LEGOS R SRS BSNS
You seen this? About how some dipshits in the UK are all pissed at this BrickArms place for selling an Osama bin Laden Lego man? It’s pretty classic.
A few points to consider:
1) I went and looked at the model in question, and it doesn’t look a damn bit like Osama bin Laden. And the "Mr. White" name isn’t screaming BIN LADEN at me, either. So I’m pretty sure this is a generic Arab terrorist figure, and not specifically Osama bin Laden.
2) The BrickArms front page says the online ordering system is currently down due to "overwhelming order volume." So I’m not convinced all the ranting and raving in the world is actually getting you fools what you think it’s getting you.
3) The Lego headquarters is in Denmark. Why is this complaint coming from the UK affiliate? Is it because no other country’s Lego branch thought it was such a big damn deal? Or is it so they could get that quote from Britain’s "religious leaders" in there?
4) The Ramadhan Foundation may indeed qualify as "religious leaders" in the UK for all I know, but I’d think anything with sufficient impact to have earned the label would have been noticed by Wikipedia by now, wouldn’t you?
5) While the anonymous "Lego spokesman" and the apparently-somewhat-more-testicularly-endowed Mohammed Shaffiq may be of the opinion that the best approach to fighting terrorism is to take it really, really seriously, a lot of people the world over think that maybe we’ve brooded enough to satisfy you tight-asses and now we can get back to fighting terrorism our way: by having a laugh at its expense.
6) While the article definitely states that Lego "blasted" BrickArms for creating the terrorist Lego man, I find it interesting that they fail to quote the anonymous Lego spokesman actually, you know, doing any blasting. Every word the spokesman says in that article is about how BrickArms is not licenced or approved by Lego — in other words, it’s boilerplate "we didn’t do it" fluff, and not any type of blasting. I can’t help but infer from this — and from the fact that the best example of a religious leader UPI could come up with was a guy from a religious organisation that doesn’t exactly strike me as poised to overpower the C of E anytime soon — that maybe Mr. Shaffiq is actually the only person complaining, that he elected to do his complaining in the direction of UPI, and that they fluffed it up to make it sound like the entire body of religious groups in the UK is horribly offended by a Lego man with a turban. Oh, and also Lego.
What do you suppose are the chances?
