This Actually Kept me up at Night.

Well that and I think the universe is conspiring to make sure I experience that heady mix of sleep deprivation, paranoia and stress without which Christmas just wouldn't feel like Christmas.

Anyway  last night the final episode of the second season of "Homeland" was broadcast in the UK just a week after it was shown in the US. While I don't want to spoil it for anyone this provoked a lot of controversy on Twitter over a scene in which the Saul character stood over a dead body and said something in a foreign language. He was actually saying the Kaddish which is a Hebrew prayer for the dead similar to the Catholic last rites. However a lot of people mistook this for Arabic and speculated that Saul might actually be one of the terrorists. I think there's a good chance this was done on purpose because there's been a lot of controversy at an inter-governmental level of Homeland's use of Arabic and it's portrayal of Arabs. In much the same way you get British English, US English and Australian English you get different versions of Arabic. The version used in Homeland is actually Israeli Arabic and well some of it's just nonsense. This has led to some people speculating that the writers are trying to make a connection between Israeli Zionism and Palestinian terrorism. However I think it's simply that the Arabic adviser the show uses is a guy called Gideon Raff who wrote the "Prisoners of War" show on which Homeland is based. Raff is an Israeli so obviously he speaks Israeli Arabic. Other problems with Homeland include the fact that no matter how many times they show characters in Muslim prayer I don't think one of them has got it right yet and the fact that the name of the central terrorist character "Abu Nazir" actually means "the father or Nazir." The biggest controversy though is over the name of Nazir's son "Isa." Although to a US audience this is quite a good joke about Darrell Issa the chair of the House Oversight Committee Isa actually means Jesus in Arabic which is hardly the first name an Islamic extremist would chose for their child.

All these little niggles come together to mean that while a western audience are watching a taut political thriller to Arab audiences it does take on the air of a Carry On film style farce. Some - particularly Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) nations - have used this to suggest that the show is deliberately mocking Muslims and Arabs. This suggestion is being made in an attempt to drive a wedge between the US and the so-called "Arab Street" in order to isolate the US in the region - particularly in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process.

So yeah I think season three's going to be fun.


10:10 on 24/12/12.

Edited at around 16:30 on 24/12/12 to add: As no other bugger is stopping it seems my Christmas message is going to be me just blathering on about Homeland.

Thinking about it with the Walden character representing Romney/the Protestant Republican Party having them as the people who killed Isa could be a little swipe at the implicit anti-Semitism within Protestant Zionism. The common excuse always being that the Jews killed Jesus. And to think people say Christmas has lost it's religious dimension. Similarly the Abu Nazir name seems to be a little hint to a western media who keep referring to terrorists such as Abu Hamza. That is of course a pseudonym roughly meaning "Father of the Provocation." Abu Nazir roughly translates as "Father of the Beautiful Observer" which sounds like a joke at the viewer's expense. I've actually noticed that since Homeland has started US media outlets have started referring to the Abu Hamza with the hooks for hands as Abu Hamza al-Masri in order to differentiate him from the 15 or so other Islamic terrorists who all use the same pseudonym.

Also while I don't want to spoil it in the finale of Homeland there was a blink and you'll miss it reference to a truly awful UK/US co-production called "Secret State." This is only worth mentioning because it was the collaboration on this series which allowed the US and the UK to dream up the investigation into the natural gas wholesale market that tried and failed to force it's way on to the COP18/CMP8 agenda.

So in summary much like House while it contains many glaring errors Homeland remains one of the best things on TV. For example Clare Danes was actually heavily pregnant throughout the second series but it was so well covered no-one seemed to notice.