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Lebanese minister threatens to sue over TV show
Wednesday 24th October 2012 | Jacob
Hit US drama series ‘Homeland’ angers the Lebanese Tourism Minister over its depiction of a street in Beirut.
Displaying an excellent understanding of the term ‘fiction’ the minister pointed out that the episode “did not depict reality”. Nice definition there, bro. With the recent (and horrifically non-fictional) troubles in Syria threatening to boil over the border into Lebanon, you may think that the country’s government would have more pressing matters to attend to than watching big-budget American TV, Emmy winning though it may be.
Perhaps the real root of the complaint is that the scenes in question were filmed in Israel, a country with whom Lebanon has had a somewhat ‘fractious’ history. It’s the Middle Eastern equivalent of someone filming a slanderous film about you at your neighbour’s house, because it looks like your house, and you hate that neighbour because there is some argument over who actually owns the house. Plus it’s a porno. Whatever, I’m not good at analogies.
A lawsuit is being planned against the show’s director and producer, centring on the damage the may have caused to Lebanon’s image and the subsequent effect on tourism. Not to piss on their chips here, but I’m pretty sure the main barrier to people visiting Lebanon on holiday isn’t what they’ve seen in Homeland, it’s what they’ve heard on the news.
By Jacob Alexander Guberg
