Valve has removed a game from Steam in the UK in response to a request from the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, a body that polices extreme content on the internet (thanks, 404). The game in question is called Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, was released in 2022, and casts the player as a member of the Hamas group attacking Israeli targets.
While the game has been available for a while, and would obviously cause offence to some anyway, this latest development seems spurred by a new update at the start of October (the “Operation al-Aqsa Flood Update”) which features recreations of some aspects of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The trailer for this update includes text such as “I want an explosive belt to blow up myself over the Zionists!” alongside game footage of Hamas fighters shooting Israeli Defense Force soldiers, as well as the execution of an Israeli hostage.
The game’s developer, Nidal Nijm, makes the contradictory claim that players cannot carry out the latter act in-game and are also penalised for doing so.
Valve contacted Nijam on October 22 to inform him the game had been removed from sale. “We’ve received a request from authorities in the UK to block the game and have applied such country restrictions,” reads the text of the email.
Asked for the reason, Valve’s response reads: “We were contacted by the Counter Terrorism Command of the United Kingdom, specifically the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU). As with any authority for a region that oversees and governs what content can be made available, we have to comply with their requests.” The game remains available in other regions and Valve does generally tend towards a free-for-all approach unless games are breaking a given region’s laws (this approach has been met with criticism from certain interest groups, including most recently the ADL).
The UK’s CTIRU has been in operation since 2010 and basically polices extremist material online. Members of the public can refer content to the unit, and it claims to have removed hundreds of thousands of pieces of extremist material from the internet. “We do not comment on specific content or any communication we may have with specific platforms or providers,” said a CTIRU spokesperson.
Fursan al-Aqsa has also been blocked in Germany and Australia, which its developer says is because he can’t afford to apply for an age rating. “The region lock of my game in the UK was clearly due to political reasons (they are accusing my game of being ‘terrorist’ propaganda)”, Nijm told 404.
“I do not blame Valve nor Steam, the blame is on the UK Government and Authorities that are pissed off by a videogame,” Nijm said. “On their flawed logic, the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 should be banned as well. As you play as an American Soldier and go to Iraq to kill Iraqi people. What I can say is that we see clearly the double standards.”
Fursan al-Aqsa is not exactly a Call of Duty competitor. It’s a low-budget shooter made with generic assets that dots a few Israeli flags around the place. The idea of what it represents, of course, is far more incendiary than the shovelware reality. Nijm also doesn’t do the game any favours by admitting that aspects such as the execution of an Israeli soldier in the trailer were made “just to ‘trigger’ Zionists and to piss them off”, before comparing it to the infamous No Russian mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (where the player takes part in a terrorist attack at a Russian airport, including the shooting of civilians).
There is of course a valid wider point about how the vast majority of shooters are dominated by a western world view, and for decades now players have been enjoying virtual recreations of real-world wars, particularly Middle Eastern conflicts. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that you can probably play through a game version of most major conflicts the US Army has been involved in, and mostly you’re going to be playing as the heroic Americans taking on vaguely-defined Arabic cannon fodder.
But Fursan al-Aqsa does seem to cross the line into bad taste by actively celebrating an incident that, whatever your perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict, is unquestionably a horrific terrorist attack where the victims were mainly civilians. Hamas is still holding on to hostages from this incident, and of course the war between Israel and Palestine is ongoing. Recreating this specific incident and aligning it as some act of heroism… let’s just say I can see why the UK authorities didn’t like the idea.