Any language will contain phrases that are inadvertently echoed in other languages, or could be detected in the nonsense-patter of a comic (say, Sid Caesar, pretending to speak French or German or Italian in one of those old "Show of Shows" skits from the 1950s). Even what is meant to be background gobbledygook, even static, if listened to by someone, may in fact seem to be uttering a phrase to which he takes offense.

This is the classic behavior of schizophrenics, the kind who "hear" themselves being talked about -- talked about on every radio and television show, their names being slyly conveyed, and only the schizophrenic himself can actually understand that it is he they are talking about, and "they" are doing it -- don't you see? can't you hear it? -- all day long, and day in, day out.

Muslims who take offense, and apparently many do, at what they imagine they are hearing -- a deliberate echo or repeat of some Qur'anic verse -- are akin to those schizophrenics. They are, essentially, mad, or would be seen as such, were they individuals in the Western world. Should we regard their craziness, and eagerness to find what is a figment of their aural imagination, as anything more than a collective version of what the individual schizophrenic suffers from, and should Sony, or any other company or country, change its plans, give in, in an attempt to be solicitious of the sensitivities of those who in their own "civilization" may not be, but in ours most definitely are, simply mad?

Won't we, by collaborating in this madness, start to go slightly off the rails ourselves? A regrettable decision, and perhaps more than a few Infidels will make their displeasure known, at this idiotic yielding to an idiotic complaint.

Posted by: Hugh at October 18, 2008 12:48 PM

I'm sure some of the 8-bit masterpieces from days of yore will still outshine this soundtrack. Sometimes less is more.

Posted by: MarisolJW at October 18, 2008 1:02 PM

Listen closely, and see if you can detect phrases from the Arabic of the Qur’an in this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaemNKql-TI

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxBbXZuAe0A

or this:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LgQl9WQwGak

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhMq8_s64Y4&feature=user

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLfgT2CFC4Y

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHYC6SYI-9Q

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJtOWKmvHxM

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EihQHmFcdQ

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2VSR_4xFp0

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMXhiTgSzIE

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFOPMRNCoSo

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjXYwDNhMG8&feature=related

I’m sure a good Muslim by now is brimming with fury, for god knows how many “phrases from the Qur’an” he’s detected. And that’s just a non-devil's dozen, in eight different languages. But there are thousands of languages, and there are millions of songs. Just think how many words are being spoken every day, in those thousands of languages, that include a phrase that sounds exactly like something in the Qur’an. Think of what is being hummed in Evenki, or clicked in Xhosa, and the tiniest bits of the Qur'an that might, just might, be inadvertently pronounced.

My god, where does it end for those listening, listening, listening, for the phrase, in an Infidel song, that dares to sound like a sound-bite from the Qur'an?

Posted by: Hugh at October 18, 2008 1:53 PM

I am a gamer, and if some of what I have heard is to be believed, this is not the first game that had trouble of this sort.

Another game, Assassin's Creed, made by the company Ubisoft, ran into some difficulties at some point, though the nature of the difficulties was never explained fully. What is known was that there were threats, possibly of legal action, that resulted in the canceling of a tie-in novel that may have been titled 'The Hidden Imam'. The author of the novel was told that all mention of religion had to be removed, and since the game that the novel was supposed to elaborate on took place during the Crusades, this was impossible.

I also believe that there may have been changes made to the game, since when the game finally came out it was not quite what I had come to expect based on information Ubisoft released in the months before publishing the game. For some strange reason, it was clear that the Crusaders, and not just the Crusaders, but Christians in general, were causing a lot of trouble, but who there was no mention of who they were fighting, or why. In the end the game outright said that Christianity was founded on deception, yet anything in the game that might have been interpreted as relating to Islam was treated with the utmost care.

Two of my friends actually told me that without my knowledge of the Crusades, and history in general, the game would have been incomprehensible to them. This was a game that was many years in the making and was supposed to have an epic feeling story. Looking back over the information on the game, as the making of it progressed, the story line and characterization became increasingly vague until the end result was nothing compared to the initial promise.

Sorry to be all conspiracy theorist like that, but things got very odd on gaming sites when that game was discussed. Now, hearing of another game having difficulties, I am starting to think that there is a lot going on in the gaming industry that gamers, such as myself, are kept in the dark about.

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 2:25 PM

"Assassin's Creed...made by Ubisoft"
-- from a posting above

Judging by the comments just above, this bears looking into. Who created the game? And who owns, or funds, Ubisoft, are just two of the obvious questions to ask.

