CAIR nods in approval.
Via Salon:
“Homeland” has, or more precisely, has had, a lot to recommend it. The show’s depiction of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and his conflicted feelings about America and its role in the world — and the actions he took against America in the show’s early going — were among the most realistic depictions of the contemporary state of villainy available on TV. Brody’s motivations, about which we learned little by little over the course of the show’s halcyon first season, chimed brilliantly with an America in which the enemies of the state looked less like Osama bin Laden than like the uncannily familiar Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, people whose very American-ness made them interesting characters and upsetting Rolling Stone cover subjects. “Homeland,” almost certainly inadvertently, met the anxieties of its moment, depicting a nation coming apart from within.
But in case any viewers forgot that the top-level talent producing the show came from “24,” Fox’s examination of the post-9/11 years, the show has hammered, hard, a particular suspicion of Muslims. Brody’s anti-U.S. position, in the first season, was loosely associated with his conversion to Islam in a manner that felt more coincidental than causal; he’d been turned against the U.S. because of its drone strikes, not because of radical Islam. By the third season, “Homeland” is treating Islam like yet another of its cheap party tricks, like (spoilers ahead!) CIA agent Carrie’s (Claire Danes) madness, which comes and goes, or her newly announced pregnancy. It’s a fun twist, something that gives a jazzy frisson.
In the current season, a CIA analyst played by the Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi has changed the temperature on “Homeland” without doing much of anything. Boniadi’s character, Fara Sherazi, is explicitly a potential threat; in a show whose very nature lends itself to constant betrayal, the camera lingers over her rather anodyne presence as though her hijab signals treason in the offing. (This leer was particularly pronounced in the most recent episode, during which Fara’s typing on a computer was treated almost lasciviously by the “Homeland” camera.) Indeed, the heretofore heroic character Saul (Mandy Patinkin) lectures Fara, early in the season, about how disrespectful her choice to wear a traditional religious garment is. Some other shoe will almost certainly drop, this being a series that burns through seasons’ worth of plot in a few episodes — but even if it doesn’t, “Homeland” has created an atmosphere of paranoia around Fara that says more about its creators’ viewpoints than it does about what Americans think of Islam.