Idiot of the week: “Sigvatr”

Not to be outdone by the loving Christian heathen-genocide fantasy that is the Left Behind video game, some right-wing asshat has provided other right-wing asshats with the wherewithal to engage in a Muslim genocide fantasy in their own homes.

A computer game in which players control an American soldier on a mission to “wipe out the Muslim race” has been condemned as tasteless and offensive by British Muslim groups.

The game called Muslim Massacre, which is available as a free download over the internet, allows players to take control of an “American Hero” whose goal is to “ensure that no Muslim man or woman is left alive.”

After being parachuted into the Middle East armed with a machine gun and rocket launcher, the aim is to kill as many Arabs as possible – some dressed as terrorists, others apparently civilians.

Players progress through various levels where they take on Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and finally Allah. (The Times)

Either you love murdering brown people, or you’re with the terrorists.

UPDATE: The game is probably a Poe—that much is intimated by the subtitle “The Game of Modern Religious Genocide.” That doesn’t make it any less idiotic, nor does it make critics of the game viable targets of the inevitable “PC” shut-up, unless it has become unfashionably “PC” to oppose the slaughter of people because of their religious affiliation. (Substitute “Jew” for “Muslim” in the title of the game and the point is made.) This kind of satire was much better executed in films like Series 7 and Team America, and unintentionally in the aforementioned Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

The jury is still out on whether the individual responsible for Muslim Massacre is as right-wing as I’ve suggested. In January of this year he was interviewed by IndieGames.com in relation to a couple of games he is developing: Link-Dead and Beserker:

For me, making Berserker is a bit of a political thing because the country I live in (Australia) doesn’t have an R18+ rating for video games. Any video game that would qualify for such a rating is simply banned immediately. I want to challenge the Australian censorship lobby by releasing an explicitly violent and sexual game for free on the internet because they won’t be able to do anything about it.

In the country in which Sigvatr lives, much of the popularity of the former government throughout the 2000s can be attributed to its successful cultivation of the kind of gut-driven anti-Muslim sentiment that a game like Muslim Massacre appeals to. That government also happened to be a key proponent of the very censorship of electronic media which Sigvatr opposes and seeks to subvert.

Sadly, in the country in which Sigvatr lives we don’t enjoy the same kind of freedom of expression as is enshrined in documents such as the US Bill of Rights (the degree to which the political Right in that country sees fit to ignore that particular document notwithstanding), and his game is currently being investigated by Queensland police. That, in my view, is far more outrageous than the game itself.