Thursday, May 23, 2019

Law & Order: SVU S20E23 "Assumptions" Was Thoroughly Anti-Muslim

NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 20, Episode 23 "Assumptions" poorly handled recent controversies and promoted anti-Muslim stereotypes.

Let's review some previous observations I and others have made about Dick Wolf's Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.


Law and Order, Season 20, Episode 3 "Great Satan" ignored the real-world problems of using confidential informants in terrorism-related charges against Muslims.

Now let's go through L&O: SVU S20E23 "Assumptions."

In the initial interview before reaching the ambulance, Nazneen Contractor, playing Nahla Nasar, the Muslim councilwoman whom Detective Carisi has already informed us is famous for anti-Semitic remarks, tells him and Detective Rollins that "those people" are responsible for her assault. Thus, she confirms her antisemitism. The councilwoman is a barely concealed stand-in for Ilhan Omar, a representative to the US House of Representatives from Minnesota's 5th District.
So the Councilwoman's Chief of Staff Aida Golanis (played by Elise Hudson) is responding to a question about her boss's alleged antisemitism as she enters a scene: "Nahla is passionate about her beliefs. She is exercising her right to criticize Israel. She is not anti-Semitic." Carisi responds: "My understanding is that people got offended by her choice of words."

I'm not going to rehash the real life backlash that Ilhan Omar faces for supporting Palestinians' rights and criticizing other politicians for their support of Zionism but you can read one of the Electronic Intifada articles about it.

The episode raises this controversy but doesn't deal with it directly. Because Nahla Nasar acts in bad faith for most of the episode, her views (and hence Ilhan Omar's) are indirectly discredited. An example of her bad faith is in the statement of her chief of staff that the only good thing from the assault is that "maybe everyone will realize that she's the true victim here." In other words, the antisemitic politician uses the crime to advance her political agenda.

Nahla Nasar tells Lieutenant Benson that, because her parents are from Syria, she knows what women go through in war zones & she won't feel sorry for herself. #1, Syria hasn't always been a war zone, so Syrians who immigrated to the USA & raised children here wouldn't have any special inoculation against trauma. Or this does play into the stereotype that "those people are always fighting, so if we drop a few more bombs on them, what does it matter?" For this reason, victims of USA & Israeli & Russian military interventions are hardly named, because "they deal with death differently than we do." As a long-time SVU fan, I can remember only a few instances where the rape victim is not personally traumatized. So this stoicism is more Othering.

At the end of the interview in the hospital room, Nahla again repeats her allegation that her assault was planned by the administration of the synagogue, who had lured her there on the premise of "peace." Spoiler alert: it wasn't them. She makes this assertion without evidence, thus reducing her credibility and the credibility of her political views.

I tried to search to see if there was a Holocaust Exhibit Room at the Amsterdam Avenue Synagogue at 360 West 89th St. According to Google Maps, that address isn't a synagogue, but a Google search reveals places to go in NYC to learn more.
So the episode balances Nahla's bigotry with that of the mother of Michael, a boy attending a meeting about "birthright to Israel" (aside-when can Palestinians take this trip?), who says that because Nahla wears a hijab, she must then believe in Sharia Law. Detective Tutuola then responds, "So she's a terrorist?" Unfortunately, Tutuola's response makes it seem that believing in Shariah Law = being a terrorist. As we'll see, the episode's assertions on "Shariah Law" are dangerously anti-Muslim.

Just in case you start at all to sympathize with Nahla, when she recognizes the two Jewish boys from a demonstration in front of her office, she makes another false accusation & says some more racist statements.



Then Nahla's office, because they are sneaky, bad people, leak a doctored video of the demonstration despite Chief Dodd's request for them not to do so. When one of the falsely accused Jewish boys yells in her face and touches her hijab, Nahla cunningly turns it to political advantage, playing the "victim card."

Boy hisses to Nahla: "You're an antisemite."

Nahla: "Stop spitting in my face like some kind of animal."

Boy grabs her shoulder and sticks finger in face: "Hey, don't you dare call me an animal!"

Nahla: Are you trying to rip off my hijab?

"A hoax?"

District Attorney Peter Stone: Maybe that's not the only hoax!"

Dramatic long tone. Cut to commercial.

Stone gets a judge to compel the local news outlet to provide the whole video, which shows that Nahla "initiated" the confrontation. And, sure enough, if you didn't get the memo that Nahla is ANTISEMETIC, here's the dialogue:

Boy: Why do you say these hateful things against the Jews?

Nahla: Well, why do you sanction genocide against the Palestinian people?

Boy: We don't!

Another demonstrator: Nobody here thinks that!

Boy: You are the ones that want to push us into the sea.

