“Homeland Is Racist”: Hired Artists Snuck Some Great Arabic Graffiti Into The Show’s Latest Episode

Though it has a whole swag of awards to its name including Emmys, Golden Globes and a Peabody, Homeland is still regularly saddled with some pretty serious criticisms. Some argue that it’s essentially US propaganda — a justification of military action in the Middle East. A report from Amnesty International even accused it getting people on board with torture. But the most prevailing complaint has been that the show is racist.

Homeland‘s depiction of people from the Middle East has been described as “not only crude and childish but offensive” and it’s been openly declared “TV’s most Islamophobic show”. Though some critics have pushed back against the allegation — The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenbrrg defended certain portrayals arguing “ignorance shouldn’t be mistaken for bigotry” — the criticism’s really lasted.

Showrunners didn’t really help matters when they released this poster last year:

Look! It's Little Red Riding Racist! Can blondie survive in a sea of cloaked women?? #Homeland show poster. pic.twitter.com/XIgxeMjWN5

— Zahra Noorbakhsh (@ZahraNoo) July 19, 2014

Now, a group of artists have taken action. After being hired by the show’s production company to scrawl Arabic graffiti on the show’s new set in Berlin, the men took the opportunity to get creative. Though producers had instructed them to make the messages apolitical — writing “Mohamed is the greatest, is okay of course” — they decided to instead critique the show itself.

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Even better: two of their statements (“Homeland is racist” and “Homeland is not a series”) just aired on the latest episode in Australia and the US:

In a statement on his website, one of the artists Heba Amin has fully explained his motivation:

“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 wrote. “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 [to get involved] 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.”

“[On the day] set designers were too frantic to pay any attention to us .. The content of what was written on the walls 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 dehumanising 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 time.”

On of the show’s creators, Alex Gansa, has now given a statement to Entertainment Weekly remaining fairly good-natured about the whole thing. “We wish we’d caught these images before they made it to air,” he said. “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.”

This is something Amin is totally on board with as well. “[I’d] be happy if this resulted in a dialogue,” he said in a new interview with Slate. “If it created a platform from which these things can be talked bout in a less aggressive, confrontational way.”

What a great result!

That is unless you work in post-production on Homeland. In that case, you’re very very fired.

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All images supplied by Heba Amin. Read his full statement here.