Posted by: Hugh at October 18, 2008 2:28 PM

Creeping sharia? More like KUDZU sharia. Islamic kudzu is an apt metaphor - an alien import 'experts' brought to America with good intentions that grows aggressively and rapidly chokes out everything else.

Posted by: poetcomic1 at October 18, 2008 2:43 PM

I wish I had more information on the whole Assassin's Creed situation, but at the moment I cannot even find an online copy of the script of the game, which I very much would have liked to post some portions of.

Unlike normal where they give away too much information about the game so that all the big plot twists are common knowledge by the time the game comes out, with Assassin's Creed things were kept very quiet. I never even knew that the novelization had been canceled until I looked on amazon.com to see when it was coming out and found that there was no longer any information on the book.

What I know about Ubisoft is that it is based in France, but has facilities (developers, publishing companies and the like) practically all over the world, with the largest development studio located in Montreal Canada. Assassin's Creed came out of their Montreal studio.

I also found a statement on a website belonging to an individual who was supposed to write the novelization of the game:

"I was asked about “Assassin’s Creed” and I’ve got bad news: the book isn’t going to be published. No, there was nothing wrong with it: Marco Palmieri at Pocket Books was perfectly happy with it. But it seems that the video company got visits from descendants of the ORIGINAL ASSASSINS, members of the Ismaeli sect currently led by the Agha Khan in India. They…suggested that Ubisoft, the game company, show more respect for their ancestors, and Ubisoft went all pitter-patter. Next thing we knew, they wanted to remove all religious references from the book. I guess the Crusades were about shoe size or something. Then they hired an expert to vet the book. Curious that they hadn’t thought about that before, eh? And finally, they wanted to send the book to the Agha Khan’s people for their suggestions. By this time, Marco was thoroughly disenchanted. The book was turning into puree of bat shit, and I was no longer amused. The whole three-book project died."

What bugs me the most about this is that Ubisoft never officially told gamers like me that they were doing this.

Oh, and I messed up on what the novel was to be called. The title was going to be "The Invisible Imam".

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 3:39 PM

It is not obvious to me that it's actually the Muslims that SONY are apologizing to. Maybe it's to people like you and I that don't want to be indoctrinated when we play games?

Posted by: Vagn Henning at October 18, 2008 4:11 PM

Oh, no they are not apologizing to gamers. Most gamers honestly do not care what the words are and just want to play the game.

I have looked into this Little Big Planet on a few gaming sites. Word on those sites is that one Muslim got the game a bit early, complained and SONY pulled the game. Also, if what I have heard on gaming sites, the person who wrote the song is a Muslim and that the lyrics in question translated to "Every soul shall have the taste of death
- All that is on earth will perish".

So there may be more to this that it would at first seem.

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 5:13 PM

"My god, where does it end for those listening, listening, listening, for the phrase, in an Infidel song, that dares to sound like a sound-bite from the Qur'an?"

I hear that if you play "I Am The Walrus" backwards you can hear "Mohammed is dead"...

Posted by: DenverRodeo at October 18, 2008 5:19 PM

If one wishes to help Muslims root out unacceptable instances of blasphemy, one should go to Muslim websites, post a YouTube song (the more obscure the language in which the song is sung, the better) and sweetly explain that you think -- you're not sure but you think -- that there are some echoes of Sura 9, or Sura 12, or Sura 23 -- and you'd like fellow Muslims to listen to it, five or ten or five hundred times, to see if they can confirm your suspicion.

Repeat, with a thousand other songs, or speeches, or anything at all, ad libitum. What a splendid way for Muslims to spend their time. Indeed, why should not a billion Muslims, or at least tens of millions, spend their time listening to Infidel songs, hearing Infidel speeches, in order to catch on the wing a telling phrase that surely, surely, is an "exact" duplication of a Qur'anic phrase, and then all hell can break lose, which is always the point or end-point. At the very least, we might thereby extract from the world's Muslims the same number of utterly wasted man-hours that they, by their bombs and plots to bomb planes in midair, have caused the entire Infidel world, as our waiting-time for every flight has gone up, as a consequence, by an hour or two -- and that means billions of Infidel man-hours wasted. A little tit for tat is called for.

Use your imagination.

Posted by: Hugh at October 18, 2008 5:32 PM

The song in question can be downloaded from iTunes, as it is freely available and was sung by a devout Muslim. Although it has been out for a while, it had never been criticized before.

the song is "Tapha Niang" from the 2006 album Boulevard de l'Independance by Grammy award-winning Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté (and it's available on iTunes, both Zune and Amazon marketplaces, and we imagine just about any place popular world music is sold). You can even listen to the track in its entirety on Toumani's MySpace page.

