This is the best hack I've seen on Hacker News in months and it doesn't even involve a computer. Great job to everyone involved in pulling it off, even if the casual viewers didn't notice.
From the show's creator & executive producer: "We wish we’d caught these images before they made it to air. However, as Homeland always strives to be subversive in its own right and a stimulus for conversation, we can’t help but admire this act of artistic sabotage.” [0]
If you ever needed proof of the adage that capitalism will co-opt even the most accurate and stinging criticism of it, here it is.
The show was criticized as being racist and so the show appropriated that message (by hiring the "street artists" and instructing them to "go rogue") in order to sell more of the show.
If the producers asked for graffiti, then they certainly got what they paid for. Graffiti has been used as a form of protest and criticism for as long as there has been both paint and walls.
The producers are doing just fine. artistic subversion of commercial considerations is a norm in the arts industry; if anything, this gives an otherwise shallow piece of ideological entertainment some unintended cultural depth.
I'd venture to say this was a pretty calculated move -- no doubt they might not get work with this production company anymore, but they'll surely have quite a few more jobs lined up now with their name out there like this. Also, those jobs might be on projects that more closely align with their political and artistic goals and visions.
I can't speak for the producers, but this would not offend me were I one of them. I'd be quite happy with it.
If I were a producer of the show I might go so far as to actually discuss this issue with the (graffiti) artists on camera, so long as they agreed to be reasonable and collegial about it.
One of the great opportunities for the producers is to shine a light on the show not being particularly racist, but that characters might be - a little.
Having said that, it sounds difficult.
I think the best example of this is The Americans, which stops just short of making the FBI look stupid while kind of raising its eyebrows at the then-prominent "evil empire" narratives. The ...constraints of Soviet political culture are also shown well.
But the craft level of "The Americans" is extremely high.
Now that I think about it, this is pretty much social engineering. One can imagine exploiting cultural ignorances and biases similarly as part of an electronic hack.
Wasn't there an old black-and-white movie set in Africa, where a Zulu warrior comes onscreen to tell the Chief something about the plot in subtitles? And what he says in Zulu is "I'm not being paid enough for being in this movie!"
Agreed, great story. Now we just need a copycat to get hired onto Blue Bloods and do the same thing. Add a 'is dumb' to that one too perhaps. A good place might be on a fridge magnet of a house the main guy usually barges into without regard.
A native Arabic speaker here, I must say that I admire the courage and innovation of the graffiti artists and activists who chose this medium to protest and convey their message, which needless to say, that I don't necessarily endorse or share the creators' point of view.
I have to admit that I haven't seen the show yet not even a single shot and I could say too that I have a very thick skin when it comes to "cultural insensitivities" in TV drama or real life.
So, I don't have any problem with media, cinema or drama depicting characters from our region, the Middle East, or ones that share the same cultural background even in very negative and unflattering light.
However, I must say that it's really alarming that not even a single person of the whole crew of the show has a 3rd grade proficiency level of the Arabic language to be able to read and grasp a two word phrase, esp. when the show prides itself on offering their audience deep insight into the characters, their mindsets, their psychological profile that they portray on screen, or that is what I at least was able to collect from the scattered and random reviews that I came across online recently.
It's courageous to graffiti anti-establishment messages under despotic regimes....it's not courageous to hide a message in a western TV show that you were hired to do work for.
If you want to debate this from an ethical standpoint, you could argue that the artists might have breached the producers' trust when they bombed the location with opposing and negative messages about the show. In an ideal scenario, these artists are encouraged to return the compensation they received if any because they should not benefit financially from their political opponents esp. when the contract was on a bona fide basis but I don't know really the details of the transaction or incident as a whole to be able to give sound advice or assessment of the situation here.
As with your argument that anti-authoritarian messages are best suited to despotic regimes, from what I was able to gather about this show, I found that it's very controversial and some people believe that the producers constantly push and glamorize a mass-surveillance state and a clueless, extensive, and all-out Bush's style "War on Terrorism", I guess the artists with their act were in the ballpark of opposing and protesting tyrannical regimes as you put it when they attacked one of the propaganda channels of America's Neo-Conservatives with their political message according to at least the prevailing analysis by the proponents of this stunt.