Nahla: Who's paying you to come down here, huh? The Zionists from AIPAC? You're
Of course, this plot twist is a retelling of the confrontation between the Covington Catholic High School students in Washington, DC for an anti-abortion rally & Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder. While liberals initially supported Phillips, when the students' PR machine

Just like the episode didn't actually deal in a meaningful way with the accusations of antisemitism leveled against critics of Zionism & defenders of Palestinian rights, the episode also didn't deal with the confrontation in Washington DC. The episode, by portraying Nahla as lying about the fictional confrontation, also implied that Nathan Phillips was lying about the confrontation with the students from Covington Catholic High School. SVU's writers basically take two painful episodes from real life, casually come down on the side of the powerful, & then, what, go out for a celebratory meal at Applebee's?

Unfortunately, that's not the only terrible stereotyping in the episode. At 23:10, evidence from Nahla's cell phone leads Tutuola & Carisi to a lesbian bar, where they witness Nahla, without hijab, ordering a "Hendricks
lying to conceal their agenda of conquest & pillage & disregard for non-Muslims. Of course, whenever bigots & xenophobes want to scare people, they use a foreign word to describe it. In this case, it's taqiyya. Thankfully, this didn't make it into the SVU episode, but the repeated lying by the Muslim characters in the episode, especially Nahla, the assault victim, will contribute to this false idea. And if you think I'm exaggerating, here's the Google search for taqiyya. It's a veritable smorgasbord of ignorance & prejudice.

And Nahla's really recovered from concussion & rape nicely. Hitting the club!

One good point in the episode is the discussion the detectives have about Nahla's sexual orientation. Lt. Benson asks why can't she be a devout Muslim and a lesbian. Detective Carisi observes that LGBT children in households of various religious beliefs can have difficulty. Then Ice-T (Tutuola)
invading & occupying Iraq & destroying the country, nobody was throwing gays & lesbians off of roofs? Is it too late to remind them that the people who created Daesh/ISIS met in USA military detention camps?

LGBT Muslims face many challenges &, in many cases, severe persecution. But it's not a monolithic tale, and, in the case of European Christianity, isn't it a little rich to wag the finger at Muslims for homophobia? It's kind of like your co-worker who recently quit smoking &
won't shut up about your nicotine addiction. Here's a list of resources for LGBTQI Muslims.
Also, check out Islamic Law & Same Sex Unions by Junaid Jahangir & Hussein Abdullatif  and Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections by Kecia Ali.
Coming back to the episode, Detective Rollins hits the nail on the head when she says, "Fine, [she can be an observant Muslim & a lesbian], just don't run for office & lie about who you are."

Of course, Nahla's Muslim parents live in Bay Ridge!
Being an idiot perp, Masud lies to Detectives Carisi and Rollins in the initial interview about his alibi, thus raising suspicion. At 29:35, as he's being arresting, he suddenly affects a foreign accent. "Not in the least. She hates men." Did the director, Fred Berner, put him up to that?

On the witness stand, Nahla pronounced her former husband's name as Masud Farhaj. Do the SVU writers not know that Faraj & Farhaj are two different names? فرج Faraj is a common Arabic name. فرهاج Farhaj is not an Arabic name. I did find it as the name of one of the victims of the Christchurch massacre. رحمه الله He was from Hyderabad in India. So, if you're going to do an episode slandering Syrians, Arabs, Muslims, etc, at least get their names right.
doing all kinds of crimes to their spouses, but when Muslim husbands attack their wives, it's all about the honor.

Separating "honor killings" from the general category of misogynistic domestic violence is a tactic #45Regime Department of Justice used to massage statistics in support
Masud Faraj spits on the ground in front of his wife's female lover. What class! - Thankfully, this occurred off camera, but it did help the bar's staff remember when he came around so that they could ID him from street video.

Hold on to your seats, though. We're about to dive into the real Islamophobia.

Stone gets Masud to admit on the witness stand that he didn't consider the divorce because it was only through the civil law, not the religious law, because he's a "Conservative Muslim."

What does that term mean? That I don't invest all my money in penny stocks? That I believe in supply-side economics? There is no recognized category of Muslims who call themselves "Conservative Islam" akin to "Conservative Judaism." This is another example of ignorant writers
Masud says he does follow Shariah law. (35:35) Stone opens the book in his hand & says, "Shariah law states that homosexuality is immoral" Apparently reading from the text, "If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence of four reliable witness from amongst them
The passage Stone reads is an approximate translation of
وَاللَّاتِي يَأْتِينَ الْفَاحِشَةَ مِن نِّسَائِكُمْ فَاسْتَشْهِدُوا عَلَيْهِنَّ أَرْبَعَةً مِّنكُمْ ۖ فَإِن شَهِدُوا فَأَمْسِكُوهُنَّ فِي الْبُيُوتِ حَتَّىٰ يَتَوَفَّاهُنَّ الْمَوْتُ أَوْ يَجْعَلَ اللَّهُ لَهُنَّ سَبِيلًا

This is the 15th ayah of Sura al-Nisa (4:15).

