A Gaming War Between Islam and the West?

The Washington Post has up an article looking at a burgeoning venue for political expression: gaming. Between 'The Quest for Bush', Counter-Strike mods, and more serious titles with a political slant, the political arena is quickly claiming gamers for their own. It's not just politics either; there are some excellent titles being released that attempt some truly insightful social commentary. From the article: "'UnderAsh,' released by Afkar Media in 2002, views the first intifada from the eyes of Ahmad, a Palestinian teenager resisting the Israeli occupation. Last year a sequel was released. A teaser to 'UnderSiege,' which tells the stories of five Palestinian families during the second intifada, shows a Palestinian teenager being shot on the street; an Israeli soldier appears to pound him with a concrete block seconds later. 'Our games are not propaganda,' Kasmiya says. 'Our games are a reflection of our history -- past or present. The fact is, most movies, most TV shows, most video games put Muslims in a bad light, so we have to try to tell our side of the story.'" Commentary from GamePolitics is also available.

Comments

Yes, but

[Travoltus]

While they're guilty of holocaust denial, we're constantly guilty of "them swarthy people"ism.

Recognizing the Palestinians' side of things is not the same as hating Israel.

I cheered for Israel when they went to get their kidnapped soldiers back, but I also feel Palestine should have their own territory, and be treated under the same rules of conduct as every other country.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Israel just wants to be left alone.

Uh huh. Sort of how people in the south just wanted to be left alone to have black slaves work their plantations.

If Israel changed it's name to something ethnically neutral and renounced all discrimination then it would be left alone. The key problem is that Israel wants to be segregated. They don't want complete ethnic purity - they like to have a few token members of other ethnic groups around to pretend to be inclusive.

The primary vehicle of discrimination is citizenship. Only a token number of the undesirable ethnic groups are granted citizenship. Millions of people in the "undesirable" ethnic groups were driven out of Israel and live in refugee camps unable to return to Israel because Israel wants to remain predominantly, but not completely, ethnically pure. Millions more have lived under a brutal occupation for the same reasons.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

but I also feel Palestine should have their own territory, and be treated under the same rules of conduct as every other country.

The call for a "Palestinian state" is, more correctly, a call for an Arab state in Palestine. The word "Palestinian" also denotes Israelis, since the whole region is called Palestine, and there are now thousands of people born in "Palestine" every day, many of them in Israel. Since there exists the state of Israel, there is already a "Palestinian state". So obviously, that's a misnomer.

Now that the correct terminology is being used, an Arab state in Palestine, I can point out that one already exists: Jordan. Remember the British Mandate for Palestine, which they received after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, and what area the region of Palestine covers: all of modern-day Israel, Gaza, the "occupied territories" minus land designated as belonging to the French Mandate of Syria (including Shaba Farms), and Jordan. Transjordan (later renamed to Jordan) was created as an Arab state in Palestine, and Israel was later created as a Jewish state in Palestine.

The issue of "Palestinian refugees" exists solely because none of the neighboring Arab states will accept them into their country, and those "refugees" don't believe Israel (or Jews, for that matter) have the right to exist. They were originally displaced in the war of Israeli independence in 1948, when the attacking Arab nations told them to leave their homes and get out of harm's way for a brief time while they went in to wipe out the Zionist uprising. That failed miserably. The native peoples were still displaced, they refused to live under "Zionist" rule, and they were not accepted into the Arab states who caused their situation in the first place. They've continued to reproduce, so naturally the situation is larger now than it was in 1948.

Don't trust everything you read or hear, particularly concerning issues that people fight and die daily over (like the Middle East, and Israel in particular). Simply by changing a few words, you can totally change the meaning and emphasis of something. Find out what is really being sought and what is really being said, then look up your history in an objective manner. It is rather eye-opening.

And, unfortunately, the elected government of the PA has chosen to deny the existence of the state of Israel, and instead call for its destruction (no, not just a withdraw to pre-1967 borders). This means the majority of the populace supports this idea (these are the "refugees" I mentioned above). As soon as Israel pulled out of Gaza, there suddenly wasn't peace. There were renewed calls for further violence, continuing the attempts to push the Jews into the sea.

In a world that is (at least superficially) trying to encourage tolerance, such a stance is ... unfortunate.