Yes, they breached trust, but it was not courageous, because there is basically zero chance of any kind of negative consequence for the individual, and any possible negative consequence would be extremely minimal.
My point about the courageousness of doing something like that under a despotic regime was not to say that is the only way to be courageous - my main point was that, if your bacon isn't on the line, it probably isn't courageous. For an example within the american system, even though I don't quite agree with all his choices, what Snowden did was courageous, because he had to literally flee the country for what he did.
Hi 'gotchange! Since you speak (and read) Arabic, could you tell what's in the top left corner of that picture[0]? Seems like hashtag-something, but it wasn't mentioned in the article.
The Hollywood biased or caricatural vision is not exclusive to the middle East.
You should see also how France and French are depicted in US comedies and TV series. Usually people are dressed like in the 50's, streets filled with cars of the 50's, hotels are filthy, and actors speak some words of French that is barely understandable. I don't see such stereotypical clichés with England.
As racist as it would be if there were a US show based on how the French are scary, and no one involved with the show spoke French. It means that they are likely exclusively trading in stereotypes and Western orientialist imagery and tropes. I've never seen the show.
France is not a race. That would be xenophobia, which is a different brand of bigotry.
Not speaking Arabic is a grey area -- not all Muslims are Arabic, despite the fact that the Quran is written in Arabic and only canonical in that language. There are millions and millions of Muslims who do not speak Arabic, and rely on their clergy to teach them the Quran.
While it's apparently not the case here, the absence of an arabic-speaking component on the production team does not necessarily preclude a Muslim component on a production team.
No, but it does show that the writers who are making storylines around Arabic speaking nations and cultures don't have anyone who lives in that culture.
What do you think a race is? The French are a race under any defensible definition. They're more closely related to each other than they are to Georgians.
No, racism is discriminating based on (perceived) race, not merely the belief that race exists. (Which it manifestly does, as a cultural construct.)
Nationality and ethnicity likewise exist as related, but usually distinct, cultural constructs to race, and we have different names for bigotry based on them. Though, obviously, the distinction between these forms of bigotry is somewhat nitpicky, and often not meaningful, and a lot of time "racism" is used broadly to refer to bigotry based on race, ethnicity, or nationality.
> [...] the belief that race exists. (Which it manifestly does, as a cultural construct.)
That's like saying that aliens exist as a cultural construct. Let's not mix reality and widely shared fantasies.
How would you call the unscientific belief that races exist in the human species, if not "racism"?
> a lot of time "racism" is used broadly to refer to bigotry based on race, ethnicity, or nationality
True, just like "vagina" is used to refer to the vulva. Errors need to be pointed out, not accepted in silence, even if the hoi polloi will make you pay for it.
> That's like saying that aliens exist as a cultural construct.
No, its not. Its more like saying color exists as a product of perception. Races are a categorization, categorizations do not inherently exist at all, they exist as products of mind only.
> How would you call the unscientific belief that races exist in the human species, if not "racism"?
If by that you mean the unscientific belief that the cultural perception of race has a direct correspondence to inherent biological feature of humans, I'd call it something like "the erroneous belief in biological race".
Its pretty much logically orthogonal to racism; racists are probably more likely to believe that biological race is a thing than non-racists, but its quite possible to be a racist without believing in biological race (if it weren't, bigotry against, e.g., nationality -- which doesn't have the problem of people mistaking for an inherent biological trait -- wouldn't be a thing. Heck, bigotry based on sexual orientation seems to be inversely correlated with the belief that it is an inherent biological feature.)
> Errors need to be pointed out, not accepted in silence, even if the hoi polloi will make you pay for it.
Well, yes, that's why I am pointing out the error of your mistaken confusion of the erroneous perception that race is an inherent biological feature with "racism", a term which has always referred to belief in the superiority or inferiority of particular races, not belief in the biological inherency of race.
