Religious group slams ‘Muslim Massacre’

The Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and more national newspapers have printed the Ramadhan Foundation’s comments condemning Muslim Massacre yesterday – handing the game unprecedented publicity into the bargain.

The originally appeared on site SomethingAwful.com, but now has its own online home. Players control an ‘American Hero’ armed with a machine gun and rocket launcher.

After being parachuted into the Middle East, they are tasked with slaughtering all the Arabs that appear on screen.

Players progress to later levels where they can kill figures including Osama bin Laden, as well as figureheads of the Islam religion.

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation said:

“Encouraging children and young people in a game to kill Muslims is unacceptable, tasteless and deeply offensive,” he said.

“There is an increase in violence in this country and some of it comes from video games. When kids spend six hours a day on violent games they are more likely to go outside and commit violence.

“If it was the other way around, with a game featuring Muslims killing Israelis or Americans, there would be uproar and rightly so.

“We would urge ISPs to take action against sites like this.”

In an internet discussion of Muslim Massacre, the game's creator Eric Vaughn wrote:

'I think it's pretending to be legitimate commentary and I'm sure there will be lots of people who defend it on those grounds, but ultimately it's just a game where you blow the gently caress (slang for a common swear word) out of arabs,' he wrote.

'Anyone is free to believe whatever they won't [sic] though, because I don't even know how to interpret it myself anymore. The bottom line is that I enjoyed making it and it's fun to play.'

Later, he added: 'The Muslims represented in the game aren't meant to be based on actual Muslims.

'If I was to try and come up with a meaning for the game at this moment, it would probably be something along the lines of metaphorically destroying the stereotypical depiction of a Muslim.'