hey btw, since i saw somebody asking what the significance of the butcher's shop is: textually there is no significance. the significance is meta-textual. it is a kosher butcher, where they practice shechita (butchering of an animal to make it kosher.) infringing on the laws of shechita renders meat inedible (treif) to jews as a sin against G-d. the butcher's shop has to be so clean you can lick the floor and certified kosher by a rabbi or kashrut supervision agency (kashrut are the dietary laws.) nothing can be slaughtered except by the shochet (butcher who understands kashrut) with the chalaf (very sharp knife designed to kill with one cut.) spilling human (or vampire) blood in the kosher butcher shop would make any meat prepared there treif (unkosher) possibly permanently? to be honest i don't know. edit: i looked this up, and it wouldn't permanently make any meat prepared there treif, but it's still a hate crime in all directions.
my read on this scene is that we're seeing armand and fareed (armand is muslim-coded although his religion is never specified or explained which is a seperate issue of orientalism, and fareed is pretty presumably muslim edit: @knight-in-shimmering-armour made a really good point, i assumed this is about islamophobia because they’re both shown in proximity to islam in dubai and that’s the only time religion comes up other than with tcod with armand, but by both fareed’s last name and when/where armand was enslaved, they should both be hindu/raised hindu, so we don’t actually know if the intent behind the scene was islamophobia or hinduphobia,) torture louis and regina (both Black) in a kosher butcher's shop as a nod to white supremacist ideologies pitting people against each other along racial/ethnic and religious lines. because i can't see any other reason for it.
third (?) edit: hannah moscovitch recently posted this, specifying that she does her activism offline. i'm very glad to hear she's not a zionist, and that she's hearing what people are saying. i hope that means something positive will happen and she won't immediately get defensive (since she hasn't publicly addressed any of the bias in the season, as far as i've been able to find.) i also hope nobody sent her anything anti-semitic. it /is/ anti-semitic to assume all jews are zionists until proven otherwise, and that was what some people were doing. but i've also seen people say compiling evidence to point out bias after a beloved tv show becomes a bigoted shitshow is a witchhunt, and. c'mon. she just became the showrunner, they just wrote this scene where she's credited as lead writer, they're about to make another season with two palestinian characters who are already not handled well because of anne rice's personal bias, the ceo of amc is a trump donor, there were ads for a zionist company on tvl, the previous showrunner who was in charge for this shit is still gonna be in the room, this was a relevant question. if there's one jewish person in the room (who's credited as lead) when they write a scene like this, it's not unreasonable to ask what biases they might have that would lead them to write it this way. this post wasn't even supposed to be about hannah moscovitch, it's about this scene, but i pointed it out, so i'm correcting myself, and while i'm correcting myself, i'd like to mention i've seen people (including non-jewish people who aren't critical of the season, which i find Very Interesting) taking a victory lap about this, and acting like it's anti-semitic that anybody even brought it up. i think it is disingenous to say that people calling out things she's previously said/done/written as proof of bias is a witchhunt. did i see people saying antisemitic things they should re-examine? yes and i hope they think about that. but as a general movement people /were/ very much talking about rolin as well, they were talking about the whole writers' room, i think it was a relevant question we didn't have an answer on beyond what she had publicly said. which there was a lot of debate about, and i'll be the first to admit, as i've said before, i have a real hard ass stance on this that not every jewish person shares. my personal belief is every jewish person, especially every white jewish person, should be speaking out against the israeli gov't, and i also consider the times of israel to be a zionist publication. i will publicly rescind calling hannah a zionist, but i will not publicly rescind pointing out her bias. i think it's important to call out anti-semitism, but also to remember that /the show itself/ still went with this storyline, and she was the lead writer for this episode. the storyline is not suddenly fine because hannah moscovitch is doing anti-zionist activism. i also don't think that erases this pattern in her writing, but i'm gonna leave it at that.
second edit: i had a lovely conversation with @bratboymolloy about this, where they pointed out i kinda tacked that last sentence on and people might misunderstand. there's been some anti-semitic rhetoric around this one, so just to clarify, /i/ believe hannah moscovitch is a zionist for a couple reasons i'll elaborate on, but i don't think she's a zionist because she went to israel, which i have seen a couple people say, or because she's jewish. i personally, as a jew, have kind of a hard-ass take on going to israel at all, but it's a much longer conversation about occupation and privilege and how living on a kibbutz is something mostly teenagers do, not everybody who's been to israel is automatically a zionist, nor should all jews be seen as zionists until proven otherwise. that's anti-semitic. just randomly assuming every jewish person is pro-ethnic cleansing and genocide is pretty close to blood libel, don't do that.
the reason i think hannah moscovitch is a zionist is because she says /to the times of israel/ (which is a zionist publication that's defined as 'centrist' but i would call um. Other Things.) that "there are enough works out there about north american jews who go to israel and discover how much more complex the situation is than they thought or were taught to believe," when It Most Cetainly Is Not. zionism is just the belief that there should be a state of israel in palestine, so to say it's complicated as to whether or not there should be a state of israel falls into the 'strong suspicion she's a zionist' category /to me./ she also wrote a play based on a guy at her kibbutz whose grandfather was a nazi who was there to make amends. the plot of east of berlin explores the legacy of genocide and the effect it has on survivors/perpetrators' children and grandchildren. but she didn't take into account her privilege as a white jew from the diaspora who was living on palestinian land at the time, or the inherent privilege of that experience, the systemic violence and oppression that allowed that to happen.
https://nitter.net/ariesmandeo/status/2078651331905028178#m
she also wrote a play about canadian soldiers who committed war crimes in afghanistan that is entirely about their experience (this is war,) rather than the people whose land they were occupying, who they committed the atrocities against. the writing in this scene is definitely coming from the whole writers' room pulling from an orientalist bias against south asian men, where it's unclear which specific stereotypes they're pulling from, but they clearly have these biases. very specifically the writers' room was pulling from this school of pitting people against each other along racial, ethnic and religious lines to absolve a white guy of his egregious behavior.