Sony's game "Resistance" included a firefight in a historical Church. Despite protests, the game shipped on time. . .go figure

Posted by: heroyalwhyness at October 18, 2008 8:45 PM

Jean Sablon, never heard of him but. . .ooooh la la! Such a treat - merci beaucoup, Hugh.

Posted by: heroyalwhyness at October 18, 2008 9:26 PM

As a gamer and a Christian, I have to say that I have no problem with with firefight you mention if the game 'Resistance: Fall of Man'. Maybe SONY did not treat the matter with proper respect, but not many game companies are big on respect.

A little background on Resistance for all you non-gamers, Resistance is an alternate history of sorts. I am not going to go into details since I know most of you are not gamers, but basically in Resistance things turned out differently after World War One and an Earth is attacked by aliens (sounds stupid when I put it this way, but whatever). The game tries to give gamers who care about such things (and I am one of those gamers) a strong feeling of where and when this game is taking place. A gun battle in an almost recognizable place, especially what should be a safe and peaceful place, is an effort to drive home the bleak and horrific setting of the game.

Then again I may be a bit biased when it comes to Resistance, since I thought some of the advertisements they put out for it were very impressive in terms of creating a feeling of unease and the idea behind the game is fairly interesting, even if I do not personally care for games of that style (it is a first-person shooter).

Really though, when it comes down to it, the reason that no one cares if games offend people like me is that we don't blow stuff up and kill people when we get mad. We simply sit down and tell our friends not to support/buy whatever it is that got us mad. Game designers are brave against those they know will do them no harm, but are quick to give in at the first sign of danger.

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 9:29 PM

And wow, this is starting to make me feel quite silly. I mean this whole Little Big Planet has everything backwards for me. I go to gaming sites and read about stealth jihad and Islam attacking freedom of speech, then I come here and talk about video games.

On the bright side, I am seeing a fair number of gamers showing appropriately directed outrage. A few more incidents like this and you may see gamers looking into what Islam is really like.

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 9:34 PM

"Jean Sablon, never heard of him but. . .ooooh la la! Such a treat..."

Okay, here's another, by the same singer (you can find this song, by the way, already posted at the still-to-be-added-to "Jihad Watch Interludes" -- click the link just under Oriana Fallaci's picture) -- just for you. I'm told that I'm a dead ringer for Jean Sablon, by the way, and I certainly have his voice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfNwV5f2V0I

Posted by: Hugh at October 18, 2008 9:41 PM

I've got a copy of this game early. Limited kuffar edition.

It is actually in arabic in the song, so it's not just muslims hearing random noises and deciding it's lines from the qur'an... but still, it's all so ridiculous, Sony is cowardly, I really doubt this would've been a big deal anyway.

Posted by: MattMacD at October 18, 2008 11:03 PM

Good for you MattMacD, I am considering getting it once the price drops a bit. On many of the gaming sites I frequent people are royally ticked off about what happened.

I think this may end up educating gamers about Islam and how contradictory it can be. After all, the guy who wrote the song in question is a Muslim, so clearly the song does not offend all Muslims. It is also causing Muslims to show up on gaming discussion sites and expose gamers to what they are really like. For some reason many of the Muslims on gaming forums tend to get banned quite quickly, or make just one or two posts and never show up again.

Posted by: BUG at October 18, 2008 11:37 PM

You know, Hugh is absolutely correct with his assertion:

Any language will contain phrases that are inadvertently echoed in other languages, or could be detected in the nonsense-patter of a comic (say, Sid Caesar, pretending to speak French or German or Italian in one of those old "Show of Shows" skits from the 1950s). Even what is meant to be background gobbledygook, even static, if listened to by someone, may in fact seem to be uttering a phrase to which he takes offense.

By a funny coincidence, I pulled out my London recording of Les Miserable and was thoroughly annoying my neighbors with the beautiful voice of Sarah Brightman, a.k.a Cosette, when, Lo! and Behold! I heard this in the background:

أشهد أن لا إله إلاَّ الله و أشهد أن محمد رسول الله

Please, someone alert Sir Andrew!

(okay, bad attempt at humor, I know.)

