Monday, July 03, 2006

The war on Israel via video games

I must at least mention this one:

The winner of last year's Electronic Sports World Cup has refused to play this year because he was drawn to play against an Israeli gamer. Badr Hakeem, the 21-year-old champ from Saudi Arabia, cited current events for his reasoning.

"Due to our stand against the Israeli aggression and occupation of Palestine," he said, "I raised my voice and said there was no way I was going to play this guy."

The comments on the post get progressively nasty toward Israel as they go. I have learned not to argue with these people in open forums. Update: That was quick. The comments have now all been deleted. A sample of the vitriol can be found at the source of the above article, here. Note that if these comments also get deleted, we can go to that article's source, which is an arab paper.

Yehuda

4 comments:

MaksimSmelchak said...

Hi Yehuda,

Sad, very sad...

*** Why can't we just all get together and play a few harmless games? ***

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

P.S.
Working on ideas for a meme game...

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Eh. I don't fault him for it, actually. It is an acceptable form of protest, at least.

Yehuda

MaksimSmelchak said...

Hi Yehuda,

*** Do you really think that it is an acceptable form of protest? ***

I mean... I certainly prefer it to genocide belts and the us of false ambulances and Pallywood, but really?

I get tired of seeing Jewish and Israeli athletes shafted simply for being born in the "wrong" corner of the world. FIFA has been pretty nuts lately about giving Israel a bad time.

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

Yehuda Berlinger said...

Well, I agree with the sentiments, obviously. As you say it is at least more acceptable than blowing up civilians.

But, yes, it is acceptable, so long as it is directed at a country, not as a race. Refusing to play with Jews wouldn't be acceptable, refusing to play with Israelis (including Israeli arabs) would be.

In the late sixties, Jews in America interrupted cultural events from the Soviet Union, protesting that America shouldn't maintain any sort of ties with a country that holds prisoners of conscience. It wasn't "nice", but it was effective, and I think reasonable.

So I can't fully condemn boycotting Israelis at cultural events, even though the reasons for doing so are based on anti-semitic reasoning, and I think that they are stupid and wrong.

Yehuda