I'm not sure that categories don't exist outside of the mind of a person.
I think sets (for example) probably have a real existence, in a sense.
some of the categories we choose might not have anything special about them to mark them as any more real than other categories that we would see as arbitrary, but that wouldn't mean that they aren't real, just that they aren't more real.
But maybe the ontology of abstract objects isn't very relevant here.
Also, I don't mean to say that the categories we use are all arbitrary, just that even the ones which are arbitrary (if any) I think still exist.
Also, I don't right now present any argument for why I believe what I do about abstract objects. I'm just stating beliefs that I have, and which your post seemed(?) to assume something that contradicts.
They do, after you define objective criteria for clustering the objects in a set. For biological race, the main criterium would reveal a genotype-level clustering that matches the phenotype differences - and we see this in dogs, but not in humans.
"exclusively trading in stereotypes and Western orientialist imagery and tropes"
To be fair, they could also be simply trading on whatever happens to be in the news. If you open a newspaper / watch the news, most of what you will see about the region can be summed up by 'crazy islamists killing people, threaten America with annihilation'.
I'm guessing you don't really know how TV shows are filmed. There could be dozens of people in the production who speak Arabic, but the odds that they would actually go on set and analyze the props is next to nil unless you are a person who works on the set. Is your argument that a sound man or camera operator speaking arabic would lend credibility to a show involving the middle east?
I haven't seen Homeland past the first season - but can someone who has seen more shed light on the alleged "racism" of the show? Is the show actually racist in its depiction of Arab-speaking characters, or is this simply a manifestation of Hanlon's Razor - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"?
Homeland is not intentionally racist, but that isn't the main concern. Homeland leans on lazy stereotypes way too much, and that's harmful regardless of intent. This opinion piece from last year has details:
Indeed. I haven't seem very much of the show, but I found its depiction of the military and suburban lifestyle to be nauseating and trite. I can't imagine they'd do any better depicting foreign cultures.
Isn't strongly leaning on lazy stereotypes a form of intentional racism? It may not be with malice, but it is an intentional choice to use those lazy stereotypes.
Brown person here, I find Homeland stupid but not racist, let's cut the crap. Some Muslims do more damage to the Muslim community than a single show that paint a few Muslims as terrorists. Even 24 which was deemed controversial wouldn't qualify as racist in my book.
They somehow managed to show that terrorists were manipulated by some higher interests , and were no more than "useful idiots". But it never painted the whole Muslim community as terrorist , nor does Homeland. It's always more about US policies and its consequences than anything else.
If we put the "racist" label on everything a little bit controversial then the word itself becomes void of any meaning.
A racist TV show does the same damage regardless of whether the creators were ignorant or malicious. Wide reaching mediums like TV shows have a lot of power in influencing our culture. Media creators have a lot of responsibility.
The main writer of Homeland died unexpectedly in 2013 [1]. The new writers are clueless. That's why the show has lost its nuance and most of its discerning audience.
Oh, so that explains it. IMHO the first season was really great, one of the most subversive shows aired on TV in the last 15 years. I know the word "subversive" gets thrown a lot in many discussions lately, but the first season certainly deserved it (warning: spoilers for season 1 following), I mean, we've got an American war hero praying to Allah, getting elected as a congressman while conspiring to kill the Vice-President and only at the last second deciding not to do it, and not because he believed in America or western values, whatever that means, but because of his kids. Plus the entire higher echelons of the CIA getting bombed off to pieces at the end, you don't see that in many shows/movies.
I don't know about racist, but the show is quite dishonest in its depiction of an alliance between the Iranian government and Al-Qaeda, when in the real world the link is between Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their respective sponsors in the Gulf Arab states (Saudi Arabia, etc.)
I enjoyed watching the show until they dropped that plot twist, then I rolled my eyes and quit. It's concerning because viewers who are less informed about the actual alignment of powers in the middle east may take the show's plot line as being inspired by reality, when it's fact it's far from it.