But honestly, when the zombies find something wrong this, then we're really in trouble:

The Lords Prayer

Posted by: boneshack at October 18, 2008 11:52 PM

Here is another link to a story about the release delay of LittleBigPlanet:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/10/17/islamic-content-in-games-a-brief-recap

A couple of other islam/gaming controversies are also mentioned.

Posted by: del at October 19, 2008 2:05 AM

Oh but there is nothing to be upset about. It is only things like this that may crash leftist-islamist love affair, i.e. the things that interfere with their personal enjoyments.

Posted by: AlexD at October 19, 2008 3:41 AM

Hugh:
I hope you're happy. I had a million things to do tonight, and thanks to you I've spent the last five hours totally tranfixed by the sublime music on the links you've provided us.
Isn't it tragic that moslems are so single-minded and constipated that they'll never be able to appreciate this music's emotion and freedom?

Posted by: suprkufrB at October 19, 2008 5:15 AM

Christmas is coming - make sure Matel is off your Christmas list... Hard cash is one thing they DO understand.

Posted by: Stefcho at October 19, 2008 6:15 AM

Than computer game that would have allow you as than
character to beat and rape female as the only action was cancled by the game company when than nation wide framous lawyer wrote to then that they might be held legality responce it than teenager play that game and then went out than beat and rape than female. So the company chech with other lawyer and DA and game disp(they buy games from company and then sell them to the public) they didnot want to buy the game as they might be held liablie legality
also. Other lawyer raise many valid legal issue with just than game and many DA said that they might take legal action against the company that company decide
to kill the game idear. It would have very reelist
3-d graphic in it. I as than muslim have no touble with the song at all as it mean we all will die one day anyway.

Posted by: DefenderofIslam at October 19, 2008 7:02 AM

Defender, the lawyer you mention may have been famous, but for all the wrong reasons. I believe the lawyer you are talking about is Jack Thompson who owes part of his fame to threatening to take legal action against two men for donating money to a charity. I believe this man has been disbarred.

Posted by: BUG at October 19, 2008 11:05 AM

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand I think Sony is being cowardly and this is much ado about nothing. If you're offended by this, don't buy it. On the other hand, I wouldn't want any product with quotations from the Book of the Pedophile Prophet. So I guess it's win-win?

Posted by: Infiel at October 19, 2008 10:42 PM

No it wasnot Jack Thomson. It was around 1998 when some testplayer told than middle level manger that it was than not mortal correct game. When they found out it will be release in one month time. They went to the new media with than copy of the game an show it to new people. CNN new carry it. This lawyer was than criminal defense lawyer. The game also allow you to murber the woman than rape the dead body. Many states have fenoy laws dealing with have sex with dead bodies. When the Comany president read the letter he ask to review the game. He talk with other lawyer include copyright lawyer and DA. Then he kill
the game an kept the copyright so than other companies cannot make than other one like it. I hope no one got sick. The middle level manger have to find than other job.

Posted by: DefenderofIslam at October 19, 2008 11:30 PM

I am rather interested in what you are saying now Defender. Can you give any specifics about which company or game, or who the lawyer was?

Posted by: BUG at October 19, 2008 11:43 PM

So I guess it's win-win?

Posted by: Infiel at October 19, 2008 10:42 PM

Yep! This is like Ahmediyas professing Da'wa, while they themselves are not accepted as Muslims. There is no pleasing Islam. Let Dhimmi liberals suffer the wrath of Islam, like in this case.
No sympathy for Dhimmis at Sony!

Posted by: Alert at October 19, 2008 11:43 PM

I cannot rememder all detail, if the game was ever release it would have brought down the game company big time. They put off the release date while revein the game. The reason the middle level manger was fired this game was his idear the computer programmer and other who worked on it didnot like the idear of than game like this. No other manger knew about this game. The president of the company is than computer gamer player than a game like this is than sick game that was laid to rest. Thomson was into stoping all computer games total which lead to his disbaring.

Posted by: DefenderofIslam at October 20, 2008 6:20 AM

Yes, I am happy that you listened to those dozen songs put up roughly in order of linguistic difficulty (for a native speaker of English), from Sophie Tucker's "I Know That My Baby Is Cheatin' On Me" all the way to Zhou Xuan's "Shanghai Nights." You can find more songs, and some dance or vaudeville routines, and even bits from old movies, at"Jihad Watch Interludes" -- click on the link just under the picture of Oriana Fallaci on the upper left of this web-site. You can also google "A Musical Interlude" and "Hugh Fitzgerald" and find others, only a few of which are included in the "Jihad Watch Interludes."

Posted by: Hugh at October 20, 2008 12:48 PM