The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is petitioning Netflix to cancel its show Fauda, Arabic for "chaos." The show serves as an "anti-Arab racist, Israeli propaganda tool that glorifies the Israeli military's war crimes against the Palestinian people," the group's March 29 statement reads.
The show features an undercover Israeli unit that embeds itself within West Bank society in an effort to find terror suspects. One plotline features Hamas members planning to release sarin — a poisonous chemical — in a synagogue in an attempt to get Israel to react with war crimes, which would then push its Arab neighbors into action.
"The Palestinian issue is very complicated — it's not black and white," Hisham Suleiman, an Arab-Israeli actor who plays the main Hamas villain, told the BBC about the show, which bills itself as being about a conflict which is "ancient."
PACBI noted that in February, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin hosted a party bringing together Israeli celebrities — including those acting in Fauda — with counter-terror soldiers. The crew lauded the soldiers as "protectors of life," according to PACBI.
In 2015, Sputnik News spoke with Don Karl, an artist who gained notoriety after he was hired to paint Arabic graffiti on the set of the US television political thriller Homeland. When he got on the job, he painted "Homeland is racist." Telling Sputnik that the show doesn't have a "clear idea of the culture they are filming a series about," it promotes the idea that all Muslims, Arabs and Pakistanis are terrorists.
Karl added that many shows are filmed without thought and built on stereotypes and that series like Homeland follow the beat of the news and reflect a country's political interests in the form of fiction.