By Sean Stroud
LONDON, April 1 — Everyone was still buzzing this week after the Bishop of Rochester’s blistering comments on Saturday during Evensong service in which he lashed out at violent video games that have become popular among the youth of Pakistani neighborhoods in England.
Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali is the only Pakistani-born bishop serving in England—he has dual citizenship—and so his opinions are often sought on issues involving Muslim/Christian dialogue.
It turns out that the most popular of the “blasphemous” games being sold at market stalls in Manchester and Leeds is a “first-person shooter” game with an Arabic name that translates roughly as “Blood on the Walls” or “Street Bleeding.” The bishop was specifically upset over one of the “missions” in the game, in which the player is ordered by a stern-faced mentor to use a number of medieval implements to torture and kill Jesus. If the player turns down the mission, he is instructed instead to actually behead Jesus with a scimitar, after which a grinning character in a tunic holds up the head in triumph and shouts “Allah-hu Akbar!,” or “God is great!”
It wasn’t clear from Nazir-Ali’s brief presentation where the game is manufactured, but the packaging featured crude images of soldiers that look similar to terrorist recruiting literature that circulates in Pakistan’s Northwestern tribal areas, especially Peshawar.
Nazir-Ali called on British authorities to find all the copies of “Street Bleeding” that are currently in circulation and have them destroyed, but civil liberties experts said that sort of roundup is highly unlikely, and Muslim clerics were quick to call the bishop’s remarks racist.
“We were just treated to a full week of various depictions of the killing of Jesus, much of it paid for out of public monies,” said Samir Futayn al-Sabend of the Ludlow Road Mosque in Birmingham, “so I hardly think a few lads doing the same thing in the privacy of their flats should be cause for alarm.”
Other defenders of the game included designers who work at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, the company most famous for the “Grand Theft Auto” series. “Every game like this is a bit of a put on,” said Gareth Kinsley, who worked on “GTA: Vice City,” “and although the programming of ‘Blood on the Walls’ is fairly primitive, there’s an obvious exaggeration in the way the various Mohammedan warriors decapitate their victims. It’s not just Christ who gets beheaded. Christ is actually just one step above your average NPC (non-playable character), on a par with several other characters who are simply ‘in the way,’ so to speak. All of the focus is on the torturing of the savior, but most people wouldn’t choose that option anyway. No one talks about the stoning-of-adulteresses side quest. In my opinion that’s quite nasty stuff, but you don’t get the same outrage because the victims are female.”
Supporting the comments of the bishop, and elaborating further, was Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has been under heavy security since releasing his film Fitna last week but issued a statement through a spokesman: “This is exactly the sort of anti-Christian, anti-European and anti-civilization outrage that is systematically destroying our culture. Somewhere the next Mohammed Bouyeri is playing ‘Bleeding Walls’ (sic).”
Mohammed Bouyeri is the Islamic fanatic who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.
After the bishop’s comments, several reporters tried to purchase the game in Manchester and other British cities with large concentrations of Pakistani Muslims, but no one could come up with a copy. The issue even came up in Parliament on Monday, when Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg said the bishop’s speech was “a gross caricature of reality” and that the idea of dismembering Jesus or any other historical figure was perfectly within the bounds of protected speech.
The Muslim Council of Britain, after initially refusing comment, eventually said through a news release that, “Once again, this bishop is scaremongering among people who have no contact with ordinary Muslims. We have reviewed the offending video game and, while we decry the depiction of the mutilation of a religious figure revered by many people in the world, we find it no more offensive than the mutilation of the same religious figure in the film Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson. We also decry the section of the game in which Jews are burned with hot pokers, which evokes images of the Holocaust and has no place in our society, although we would note that none of the Jews seem to be historically revered figures, as in the Christ portion of the video game.”