing for a drama series for “Homeland” at the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards along with the show’s American producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Indeed “Homeland” itself won the award for the best drama series at the Emmy’s.
The Show
The show is so popular that President Barack Obama himself is a big fan. Obama told People Magazine in December 2011 that “Homeland” was one of his favourite shows. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Obama “requested and received” four sets of “Homeland” Season 1 DVDs from Showtime (the Clintons, unsurprisingly, are also reportedly big fans). Indeed in March 2012, the show’s British star Damian Lewis was invited to the White House for a dinner honouring British Prime Minister David Cameron and had an intimate tête-a-tête with Obama about the show’s plans for its second season, which began to air in the US four weeks ago. A major advertising campaign for the show has been in full swing. New Yorkers can spot large billboards and posters on New York city buses, in addition to other advertising venues, a strategy that is paying off handsomely.
“Homeland” tells the story of Nick Brody, a white American marine (played by Damian Lewis), captured and held prisoner by the Taliban and Al-Qaida until American forces freed him after eight years of captivity. The CIA team monitoring Al-Qaida from Langley, Virginia, is represented by three top figures: the African-American David Estes, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the American Jew Saul Berenson who is unsurprisingly the CIA’s Middle-East Division Chief, and the white Christian American Carrie Mathison, the female star of the show, who is a CIA intelligence officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center.
The racialist structure of the show is reflective of American and Israeli fantasies of anti-Muslim American multiculturalism. The African American Estes is divorced and his former wife married an American Jew. She and their children converted to Judaism. He has also had a dalliance with his colleague Carrie that went awry. The Jewish Berenson is married to an Indian Hindu “brown” woman (perhaps cementing the Indian Hindu-Israeli Jewish rightwing alliance against Arabs and Muslims in the minds of the scriptwriters). On the first season of the show, cross racial romance seems to have also infected the character of a white rich American woman who fell in love with a “brown” mild-mannered Saudi professor at a US university and conscripted him in the service of Al-Qaida, which leads to his ultimate death and her imprisonment, though not before the Jewish Berenson tells her how much he identifies with her as two white people who fell in love with brown people.
Lest we think that America’s racial order is not questioned, “Homeland” does register some of America’s limitations in the realm of racial tolerance.
In the land of slavery and apartheid, it was not the African American Estes who is compelled to tell us of his traumas on account of white American racism against blacks, but rather the Jewish Berenson who remembers the anti-Jewish sentiment he experienced growing up in small town USA. After all, America has a black President now, while it only had one Jewish vice-presidential candidate historically. Indeed, Estes, unlike his two white colleagues, hardly has an inner life to explore at all.
The gender representation is also remarkable for its commitment to 1970s white American feminism by featuring a leading strong white female character as the star of the show (which Hollywood began to champion since the film Alien in the late 1970s) and its equal commitment to sexist representations of white women as hysterics, or at least in Carrie’s case, for suffering from America’s most fashionable commercialised psychiatric ailment of the decade: bipolar disorder (an “ailment” that succeeded clinical depression as the most fashionable American psychiatric disorder in the preceding decade).
The Plot
The story of the show is about how the liberated white American marine has been “turned” by Al-Qaida and now works for them. We are of course offered a touching Stockholm syndrome explanation as to why Brody now hates his own government. Brody was captured along with his marine buddy, the African-American Tom Walker. Part of Brody’s torture was to beat Walker to death and to dig his grave. During his captivity Brody converts to Islam as a spiritual escape (though when he is shown praying his pronunciation of Arabic words –“al-rakhman al-rakhim” instead of “al-rahman al-rahim” seems to have an Israeli Ashkenazi, even a Benjamin Netanyahu, accent and not a typical American one—one can safely presume that Israeli Ashkenazi Jews are the accent tutors on the show).
At some point during his capture, the Al-Qaida leader, a man named Abu Nazir (sometimes pronounced by different characters as Abu Nasir though it is most likely Abu Nadhir), puts him in charge of educating his 10 year-old son who is strangely named “Aisa,” which is not an Arabic name at all and is most likely an Israeli corruption of the common Arabic name ‘Isa, meaning “Jesus”!Indeed, as Abu Nazir is the major Bin Ladenesque villain on the show, the producers should have spent an extra $100 to have an Arab consultant tell them that the name of “Abu Nazir” itself means “father of Nazir,” Nazir being his eldest son, so that they would refrain from making the elementary and laughable mistake of referring to “Abu” as his first name and “Nazir” as his last name!
Lest you think Israeli anti-Palestinianism is absent from the show, the second season’s first episode reveals to us that Abu Nazir is indeed Palestinian!
While Brody was becoming close to the young Aisa, a drone attack secretly ordered by Vice-President Walden (even the US President apparently did not know about it!) kills 83 children, including Aisa, who was on his way to school or more precisely “Madrassa.” Heartbroken, Brody digs out his body from under the rubble and helps prepare his burial with Abu Nazir. Walden goes on television and denies that any such attack took place. Having to confront his government’s war crimes and denials “turns” Brody into an Al-Qaida man. Upon his return home, Brody rejoins his all-American nuclear family –wife, daughter, and son. His wife is played by the Brazilian actress Morena Baccarin
who looks suspiciously brown, but nonetheless is presented as white! Baccarin’s roles on previous TV shows have mostly been in science fiction, presumably due to her “alien” looks.
Here one wonders what Obama must be thinking while watching the show as he himself had ordered the murder of the 16-year-old US-born teenager Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki by a drone attack two weeks after having ordered the murder of his American father who had not been charged with any crime.
The plot changes at the end of the season wherein Brody’s mission was now to infiltrate the American government and try to influence lawmakers as an elected Congressman. This is the same fantasy that real-life US politicians and candidates push when they claim that Muslims are engaged in a “creeping” or “stealth” “jihad” to takeover the US from within and impose sharia law on it. The nonexistent “threat” is deemed so great that two dozen US states have “anti-Sharia” bills enacted or passing through their legislatures.
Beirut’s nouveaux-riches who spent billions of dollars (of the Lebanese people’s money) making the city look like a fun and modern western city are surely outraged that their city is depicted like some poor remote Afghani village. Indeed the multi-billion dollar Rafiq Hariri Airport looks more like a bus stop in war-ravaged rural Iraq than a modern airport. More recently, Lebanese tourism minister Fadi Abboud told the Associated Press that he is so upset about the portrayal of Beirut on the show that he is considering a lawsuit. 
