Pakistan unhappy with “Homeland”

Good day all. Showtime has a series they’ve been running called Homeland. It revolves around a CIA analyst played by Claire Danes. This season, they took the series into Pakistan, and it seems the Pakistanis aren’t happy with how they have been portrayed.

If you haven’t seen this season of Homeland, leave now since there may be spoilers. The basics of this season has Claire Dane’s character Carrie Mathison ((Caroline Anne “Carrie” Mathison)) running the CIA station in Pakistan. I won’t bother to much with the ins and outs of this season. Basically, the plotline revolves around Mathison and the others trying to catch or kill a high ranking terrorist. It turns out that he is actually being protected by elements of the Pakistani government. Eventually, thanks to this collusion, the embassy is attacked and a number of people murdered by the terrorists. This has angered a number of Pakistani officials. Here are the details from the New York Post:

Pakistani officials are furious with Showtime after watching the fourth season of its hit show “Homeland,” which they say portrays their country as an ugly, ignorant, terror-plagued “hellhole.”

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_8YTa_-hZw’]

I don’t see a problem with that description. It seems about right to me.

The diplomats took copious notes of every slight while binge-watching all 12 episodes — including the lack of greenery in the depiction of the nation’s capital, Islamabad.

They forgot to put trees and bushes on the back lot where they filmed this? Horrors! How dare they insult Islam Pakistan by not putting trees around the set!

They complained directly to producers of the Emmy-winning drama, but their gripes fell on deaf ears, Pakistani sources said.

“Maligning a country that has been a close partner and ally of the US .?.?. is a disservice not only to the security interests of the US but also to the people of the US,” Pakistan Embassy spokesman Nadeem Hotiana told The Post.

Close partner? I seem to recall a walled compound near the Pakistani Military Academy ((Pakistan Military Academy)) that had a person housed there that we were very interested in finding ((Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad)).

One of their beefs is that the show — which stars Danes as CIA Agent Carrie Mathison on assignment in Pakistan — trashed a diplomat’s image of the capital as a bucolic oasis.

Bucolic oasis? *Snort*

“Islamabad is a quiet, picturesque city with beautiful mountains and lush greenery,” one source said. “In ‘Homeland,’ it’s portrayed as a grimy hellhole and war zone where shootouts and bombs go off with dead bodies scattered around. Nothing is further from the truth.”

Really? While it appears there haven’t been any attacks in Islamabad this year, the rest of that hellhole you call a country has been blowing up for quite a while now ((Terrorist incidents in Pakistan in 2014)).

Homeland’s production company didn’t film in Islamabad, Pakistan, they filmed in Capetown, South Africa, probably due to the desire not to have any of their staff members or actors getting kidnapped and then beheaded by some of those “Bucolic, fun loving” Pakistanis. Another idiotic complaint was the languages used.

“The Pakistani characters portrayed in the show speak English like Americans would,” a source said. “Also, when the characters in the show speak Urdu, the accent is far from the local accent. “And the connotations of some of the Urdu words that are used are out of place.”

Allow me to assist you in understanding this dipshit. This program is aimed primarily at Americans. Very few speak Urdu and even fewer care about how the sentences are constructed in a television show.

The biggest gripe is that the show depicts Pakistan as undemocratic and allied with terrorists.

“Repeated insinuations that an intelligence agency of Pakistan is complicit in protecting the terrorists at the expense of innocent Pakistani civilians is not only absurd but also an insult to the ultimate sacrifices of the thousands of Pakistani security personnel in the war against terrorism,” a source said.

*Ahem* And who was protecting the most wanted enemy America had? I don’t think it was the Canadians, pinhead.

“ ‘Homeland’ makes it seem that Pakistan has contempt for Americans and its values and principles. That is not true.”

As a typical American, I think Homeland probably got it fairly accurate, other than the climate and the lack of shrubbery. The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI ((Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence)), have a reputation of aiding Islamic terrorists, such as the Taliban, and protecting them from the United States. While no one is officially saying it, the only reason Osama bin Laden could have remained hidden in Pakistan for so long is with official help.

As far as I’m concerned, Showtime’s Homeland did a fairly good job in portraying just how trustworthy Pakistan is.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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