Dear All,

Last week’s news about the TV series Homeland was most entertaining. It turns out that a bunch of artists hired by the show to create Arabic graffiti on the walls of a supposed Syrian refugee camp had actually written out messages blasting the TV show. ‘Homeland is racist’, ‘Homeland is a joke and we are not laughing’ were among the choice bits of graffiti on display.

Homeland is a show that started out on an interesting premise: the radicalisation and subsequent alienation of a US marine, held for years in Iraq, and presumed dead. Nicholas Brody, played brilliantly by Damien Lewis, was a secret Muslim, a militant preparing for a suicide strike at the heart of the American establishment. The tensions generated by his mission, his reverse culture shock, the bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison’s suspicions of him and the whole will-he-won’t-he question were gripping and the show’s first series was astounding. But it’s been all downhill since then. After the Carrie-Brody affair, it all became a bit ridiculous anyway, and rather frustratingly, it was never really explained who the militants’ mole inside the CIA had been.

As the show became increasingly about Carrie and the CIA, all the Muslims in the show became less credible and more sinister. Tehran was depicted as a hostile, perilous place and ‘Islamabad’ as a hotspot of treachery, populated by people with East African accents speaking hilariously stilted Urdu.

It was also at this point that my youngest offspring began to tire of the show and complained bitterly about the carelessness of not getting the looks and accents of the Pakistanis right. And it was exactly this lack of attention to detail that resulted in Homeland’s recent graffiti fiasco.

Even though Homeland’s ‘Showrunner’ (presumably a new, fancy word for executive producer), Alex Gansa boldly tried to put a clever spin on the graffiti/hacking incident by saying "As Homeland always strives to be subversive in its own right…. we can’t help but admire this act of artistic sabotage", it is probably true to say that his professed admiration was more a case of trying to save face.

Homeland continues to be an intriguing enterprise and, to be fair, it does have its share of evil Americans in it. But the graffiti incident is now a perfect example of the general American attitude towards the Middle East. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde reflected on this in a perceptive and witty piece titled ‘Homeland’s graffiti gaffe shows why the U.S. just doesn’t get the Middle East’, in which she remarked that "subversive Arabic slogans were art imitating life: Americans in war zones not understanding a word". Hyde pointed out that the Americans’ lack of wanting to comprehend the region or its people was evidenced by the numbers of Arabic speakers in its State department/diplomatic force (just 8 in 2004). This lack of emphasis on language or understanding reflects a total disregard for anything getting lost in translation because communication simply doesn’t matter anyway.

Meanwhile, the trio of artists who ‘hacked’ the show, Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Stone, has pulled off a wonderful artistic coup, using set design as a mode of protest. As they so aptly pointed out of the Homeland’s producers "in their eyes, Arabic script is merely a visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East".

It is a chilling thought: the ‘leaders of the free world’ are so oblivious to everybody else on the rest of the planet that not just will they not listen to anything anybody is saying, they also won’t bother to read the writing on the wall.

Best wishes