How Conservatives on Both Sides of the Pond Escalate Ill-Will and Precipitate Culture Wars (and Sometimes Real Wars)

Posted on July 17th, 2007 by Carlos

The good folks who brought the world the “World Without Zionism” conference in 2005 have now released a video game called (according to the AP’s crack translators) “Rescue the Nuke Scientist.” In the game, the evil Americans capture a pair of married nuclear scientists (?!), and it’s the job of the good guys (i.e. the Iranian military) to rescue them. Rescuing them, of course, means killing a lot of American and Israelis along the way. You can read the full AP article here.

But lest you think that these are simply the actions of Muslim extremists propagating hatred through whatever means they can, allow me to point your attention to a couple of key paragraphs in the article:

“This is our defense against the enemy’s cultural onslaught,” Mohammad Taqi Fakhrian, a leader of the student group, told reporters Monday….

This game follows the free “Assault on Iran” online series from New York-based Kuma Reality Games. That game simulates U.S. Special Forces destroying the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran.

Why exactly is Kuma Reality Games simulating attacks on Iranian sovereignty by creating a game like this? Because they want another war? I would link to Kuma Games and let you see for yourself the kind of conservative agenda they have going on there, but I just don’t want to encourage them any more by giving their web site more hits. Their banner, which prominently features both a real and an in-game image of Saddam Hussein, pretty much says it all. Yeah, Saddam Hussein. Remember him? All those storehouses of biological and chemical weapons he was stockpiling to use against American kittens and puppies? Good thing we got him.

This story illustrates perfectly to me something that’s been bothering me for a long time: it’s the radical conservatives on both sides of the war who are dictating the conversation in the post-9/11 world. The most dangerous clash anyone can engineer is the one created when the most conservative elements of two different ideologies collide. Think about it. What would radical liberals from each country do: free love each other to death? What would the moderates do? Oh, that’s right, act moderately: with restraint, respect and decorum. But it’s not the liberals nor the moderates who are doing the talking right now. It’s the people with the most xenophobic agendas advocating for the most extreme solution there is: war.

The end result is that we have on the American side Kuma creating video games which have players commiting acts of war against Iran. That, in turn, incites the most radically conservative student group in Iran to create a game where players win by killing Americans and Israelis. Want to know what’s wrong with the world? Take a look at the games we play — at the things we do “for fun” — and you’ll get more of an answer than you bargained for.