Yes, the video games are to blame for the radicalization of young Muslim boys all over the world, and not radicalized communities, extremist clerics, or violent propaganda masked as religious truths. Huh? That’s what you would believe if you were to take Tom Friedman’s column from late July at face value. When I read the article I remember being more than a bit skeptical, after all we go on and on that video games don’t affect American children, yet we are somehow to believe that Islamic teenagers are dumber then the rest of us. I always assumed the biology was the same.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the resources to challenge these claims or find out more about the games, because there’s not much info. That is until Slate’s Chris Sullentrop decided to take the games for a test drive. What he found wasn’t surprising to me at all.

In Ummah Defense I, the game cited by the Wall Street Journal and Friedman, you fly a spaceship and shoot down a fleet of attacking robots. The vertically scrolling game play resembles a less sophisticated 1941 crossed with Galaga. Ummah Defense II flashes forward to 2214 and places you in the role of a man who looks like Robocop. Your task: Destroy yet another robot army, this one made up of a legion of rolling, turtlelike machines.

Yeah, I’m really seeing the violence and calls to a jihadist overthrow of the West here. As Freidman wrote:

One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers.”

Wow, it’ be nice if he even got the games right. I wish we knew where Friedman got his information, oh yes that’s right the WSJ story that said the men involved in the 7/7 bombing frequented a bookstore that was the sole distributor of IslamGames the company who made the games he points out. This kind of inference drawing is disgusting speculation and supports the misguided points of the PATRIOT Act. They went to a bookstore, they also probably frequented a coffee shop where they discussed how much they hate the West, surely it’s something in the coffee.

Now of course, we could reasonably infer that the enemies in these games are representations of the West, but as the article points out:

It is more likely a proxy for the secular world as a whole. Some Christian groups produce their own games to compete with what they see as debased mainstream products. Maze of Destiny, with its religious lessons, seems to fit in this tradition. It’s certainly a world apart from games that let you shoot Israeli soldiers.

Ideas and words do matter in this struggle against violent extremism, absolutely, but let’s once and a while step back from the situation and look at it critically. People jump to conclusions when you question the wisdom of Freidman’s article, but sometimes we need to remember that this thing isn’t as simple as video games and books, it comes from much deeper in society, from radical elements, from dangerous rhetoric from authoritative figures, not Ummah Defense I.