Valve removes pro-Palestinian shooter from Steam after complaint from UK Counter-Terrorism police, dev says 'we see clearly the double standards'

pcgamer.com:

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