Arabian Street graffiti artists trio explains why they have hacked the set of Homeland

1. "Arabian
Street
Artists"
Bomb
Homeland:
Why
We
Hacked
an
Award-­‐Winning
Series
What’s wrong with Homeland's political message? The very first season of “Homeland”
explained to the American public that Al Qaida is actually an Iranian venture. According to the
storyline, they are not only closely tied to Hezbollah, but Al Qaida even sought revenge against
the US on behalf of Iran. This dangerous phantasm has become mainstream ‘knowledge’
in the
US and has been repeated as fact by many mass media outlets. Five seasons later, the plot has
come a long way, but the thinly veiled propaganda is no less blatant. Now the target is freedom
of information and privacy neatly packaged as the threat posed by Whistleblowers, the Islamic
State and the rest of Shia Islam.
In the summer of 2015, the American television serial “Homeland”
was shot in Berlin. June
and July saw parts of the city dedicated to capturing the doings of former CIA Agent Carrie
Mathison (Claire Danes) in her new role as security advisor to a German humanitarian
oligarch, Otto Düring (Sebastian Koch). Amidst hints of a hacker conspiracy and secret
agreements between the US and Germany, the show attempts to mirror real-life events with
an Edward Snowden-style leak revealing a joint project by the CIA and the BND (German
Federal Intelligence Service) illegally spying on German citizens. But unlike real life, this
leak forced Germany to release all arrested ISIS terrorists.
The series has garnered the reputation of the most bigoted and racist TV series for its
inaccurate, undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans,
as well as its gross misrepresentations of the cities of Beirut, Islamabad- and the so-called
Muslim world in general. For four seasons, and entering its fifth, “Homeland”
has
maintained the dichotomy of the photogenic, mainly white, mostly American protector
versus the evil and backwards Muslim threat. The Washington Post reacts to the racist
horror of their season four promotional poster by describing it as “white Red Riding Hood
lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”.1
In this forest, Red Riding Hood is permitted to
display many shades of grey - bribery, drone strikes, torture, and covert assassination- to
achieve her targets. She points her weapon of choice at the monochrome bad guys, who do
all the things that the good guys do, but with nefarious intent.
It cannot be disputed that the show looks good and is well acted and produced, as its many
awards prove. But you would think that a series dealing so intensively with contemporary
topics including the war on terrorism, ISIS, and ideological clashes between the US and the
Middle East would not, for example, name a key terrorist character after the former real-life
Pakistani ambassador to the United States.2
Granted, the show gets high praise from the
American audience for its criticism of American government ethics, but not without
dangerously feeding into the racism of the hysterical moment
we find ourselves in today.
Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at
Columbia University, addresses this deep-seeded racism of American media towards the
Middle East:
“‘Homeland’
hardly deviates from this formula [of racist programming], 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”.3
1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/02/homeland-­‐is-­‐the-­‐most-­‐
bigoted-­‐show-­‐on-­‐television/
2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZdRDM-­‐NYgc
3
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012102591525809725.html

2. At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active
in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched
graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by “Homeland’s”
set
production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists”
to lend graffiti
authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their
new season. Given the series’
reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered
what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’
political
discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message
using the show itself.
In our initial meeting, we were given a set of images of pro-Assad graffiti- apparently
natural in a Syrian refugee camp. Our instructions were: (1) the graffiti has to be apolitical
(2) you cannot copy the images because of copyright infringement (3) writing “Mohamed is
the greatest, is okay of course”. We would arm ourselves with slogans, with proverbs
allowing for critical interpretation, and, if the chance presented itself, blatant criticism
directed at the show. And so, it came to be.
The set decoration had to be completed in two days, for filming on the third. Set designers
were too frantic to pay any attention to us; they were busy constructing a hyper-realistic set
that addressed everything from the plastic laundry pins to the frayed edges of outdoor plastic
curtains. It looked very
Middle Eastern and the summer sun and heat helped heighten that
illusion. The content of what was written on the walls, however, was of no concern. In their
eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the
Middle East, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black
burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees. The show has thus created a chain of
causality with Arabs at its beginning and as its outcome- their own victims and executioners
at the same time4
. As was briefly written on the walls of a make-believe Syrian refugee
camp in a former Futterphosphatfabrik (animal feed plant) in the outskirts of Berlin, the
situation is not to be trusted-
.
The Arabian Street Artists //
Heba Amin
Caram Kapp
Stone
* Our intervention was broadcast on October 11, 2015, “Homeland” Season 5, Episode 2.
4
Camus,
Albert,
“Ni
Victimes
Ni
Bourreaux”;
Combat;
Paris;
1948
http://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Camus-­‐Ni-­‐victimes-­‐ni-­‐bourreaux.pdf