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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.
" 'Our games are not propaganda,' Kasmiya says. 'Our games are a reflection of our history -- past or present."
This coming from the guys whose history includes the "fact" that the Holocaust did not happen.
Where were you when the voynix came?
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.
Someone needs to explain to these people (and Fox News, while you're at it) that trying to cancel out a raving lunatic by adding a raving lunatic from the "other side" does not "balance out", you just have two raving lunatics.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Just in case the article writer (and the media) hadn't noticed, there are plenty of Muslims in the west too. Come to that most of the East is full of Chinese people, who on the whole are about as Muslim as a a beer flavour sausage wrapped in bacon.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"'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.'"
Here is one example of how they do this: "Armed with a rifle, a shotgun or a grenade launcher, players navigate various missions that include "Jihad Growing Up," "Americans' Hell" and "Bush Hunted Like a Rat." In the final stage, you fight Bush.". So tell me, does this defy stereotypes at all? How is it a "good light" to make games in which Muslims are presented as violent commandos... the only difference being that they are the "first person" in the shooter and not the armed enemies for once? Or the other game in which "The goal is to kill"?
The game creators seem to think that it is a positive portrayal of Muslims to change them from being terrorists who are shot at to terrorists who are shooting.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Our games are not propaganda"
Right up there with the other great lies.
"I am not a crook!"
"I did not have sex with that woman."
"I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
If ya have to say "Our games are not propaganda" odds are it IS propaganda. From the description it certainly sounds like a recruiting tool for the terrorists.
Yes, ye unwashed hordes of pro PLO slashdot kids, the terrorists. Islamic terrorists. Doesn't make s damned bit of difference if they are 'Palestinian' Islamic terrorists from either Fatah or Hamas, Lebanese Hezbolah Islamic terrorists, straight up Iranian Islamic terrorists, AlQaeda Islamic terrorists, etc. Those who use terror against civilian populations must be hunted down and exterminated, period full stop. And since the end of IRA[1] terrorism, just about all terrorism these days is Islamic terrorism.
[1] Which ended with a few years of the end of the Cold War. But those who said most of it was Soviet agitataion to destabilise the West were tinfoil hat types seeing a Red under every bed. And of course we should also forget who originally taught Arafat his trade in death and who he served.
And back on topic, we of course know a pro terrorist game would never be banned. Nay, it will probably be widely available. "Kill all the eeevil joooos!" is free speech and any attempt to censor it would just not be permitted. Now imagine the politically correct howls if a 'kill all the diaper heads' game were created. Seems some censorship is more permissable than others.
Democrat delenda est
"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.
Where were you when the voynix came?
'Ethically Killed Tofurkey'
Do you ethnically cleanse the curds during the cooking process?
Where were you when the voynix came?
That's a great list of, to put very lightly, embarassments of US involvement in Iraq. What's it got to do with the current discussion? The point was that a positive portrayal of Muslims in media doesn't start with Bush as an end-boss. I missed the game from the West where you're challenged to build the highest "butt pyramid".
Having said that... your other off-topic points...
Good idea. However, very Western. Such behavior would simply fan the flames of the fundimentalists who would see this kind of thing as further proof of Western ideals eroding their culture. Which in turn becomes part of the reason to fight the west. And the next piece of recruitment propoganda.
Agreed. Even if we're not required to follow the Geneva Convention in these cases... it would be the right thing to do. A pity that proper behavior is overshadowed by cases of savagery. We might as well hand over propoganda to the fundimentalists.
Again - the right thing to do. Whether it really gets the US any milage or not would be debatable. The US is involved with a lot of humanitarian efforts. Yet it constantly gets shot at. Kind deeds only go so far.
The USSR crumbled not because of propoganda but because of economics. Yeah - I agree that freedom is a good thing. We should try to convince that part of the world this. But this is too easily wrapped up in the "West destroys our culture" meme.
That would be very cool. I would completely agree with this. And... in this day and age where survival may be linked to oil... one could justify the expense of removing ourselves from oil dependancy.
Thanks, Dr. Godwin. The last one brings us back on topic, to a nation where a majority of the people insist as an important goal the extermination of another nation. By coincidence, the reason for the wanted extermination is because the targettted people happen to be Jewish.
Of course wanting to slaughter your enemies because they have been beating the ever living shit out of you for decades now has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You forget the fact that this mostly one-way rabid hatred of Jewish people goes back to before Israel, before the Zionist movement.
Please provide a respectable citation for your claim that, "mostly one-way rabid hatred of Jewish people goes back to before Israel."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No can do, I'm getting married soon.
Really, is it just me, or does this sound like a Leisure Suit Larry title?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
The problem is that the Palestinians don't accept that.
Do you have sources for this? It's a rhetorical question, of course, because how could you have reliable sources for something you just made up? The fact is, Palestinians (regardless of their party) have always wanted back that which was taken from them. It's neither an unreasonable nor extreme request.