Well, the show depicts largely terrorists and criminals. Activists apparently want long diatribes about how wonderful Arab and Muslim families are to "balance" it out.
Homeland isn't a documentary. Its a dramatic show about national security and as such it will probably not paint a realistic picture of the average Muslim, because average Muslims aren't really what its supposed to portray. The same way professional wresting doesn't portray the average man's body or reality tv about wealthy people doesn't portray the average person's lifestyle.
Well, it apparently can't even depict terrorists correctly, because suggesting that Al Qaeda and Hezbollah would ever work together is just ludicrous.
And I can totally see why Lebanese would be pissed off at seeing Hamra street completely misrepresented in that way.
And even if the show isn't supposed to depict "average Muslims", do you really think all the viewers of the show will get that nuance? If all of the Arab/Iranian/Pakistani characters in the show (and the show doesn't seem to make much a distinction) are painted with a broad brush, that sends a certain kind of message to viewers.
Might we also criticize the portrayal of Jews in Palestinian kids cartoons? I am not certain there are many Muslims complaining about those portrayals.
Or the portrayal of Minnesotans in Fargo. I'm not sure that you're required to talk about every portrayal everywhere before complaining about any specific portrayal, though, so it's probably irrelevant.
True, but I don't feel it's not enough for Homeland's producers, or anyone, to say 'it's not our problem'. We all live in a community and are responsible for taking care of it and for the consequences of what we do. "No man is an island."
People absorb their views of the world from TV, in part. With widespread prejudice against people who believe in Islam, portraying stereotypes of that prejudice worsens a dangerous situation. Many, many very bad things in history have resulted and are resulting from that kind of prejudice. It's similar to portraying all black skinned people on TV as drug dealers; many people, seeing only stereotypes, come to believe them.
> The Globe and Mail reported that Scalia came to the defense of Jack Bauer and his torture tactics during an Ottawa conference of international jurists and national security officials last week. During a panel discussion about terrorism, torture and the law, a Canadian judge remarked, “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’ ”
> Justice Scalia responded with a defense of Agent Bauer, arguing that law enforcement officials deserve latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia reportedly said. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” He then posed a series of questions to his fellow judges: “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer?”
> “I don’t think so,” Scalia reportedly answered himself. “So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”
Yes, I believe that it my point. By creating constructs like Bauer, the underlying topic that torture is justifiable became easier to relate to. Thus, it's not correct to absolve the creators of those shows simply, as drzaiusapelord did, because 'Its a dramatic show'.
If you don't think art has an ideological function then you are my target audience. Manipulating political discourse is a major motivation for my creative activities, probably the primary one in fact - I falsify the world in order to improve upon it.
>many people, seeing only stereotypes, come to believe them.
Seems like the local education system has failed if people can't think critically or rationally. Blaming the arts is wrong and only treats the symptom. Do you believe that all information needs to be carefully controlled so that people don't get the wrong ideas? If so, what are you doing on an open/liberal/libertarian forum like HN then? Anyone can post anything here, pretty much. Seems to me that you're going your own advice by being present here.
This.
Thanks for posting this. Everyone likes to shirk personal responsibility and put the blame on others. If you are too challenged to distinguish between real life vs reel life, you should excuse yourself from such matters.
EDIT: Thanks for the down votes, the truth is a bitter pill to swallow, isn't it?
And matches are perfectly safe, if you don't happen to be surrounded by flammables.
The simple facts are that we have a huge amount of ignorance in the audience for this show, this show takes advantage of that (it is targeted to folks who are not informed about the places and people and groups depicted, otherwise it wouldn't take such extreme artistic license with them) and will have an effect on the views of its audience.
It doesn't matter what society we'd like to live in or how
that might play out in theory.
> And matches are perfectly safe, if you don't happen to be surrounded by flammables.
My point goes back to personal responsibility. Whose fault is it if you're surrounded by flammables labeled appropriately?
The analogy is that this is labeled as a "TV show" not a documentary.
You seem to have gotten caught on the analogy and failed to read my argument.
