Portrayal of ISI doesn’t go down too well.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The most recent season of U.S. spy thriller Homeland is not sitting well with Pakistani government officials, who are not enthused about the show’s portrayal of their national spy agencies.
Homeland is a political thriller starring Claire Danes as an unstable CIA agent; its latest story arc involves Pakistan’s top-level spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Agence France-Presse reports that while Pakistani media outlets ceased screening Homeland from its first season onwards in the name of protecting national interests, it is highly unusual for an official to comment on a fictional television show so directly.
“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,” Nadeem Hotiana, press attaché at Pakistan’s embassy in Washington told the news agency.
Hotiana also bemoaned the cultural inaccuracies cited by many Pakistanis, such as characters wearing the wrong attire or speaking the wrong dialects.
“In addition to the fact that the show projects and reinforces stereotypes about the US and Pakistan… it is also important to point out factual errors in the production of this show,” Hotiana said.
“A little research would have gone a long way in correctly portraying the culture, language, people and landscape of the city/country,” she added.
In Pakistan, where the military-intelligence complex wields significant power, it is taboo to criticize the ISI in any way, shape or form.