US Rep calls on Valve to ban Pro-Palestinian game

Sure, that’s what we should do, listen to someone who is viewed as an ally to the cryptocurrency industry and says he has “revulsion” for a non-violent movement that he describes as “extremism.” So last week I spoke about the pro-Palestinian game Fursan al Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. A game that is in poor taste, actively tries to provoke, and exclusively feeds off of news stories like this and social media bait such as the known right-wing and anti-LGBT propagator “Libs of TikTok.” A social media account that was outraged by a game that describes itself as “The Palestinian Max Payne on Steroids. Most BASED game of all times!!! [sic]” and took that seriously.

I’m already tired of having to talk about the Israel and Palestine conflict because it is a minefield that has either side shouting at you. Nonetheless, following the UK’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit calling (CTIRU) on Steam to block the game’s sale in the UK, it seems a US representative has decided to jump on a bandwagon and stoke the flames of something that would have died out in a week. According to Polygon (next, you’ll get me to talk about Kotaku), US Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) a man who sounds like he’s out of a Stephen King novel, has called on Valve to ban Fursan al Aqsa.

In the letter sent to Polygon as well as Valve, Torres says of Nidal Nijm’s game which has been out since 2022, “[Fursan al Aqsa] glorifies barbaric violence and terror against Jews.” Saying that by hosting the game on its digital storefront, Valve is complicit in “normalizing the most monstrous forms of anti[-]semitic violence and terror – like beheadings, suicide bombings, and the war crimes of October 7th.”

Torres noted in 2019, speaking on the idea that Israel is a thing particularly Republican colleagues use to paint the Democrats in bad light, he said, “The notion that you cannot be both progressive and pro-Israel is a vicious lie because I am the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” Aside from his rejection of the left-wing Democratic group “The Squad” and previously mentioned comments on nonviolent movements, Torres is also one of twenty-two house Dems who voted to censure elected representative Rashida Tlaib in November of 2023. I am simply trying to give context to his stance here, I’m not saying you should feel one way or the other.

Nidal Nijm repeated the points he’s previously made, comparing and contrasting the likes of Call of Duty when it comes to being about shooting people. However, I would like to add about Torres’ comment “the war crimes of October 7th,” there is a small game (you can guess which one) that recreates the events of a US-led portion of a war in 2003, a short battle that saw the US use a heavily restricted material under international law, called White Phosphorus munitions, which is de facto a war crime. No politician is speaking up about that, but I guess like Call of Duty, you are shooting brown people.

For once Polygon makes a good point (I know) that before the post by “Libs of Tiktok,” Fursan al-Aqsa had seen very few concurrent players. Following the social media post that led to the CTIRU banning it in the UK, the game jumped to 16 concurrent players followed by 25 earlier this month. At the end of the day, letting something that is actively trying to be in poor taste (or provocative) suffocate in silence is the best thing you can do to see it never see success. For a country that actively talks about freedom of speech a lot, the idea of banning a piece of entertainment (no matter how inflammatory or in poor taste) comes off rather odd.

As I’ve said before, games like Call of Duty (not necessarily the series itself) which we’ve all played and enjoyed are not arty games. I find it difficult to say Call of Duty is art, but it does employ an artistic medium to execute its ultimate goal.

By that very metric, Fursan al Aqsa is the same, no matter how poor it looks in comparison, with me previously calling it a step above or around asset flip games. You can disagree with the game all you want, and you can say what you like about it (I certainly have), but allowing any government to define what is and isn’t art or entertainment is a dangerous line to cross. I’ll say it again, the game is in poor taste and is never going to get the nuances of the 70-year conflict across, but neither are other war games that feature tasteless glorification in the name of Hooah/Hough or Oorah.

At the time of writing, Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is still available on Steam in the US. However, has been removed from the UK version of Steam, as well as being unavailable in Germany and Australia due to lacking an age rating.