Re:Well..

[krell]

"If you're concerned with the way you're portrayed how about you stop blowing us up?"

More to the videogame topic, I don't think these games where they choose to portray themselves specifically blowing us up are really going to help the portrayal problem.

"Islam" and "The West"?

[arodland]

Funny, I thought those two things had huge amounts of overlap.

Re:That's reductive

[PHPfanboy]

>The displaced, post-Holocaust Jews could have found safe haven in most of Europe, the United States...the Bahamas...hell, anywhere they wanted to go.

Seriously, after WW2, Zionism won by default. Most of the European countries did not want "the Jews" and quite frankly, after what happened from our buddies the enlightened Germans, I'm not sure we'd have wanted to have to depend on the mercy of strangers again. Nation states didn't and still don't like minorities.

> This was done knowing full well that it would destabilize the Middle East, and that it would invite the ire of no less than 13 other nations in the region that were different from the Jews culturally, religiously, and ethnically.

What nations? Arabs? Ottoman Empire provinces? These are all the same Sunni Arab peoples (yes there are other Druze, Christian and Shia minorities, but they were largely uninfluential) and some "nations" were created by giving Hashemite brothers Kingships (Iraq (2), Jordan, Saudi).

The notion of populare political movements, mass media and political representation all comes quite a bit later - when you say "invite the ire" it was really what the king says goes. Incidentally, King Abdullah of Jordan was friendly with the Zionists and this was one of the reasons why he was killed. The populations weren't (and still aren't in most cases) that important to the realpolitik.

Just because the Sykes-Picot treaty happened to draw some arbitrary borders and impose the 19th century model of a European nation state on the Middle East doesn't mean they were independent nations any more than New York and Colorado are. Much of the population was semi-nomadic, even the Palestinian leadership sold land to the Zionists (no not all of the land was purchased, there was a war) - i.e. you're omitting a lot of important details.

> This was made possible only through U.S. military support.

No, first it was clandestine Czech arms purchases, then the French were our major supplier and only after 1967 did the US get in the game as the US wanted winners to be seen to use US weapons (so that they could use weapons "aid" to buy allies against the Soviets). US did give political support, but the arms came much later.

kinda sorta

[BeeBeard]

I'm a real-life Jew myself (and a lawyer no less, yeah I know..insert joke here), and I would be lying if said that I felt comfortable voicing my opinions on this subject in anything but the most anonymous of ways.

I like the way you argue. If you astutely noticed that I've omitted a few key details that would weaken my position and then also emphasized those details that would strengthen it, then, yeah...welcome to the world of rhetoric ;

To answer you more qualitatively, sure, most of the Middle East was arbitrarily created by European powers. Boundary lines were drawn often with little respect for cultural and ethnic similarities. But you're forgetting your time line: Most of those nations did exist before the creation of the Israeli nation-state. It's just a moot point, anyway. Even if you don't already consider the powers in the region religiously or ethnically unified rather than disparate, their universal hatred of Israel has provided the common enemy that they need to feel as brothers, at least with respect to this one issue.

I also don't think you're giving religious minorities their due here. For example, the minority Maronite Christians in Lebanon (a made-up nation created by the French, if you're keeping score...) were and still are key players in Lebanese politics for years, having much of the money and therefore influence in what was a young and untested political environment. Even after the Lebanese Civil War, it could be claimed that the Maronites still had a stranglehold on Lebanese politics.

I would like to think that I would have been one of the Jews going "You know, this just sounds like a bad idea..." when Israel was created. But alas, I wasn't alive then, and besides, I probably would have been on board with the idea at first anyway. As I pointed out earlier, genuine malice wasn't the goal in the creation of Israel. Of course it wasn't. Everyone thought that the Middle East situation would smooth out over time and that the Palestinians would find a place among the people with whom they shared a faith. Of course, that hasn't happened. I guess we could still be hopeful.

Why do you all care so much?

[Myria]

It seems rather biased to me to say that we can have America's Army and (the original) Counter-Strike but they can't make their own games that put them in a good light instead of us. If you don't like what they're "saying" in the game, don't play it.

Besides, I'd rather them kill American soldiers and presidents in a video game than in real life.

Melissa