It doesn't matter if something is fiction, the reality is that fiction has a great impact on its audience, and that impact comes with proportional responsibility.
It does not matter what ideal rational actors should theoretically do when it comes to managing their opinions and knowledge about the world in the face of fiction, we don't have any of those.
We don't get to pretend society works a particular way, just so we can justify bad television that uses real places and real names of groups in a farcical way because it's capitalizing on a contemporary societal phenomenon of fear and ignorance of those things.
Why are the creators of the show absolved of their personal responsibility regarding the impact of their actions? If a company poisons the local reservoir with their chemical run-off, are they morally able to say, "Well, they shouldn't have drank that water. They knew they lived near a chemical plant."
No, we trust fiction-based-on-reality to have a semblence of reality to it and to not be blatently racist. That's a cultural evolution we've developed. We are criticizing a show for not being what it should be. That's our responsibility as viewers, and we're fulfilling it.
> Why are the creators of the show absolved of their personal responsibility regarding the impact of their actions?
Because they aren't democratically elected public officials, they're just making a TV show from private funding. And watching the TV show is optional.
> If a company poisons the local reservoir with their chemical run-off, are they morally able to say, "Well, they shouldn't have drank that water. They knew they lived near a chemical plant."
That's a violation of environmental laws; how is this analogy applicable to a TV show? Would you propose to curtail the right to free speech? It's a TV show, not real life.
We're not talking about the viewers of the show, we're talking about the people (Muslims, Arabs, etc) who are affected by the people who choose to watch the show -- that is, the impact on the culture that racism has.
>Would you propose to curtail the right to free speech?
We already do. The FCC does this. But I'm not suggesting that there be a law against it -- though other countries have gone this route -- I'm critizing the production of the television show. For being racist.
>It's a TV show, not real life.
Ah, but here we are: it is real life for millions of Muslims. Remember after 9/11 when Sikhs got beat up because people thought they were Muslims? Remember in the 60s when a black man couldn't get a hotel room in Atlanta?
We know that television and media have an impact on people, their opinions, and how they treat others. The people who broadcast that content have a moral responsibility to use that power in a way that does not negatively impact a single group.
Edit: since we reached our limit here:
>So one of the solutions to solving fundamental societal problems is to criticize a TV show?
Sure has worked for gay people. The public opinion turnaround time for gay marriage has been astoundingly fast. Television featuring strong portrayals of gay people certainly helped.
The Bill Cosby show/Fresh prince of Bel Air showed African Americans in the non-sterotypical manner. How did that work out?
Outliers don't mean they work in all cases.
Again, I point to the fact that these are societal problems, you can't criticize writers and producers of a TV show with this burden. They aren't incarnations of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. They're just trying to make money, it's a TV show for the umpteenth time.
> We're not talking about the viewers of the show, we're talking about the people (Muslims, Arabs, etc) who are affected by the people who choose to watch the show -- that is, the impact on the culture that racism has.
I agree, but I don't agree that this is the problem of the show's creators.
> Ah, but here we are: it is real life for millions of Muslims. Remember after 9/11 when Sikhs got beat up because people thought they were Muslims? Remember in the 60s when a black man couldn't get a hotel room in Atlanta?
So one of the solutions to solving fundamental societal problems is to criticize a TV show?
Nobody mentioned laws or curtailing their rights. Not everything is reduced to whether an action is legal or not.
We can and should discuss whether something is ethical, and we can and should advocate for legal ways of opposing such things, like publicly criticizing it, boycotting the show, etc.
It might be my fault if I put you in a room full of flammables, turn the lights out, and close the door. People who trot out the 'personal responsibility' mantra tend not to have much experience with situations in which their autonomy is curtailed. This is not to say there is no such thing as personal responsibility, but you plainly have a hard time conceiving of a context where you are not the author of your own situation.
If someone fails to distinguish between reality and fiction, that may be their fault.
But if you know that many people are unable to properly distinguish the two, and you do something that you know may lead those to hurt innocent bystanders, don't you have some responsibility if the expected happens?