There is a saying that goes "to the victor go the spoils." And that is exactly what happened in Palestine after WWII. The Jews transformed American and British sympathy after the Holocaust into a greedy land grab. They didn't ask for part of the land that is holy to three different major religions. They didn't ask for sanctuary in a land that is holy to three different major religions. No, they took it all and displaced the native people who had been living there.
No matter how hard you try, you can't unmake history and injustice with rhetoric. In case the history of the last century escapes you, there once was a sovereign nation called Palestine. Then the U.N. passed a resolution, and Palestine was magically turned into Israel. And all the people who once lived there were herded up and sent to slums and refugee camps, where they have remained for three generations and counting--their land, their homes, and their property all stolen from them, their situation grim.
And you have the balls to label these people "extremists"?
Funny, I thought those two things had huge amounts of overlap.
And heat vision.
Oh come now, arguing that it was "just a territory" is to argue semantics in lieu of the point.
These people organized themselves into a loose governmental structure long before the British got involved. They had names for their towns, for their roads. They thrived--please don't try to morally justify expelling them based on their lack of flag.
You can point to how the area has been passed around like a hooker at the Republican National Convention, but that doesn't extinguish the right the Palestinians had to the land, and more importantly to their culture and way of life--both of which have been dramatically changed now that the last three generations of Palestinians have grown up in refugee camps in Israel, Lebanon, and other places. In the camps, they are afforded no political rights (can't become citizens, can't own land, etc.) and very few human rights. It's an untenable situation, and one that the U.N., the U.S., and Israel must answer for.
>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.
29 mpg. YMMV.
I guess you haven't studied the history of Islam or the Arab world. You might start with the Wikipedia history of anti-semitism. You might then check out the website of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and Africa. Here is piece by a contemorary Muslim bigot that cites the Qur'an and the attitude of Mohammed himself.
Actually, not having citizenship in a certain country because one doesn't belong to the dominant ethnicity there is fairly common. The U.S. is rare in giving citizenship to everyone born there. The Palestinians aren't in any more an unfair situation than, say, Koreans in Japan.
You have it backwards- the Muslim world was kinder to the Jews than the Christian world. In the Ottoman empire, we had to pay taxes. In the Christian countries, we got tortured (Inquistition), kicked out (Diaspora), or just repeatedly slaughtered (pogroms). This continued into this century. Its only been in the past 50-75 years that the situation has reversed.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You might start with the Wikipedia history of anti-semitism.
On that page I see three or four references to muslim rulers imposing special sanctions on jews. I see about 10x that number of references to christians persecuting jews and often in far worse ways. If you belive that is sufficient proof that muslim's have "rabid hatred of Jewish people goes back to before Israel" then you must see christain society as 10x worse. I do not see christain society as expectionally anti-semitic. The linked wikipedia article titled "Islam and Anti-semitism" is disputed and thus not even a respectable source even by wikipedia standards, so I didn't see the point in reading something biased enough to trip over even wikipedia's low standards.
You might then check out the website of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and Africa.
On inspection this site seems to be an advocacy site and thus clearly not a respectable source.
Here is piece by a contemorary Muslim bigot that cites the Qur'an and the attitude of Mohammed himself.
I think you understand that a bigot's viewpoints on history are going to be self-serving and not particularly representative. That's the equivalent of citing Matthew Hale's intrepretaion of the christain bible as proof that christains have a rabid hatred of jewish people.
Surely you must have some rational and unbiased sources for the facts about the muslim religion. Why are you trying to distract me with irrational and slanted sources?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
You should have added a link to the Middle East Media Research Institute so people could watch the videos or read the transcripts of the fine material broadcast in various Middle Eastern countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, etc.:
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
... when the main social ill of Palestinian youth is their predilection for virtual violence.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
As a matter of interest, do you also believe that European galleries and museums should give the families of holocaust victims the brush-off with regard to the ownership of art looted by the Nazis, on the basis that "it belonged to their grandfathers, that's all"?
Hollywood, the US games industry and unfortunately, even your head of state, have been using the "raghead==evil" formula for years now and suddenly when the positions are reversed, you feel agrieved? Give me a break. You do EXACTLY the same things. Utter hypocracy.
Excuse me
n g-based-on-some-dieties-word)
A) A person can be anti-isreal (or dare I say, anti-zionist) without being anti-semitic (i happen to be anti-any-movement-that-claims-the-right-to-anythi
B) Even for a jew hater, anti-semetic is the wrong term as alot of jews arn't semitic anymore, and on top of that, arabs and armenians are indeed semitic (yes, I know this is a semantics argument)
C) Believing a different story of events does not equal hating a people. Reasonable people can disagree on detail and usually both sides of most arguments tend to be wrong in some sense. I have no doubt that both the holocaust rememberers inflate the figures to make it seem worst (or selectivly ignore the other groups who were victems) just as frequently as the deniers conflate the figures to make it seem less bad.
If you really want to help your cause, maybe you should try answering points with facts and trying to engage in useful debate, rather than just attaching a slur (yes anti-semite is as much a slur as kike) to a person and berating them for it.
Just a thought.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"