How dare they?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The makers of combat video games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States, officials said on Thursday.

Tech-savvy militants from al Qaeda and other groups have modified video war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, Defense Department official and contractors told Congress.

I mean, the only proper way for these games to be played is the way they're written with Muslims as the bad guys, right?

I find myself from time to time, amidst the jingoism, thinking back to that awful Chuck Norris movie Delta Force. How would you feel if in every movie that comes to town, your people are the enemy and the white Americans are the heroes?

Maybe I should ask the Native Americans.

(To really appreciate the irony of this article, go take a look at America's Army, an online game which just happens to have been developed, sponsored, hosted, marketed, and made available for free by US Army recruiting.)

Also: Reading the article again, ""Battlefield 2" ordinarily shows U.S. troops engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition."

Funny how they might not want to play that scenario. It just sounds like they changed the skins and inserted a different start video. It's not a nefarious plot of technological genius. I do that with some of my games.