In Stone's questioning, Masud initially refuses to complete the passage Stone is reading. Stone persists, saying, "I know that you know." This line implies that the Muslim who works at a flower shop & raped his ex-wife in a synagogue & lies about it is knowledgeable. This is akin to Graeme Wood's insistence that Daesh/ISIS is "very Islamic."

In Stone's closing arguments, he rebuts the rather pathetic work of Masud's defense attorney by saying the known "facts" of the case. Among them: "We know that his religion tells him that homosexuality is immoral & punishable by death."

Many Christian defendants have asserted Biblical justification for a crime, yet nobody every treats those statements seriously. Yet, the SVU writers want to treat Mufti Peter Stone as the last word on what Islam mandates, as if it is relevant to the case.

Can every prosecutor, when faced with with an assault on an LGBTQI person where a Muslim happened to have opportunity, convict the Muslim simply because of Stone's interpretation? Let's assume that we Muslims are supposed to act on this passage of the Quran. Are we to do it as vigilantes? Where were the witnesses? Is rape mentioned in the Quran as a punishment for a crime?

I have no problem with Muslims being slimy victims, witnesses & perps in TV shows & movies. Just don't drag legitimate political issues such as support for restoration of Palestinians' rights & First Nations' resistance to continued colonialism & erasure & serious social issues such as domestic violence & homophobia through an ignorant filter of understanding of Islam.
Thankfully, Nahla's parents affirm their love & pride in their daughter. This might have given the episode a fraction of redemption, but ...
Fearmongering over shariah justifies all kinds of ignorance in USA, and this episode bolstered it, thank you very little. For example, in my county, an advocate of hanging up The Ten Commandments in our courthouse explained that the document collection her organization was proposing established the true basis for American Laws & Government, as opposed to Shariah law. Fast forward to minute 7 for the reference to Shariah.

There's no book, even the mushaf (the printed representation of the Quran), that anybody can hold in one's hand like Peter Stone did & say, "This is shariah law." For a non-specialist Muslim to hold forth on what is or isn't shariah law in a criminal case would be rejected as

The 20th season of L&O:SVU featured Titus Welliver in the role of Rob Miller, a powerful lawyer who raped a prominent defense attorney & runs/partakes in an underage sex trafficking operation. Nobody ever examines his religious or psychological beliefs which cause him to commit crimes. Why can't TV portray a Muslim criminal like it does a Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh or atheist criminal?

This episode had an intense hijab obsession. Tearing the hijab off of a Muslim woman is terrifying. Hijab signifies religiosity. Nahla wanted to "fit in" in high school, but, when she married Masud, she began wearing hijab. When she is at the club, she's not wearing hijab. Nahla accuses Stone & Benson of being prejudiced against her because she's wearing a hijab. Why does this piece of cloth do so much work in people's minds?




For the most part, I think Jews & Muslims live rather amicably in USA. This episode makes it seem like every interaction between a Jew & a Muslim is kindle under a tank of gas.
People should check out Joel Fendelman's movie David, which portrays a Muslim family's interactions with Jews from a Brooklyn yeshiva.
evangelical Protestants. (Take that, Christian Zionist fanatics like John Hagee & Robert Jeffress). Attitudes of Muslims towards other religious groups were not included in the report, likely due to insufficient sample size.

Regardless of the chilly polling data, my unscientific personal circle shows that Muslims & Jews interact more comfortably than Muslims & white Christians, primarily because of the regard for accommodation each group is used to making & requesting & similar professional aspirations. Things may be different in NYC for local reasons.

I was going to do this thread from my memory of watching the episode, but I decided to rewatch it & do screenshots. Watching it a second time allowed me to get past the shock of the crazy plotline to see the facial gestures & body language & hear the tones of the actors' voices. It also allowed me to record "microaggressions" which I would have neglected if I had written this from memory of watching the episode once. Assuming that the vast majority of communication is subconscious through body language, voice tone, etc, watching this episode a second time led me to believe it is far worse than I originally thought. Most viewers will only watch the episode one time, and they would subconsciously imbibe all of the anti-Muslim stereotypes I've described here.

I've written blog entries describing other TV shows.

Updated June 17, 2019: Recent poll shows Jews & Muslims in USA are BFFs. American Muslim Poll 2019: Predicting and Preventing Islamophobia. Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 2019.


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