Lebanese tourism minister Fady Abboud might be the only person in the world who doesn’t like the Showtime hit series Homeland. But it’s got nothing to do with Claire Danes — he’s annoyed at the show’s portrayal of the country’s capital Beirut.
In the Season 2 opener, CIA Agent Carrie Mathison (Danes) is in Beirut to verify a co-operating witness. While there she is chased by terrorists and the government.
According to Abboud, the show portrays a “serious misrepresentation” of the once war-torn city. While Beirut was once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” being the tourism minister of Lebanon these days cannot be an easy task, as many associate the country with Hezbollah and the civil war that occurred there in the 1980s.
Abboud is quoted by The Daily Telegraph (UK):
We are following the case legally, I raised this at the cabinet meeting, and the president asked the minister for justice and the minister of communications to see what can be done. All young Lebanese adults do what they need to do — to, write blogs, to call the BBC and CNN, to try and raise awareness that Beirut is not a city of Kalashnikov and war.
And what might make the Lebanese government angrier is that the episode was filmed in Israel, not Lebanon, a country that Lebanon is technically at war with.