Maybe the activists just want the show to put the relatively minimal effort into getting basic facts right, which the linked article gives several examples of them failing to do. If I write a novel set in a neighborhood in present-day Detroit, and I describe it looking like downtown Palo Alto and say the economic hard times there were caused by everyone losing their jobs at the local salmon fisheries, I doubt I could deploy "but it's fiction!" as a Get Out Of Criticism Free card.
Meta: Does this act count as culture jamming? And if so, does culture jamming count as hacking? Because if so, I foresee the possibility of more links on HN about Banksy, or whomever is the Banksy of the moment, and others who find ways to disrupt establishment norms.
A synonym for culture jamming is "reality hacking," so I think it might qualify.
If you read many of the antics documented in compendiums like sniggle.net, they can be remarkably crafty and intricate, so I think they would count. Particularly someone like Dick Tuck is doubtlessly a hacker.
Curiously though I always thought the show portrayed the US protagonists in a less than flattering light. I can't speak of the biggottery the 'hackers' mention ... but clearly (to me at least) the decisions made by the agents are very nuanced and show some disturbing disregard for the impact of their actions and the short-sightedness of their attacks.
Also, when you're portraying a minority, the effect of your work will be different. If you live in the US, chances are excellent that you know a variety of white people well. Some are good, some are bad.
Chances are much worse that you know Muslims or Middle Eastern immigrants well. Muslims are one of the most discriminated against minorities in the US, and there's some shocking witch-hunt-esque rhetoric coming from the conservative right that makes it even more problematic.
I'm not saying that a TV show is responsible for righting society's wrongs (or even contradicting stereotypes), but they can certainly make small narrative tweaks to portray people as people, rather than flat stereotypes. It makes the show better, too.
1) That was completely non-sequitur. I didn't say Christians are primarily responsible for discriminating against Muslims.
2) The people persecuting Christians in (some of) the Middle East aren't the same people facing persecution here. It's unfair to assume they're guilty of bigotry just because someone else who shares their religion is. Should we assume all Catholics molest children because some do? Are all Protestants members of the Klan?
3) I'm from the US, and I'm not bigoted toward Muslims or Christians (nor do I belong to either group). I'm neither pot nor kettle, so your nonsensical comment means even less to me.
What's that in the upper left corner of the other image[0]? Is that a hashtag-something? I don't see any mention of it neither in the article nor here. Can anyone who reads Arabic chime in?
I wouldn't take fake background graffiti in a TV show as seriously as an Internet Essay. The graffiti that don't claim racism are mostly just silly, and "X is racist" could be read as being in line with the same type of silly humor as much as a "silent protest" or whatever. For all we know, the producers asked the artists to paint that text.
I imagine doing the same thing on a show where they show "computer code" where it could actually compile to a message without being blatantly obvious (say, concatenated characters expressed in unicode)
I think this actually happened in Ex Machina. There's a coding scene, and if you run the program the character writes, it points you to the ISBN for a book on AI.
I would imagine they did: "Ms. Amin said she and her colleagues had been hired by the show’s producers to add authenticity to the camp depicted in the episode". From my perspective this definitely adds authenticity, seems like the service was provided, if in a snarky manner. However I doubt they receive future work from the show :P
Homeland is a TV show, for entertainment. No one is happy with a lot of documentaries, the TV shows that are meant to get at facts and not just entertain.
So while I don't want to give Homeland a free ride, it'd be too much to expect more from the show.
I believe entertainment media to be more powerful than people give credit for. But yeah, people should have the freedom to take creative liberties in this context, so we should at least be having an ongoing discourse about it as it fills more of our living experience every day.
I thought "Saul" can speak Arabic and has Arabic wife, it's funny how they are portraiting a whole culture without having a single person on a show who has a relation to that culture or at least speak their language...Hollywood
The amusing part to me is that Homeland actually draws the line down the middle pretty much. It shows the human side of "terrorists" and also demonizes the CIA.
Never knew you could be "racist" against a religion.
