Wednesday, October 15, 2008

• Fisher Price Doll Plays Subliminal Islamic Message?

   by mr pine 

  Before reading any of the rest of this entry, listen to this clip, and see if you hear anything.

  *recording from Mattel's website

  This is apparently the new face of Islamic proselytizing...
  

  I remember back in the 80's (yes, I'm that old), there was an uproar about "back-masking" where people thought that if you played certain recordings backward, you could hear hidden messages.  Some Christians were saying that they could be subliminal messages used to encourage satanism.  There was even legislation brought up to discourage recording companies from doing it.

  I remember a friend of mine modified a record player so that we could play vinyl records backward, and we spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon ruining his father's rock record collection listening for "hidden" messages... (which makes me wonder if the whole controversy wasn't made up by the recording industry to increase replacement sales of their records).

  So what happens when you release a 10 year-old's imagination onto many hours of garbled sound?  Well, we heard all kinds of things ranging from "eat your tomatoes" to "Ba Ba Ba Ba Barabbas" to "Satan is my king and master of my thoughts and well-being" (you really had to strain to hear that last one).  Okay, maybe that's not exactly what we heard, but we came up with some doosies.

  Now there's this controversy about a doll (above) that apparently says, "Islam is the light," and some people are up in arms about it.  They're claiming that the doll could imprint this message into the minds of impressionable kids and are demanding that they be taken off store shelves.

  My first thought when I heard the story... "what kind of stupid company would put something in there like that if they wanted to maximize their sales to non-Muslim Americans?"  My next thought was, "if someone put it in there as a joke, what kind of quality control does this company have?"  But I never thought that this was some part of an Islamic conspiracy to turn 3-7 year-old girls into Muslims.  At worst, I thought that maybe it was something a company did because some "diversity" wahoo in their company mandated it.

  But then I heard the controversial clip for myself (from snopes.com)...

  (It's toward the end)

  C'mon.  That's a stretch.  The only reason I heard it was because I was thinking it.

  Try this... I think it actually says, "God is the Light"  Play it again thinking that.

  The point is that I think you hear what you want to hear for the most part, and this whole "controversy" is just adding to the stereotype that Christians are on a hair-trigger to be offended by anything and everything that is non-Christian.  I think this is more damaging to the Christian message than anything a talking toy does or does not say.

  To me it wouldn't matter if the audio actually changed to a deep baritone voice saying, "Kneel before Beelzebub, and while you're at it, I need a new diaper."  As long as they allow for returns, if Mattel thinks something like that can sell in the U.S., more power to them.  I mean, I would probably advise my Christian friends to think whether or not they want their child to have it, but I wouldn't call for a ban on them.  They have the right to sell them in the same way that I have a right not to buy them.  It's voting with your money (which I think Christians should be more aware of in other areas than this).

  Well, I guess we won't know for sure unless in ten years we see a spike in 13-17 year-old girls (and in-touch-with-their-nurturing-side boys) converting over to Islam en masse.  But I doubt it will happen.

  Did you hear the subliminal message?

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