Popular fiction like Homeland shaped real counterterrorism policy
Evidence
Following hard upon this controversy, in 2011 the HBO series Homeland featured a white Muslim terrorist sympathizer, Nick Brody. Brody, an all-American white male, is shown to have been corrupted by “Islam” into turning against his nation. “Islam” as ideology became a security threat. Homeland treats Islam as the insidious driving force behind all of the terror plots in the show, whether planned and perpetrated by foreign Muslims or by white American Muslim converts. This racist logic has informed counterterrorism programs both within the United States and in several European nations. For instance, the notion of terrorists in our midst who must be apprehended before they can act prompted counterterrorism practices such as the United Kingdom’s Preventing Violent Extremism program. These would be adopted in the United States during the Obama presidency through the Countering Violent Extremism program. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 610
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to reader’s interest in how narrative/media shapes policy — parallels White Noise’s media saturation and The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s counter-narrative about Muslim identity.
- SEED: Angle: tracing how a TV show’s Islam-as-ideology frame migrated directly into formal government programs is a concrete case study in culture-policy feedback loop.