I get it though, take a powerful word with negative connotations and use it to put your target on the defensive, no matter how tangential the connection. Kind of like being called a "commie" in the 20th century.
> Never knew you could be "racist" against a religion.
Bigotry against a cultural identity really isn't all that substantially different when the basis of the cultural identity is "race" or "religion", and bigotry against a race or ethnicity can often manifest in bigotry against other cultural identities that are correlated with that race or ethnicity, such as religion.
So, bigotry against a particular can both be a manifestation of racism, as well as being a thing substantially similar to racism independently of whether it is a manifestation of racism.
A more intelligent approach is to evaluate whether claims about racism hold water instead of issuing a blanket dismissal.
During the McCarthy era individuals got persecuted by the state for their beliefs. That's not at all comparable to people voicing an opinion that you may not agree with.
> Never knew you could be "racist" against a religion.
Excellent, this graffiti taught people that one can indeed by racist against muslims, because race is a pseudoscientific social construct used to attack people!
I have never, never seen anti-Christianity been referred to as "racism" by anyone, not even evangelicals and fundamentalists. It would make large swaths of criticism of Christianity (not to mention many extreme metal bands) post-facto racist.
"Othering" is far more general than racism, and relates to identity as a whole, not a specific racial identity.
Granted, there are many types of anti-Islamic thought, everything from actually studying the tenets of the religion and arguing against it from different angles, all of the way to having ignorant, inaccurate cultural stereotypes- Islamophobia. My conflating of racism with anti-Islam is with the latter. Because people in the West are usually less familiar with Islam, it's not difficult for people to assume Muslims are "those brown people over there in the Middle East", not unlike how a medieval European might have the social construct of a "Saracen." The point is, when a show depicts Islam in an inaccurate way that lumps a bunch of different peoples and cultures together as one Middle Eastern hodgepodge, it can be considered false to life, and thus, "racist."
Anti-Christianity doesn't work the same way in the West, because people here are generally less ignorant of that religion, and less likely to lump in all white people together as Christians. Maybe it's different in the East (though probably not the Middle East, where there are substantial Christian populations), and there they lump in all Christians as "those white people in America and Europe." In which case they would also be having a racist assumption.
However, one aspect that makes a difference is many Americans' picture of a Muslim is someone with vaguely brown skin. The people who engage in anti-Muslim hate crimes sometimes end up attacking Sikhs, non-Muslim Indians, even Coptic-Christians. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2011/03/29/anti-muslim-incide...
In a case where a culture conceptualized all and only White people as Christians and stereotyped or attacked them, I would see no problem calling that racism.
"Evangelicals and fundamentalists" are usually referring to non-existent discrimination, like not being allowed to use the state to discriminate. Ask a few Pakistani or Egyptian Christians, or Kurds. You'll notice that Christianity (like all other religions) usually follows ethnic lines in any particular place.
According to popular use. A lot of words, especially in the political or controversial sphere, end up having folk definitions that are open to interpretation. Witness how meaningless labels like "conservative" or "liberal" become when you try to dissect them.
If that definition is so widely open to interpretation that people with opposing views can't even talk to each other about it without misunderstandings, perhaps we shouldn't use that definition. Let's stick to the dictionary definition instead.
Well, the US Supreme Court (in 1893) believed that the Congress (in 1883) in writing a tariff act was using the words "fruit" and "tomato" as they are commonly used in English, and not as they are strictly used botanically.
In the absence of specific definitions in the law to the contrary that seems a fairly reasonable interpretation of the meaning most likely intended by Congress.
I think a lot of people would disagree that there is such a thing as a Jewish race, to start with. This gets at the question of what exactly is a race, as well. I think it most likely has something to do with your genes and family lineage, without getting too deep into it.
Unsure of this myself, I have googled and found that some writers with prominent search ranks say that Jews were always considered to be a race until after the holocaust. I still don't think it's remotely correct to say "synonymous" even here.
Except it isn't. There's a clear distinction between Jews as an ethnic group and Judaism the religion. Hence frequent criticism of and among various Jewish movements without it being anti-Semitic.
Not really. You're considered a Jew by other Jews if at least one of your parents is Jewish (your mother in most sects, your father in a few other sects). That's very tribalistic. So, what's the common communal identifier of Jews? Jewish culture, and interwoven with that, Judaism. You can't separate the religious from the cultural component of that communal identity, and you can't separate Jewish culture from Jewish people.
This also shows in how Israel regulates its immigration: both people with ethnically Jewish roots (at least one of your grandparents) and people of Jewish belief where ethnic roots hadn't been established at that time (biggest example: Ethiopian Jews) are accepted and granted citizenship.
Conversion of people to Judaism are relatively rare, and are really a more recent phenomenon. Jews don't proselytize and often discourage conversion. Samaritans, the "sister" religion of Judaism (both derive from the Israelites from before the destruction of the first temple), are similar but even more extreme in that. How more tribalistic than that can you get?
However, Jews also have disproportionately high levels of atheism, secularism and other forms of irreligion, which means much of the Jewish culture (Judaism) is relegated to irrelevance, but the ethnic identification nonetheless remains.
Jewish culture as such is certainly interwoven with Judaism, but becoming increasingly syncretic. Look at the large number of hilonim in Israel.
"Has an agenda" is a completely, utterly meaningless phrase. Literally everyone has an agenda. It's okay. You have an agenda too. You just convinced yourself you don't.
No, I didn't convince myself I don't, and didn't even insinuate such a thing. Your inferences are interesting in that light.
My agenda is to understand and promote objective truth. The agenda of those who level charges of racism or sexism or other isms is generally to drive the debate down predetermined emotional channels as a shortcut to an actual discussion.
I won't attempt to address this show which I haven't seen, but in general, propaganda can function to normalize or justify the obscene.
Through presenting two sides of an issue, it gives the illusion of honesty or fairness. Even if that strike was represented as a complete mistake with no justification, it has normalized drone strikes simply by exposing them as a thing you witness in sympathy from the comfort of your sofa.
There was nothing normalizing about their depiction. Most of the aftermath is showing a father's response to his dead young child. If anything it reinforces how horrific drone strikes on civilians are.
But it also reinforces the idea that this, tragedy included, is the new normal.
Showing the desperation of the victims, might also reassure you of the fact that you care about them (while in reality things like these happen every day without you even reading it in the news).
Finally, when you register that the ugly sides are taken in consideration, as you just did:
> In the same episode, a drone strike kills tens of innocent people. If you think that is "propaganda", you obviously weren't paying any attention.
your trust in the rest of the details of the episode and the series is enhanced. While they could be totally random, you have no clue about that.
I think being wary of normalization is justified, but there should also be room for a realistic representation of the banality of evil. The people doing drone strikes are eating cake and going to their kids' soccer game and helping their neighbors after blowing up people. Pretending this isn't true would also be stereotyping.
It was a breech of trust. Is a breech of trust absolutely and objectively wrong in all circumstances? I'm not comfortable saying it is, at least not without far more thought.
(P.S. I wonder if their contract in any way forbid this from being done. Because if not, this is no worse 'buyer beware' behavior than what is common among corporate America already.)
And yet you made your argument with a false equivalence. The street in Lebanon (Hamra Street) that was depicted as a hotbed of terrorist activity is a cosmopolitan, liberal road.
In case you can't see the issue: the series treats all Arabs and Muslims as dangerous terrorists willing to kill any "infidel" at the drop of a hat. And yet that is because of extremists, which exist everywhere - like, for example, Terry Jones.
It's false to say that EVERY Muslim will kill someone who criticises their religion.
I see the issue, and I understand what the artists gripes are. They're valid.
I'm simply pointing out that subversive demonstration is a basic right under many standard western doctrines.
It certainly is not under many interpretations of Islam.
This is all generalized of course, as there are people in the US who believe US Flag Burning should be illegal, and Muslims artists that are against strict interpretations of Sharia law.
