Toytown Terrorist

Lego is great. Everyone loves Lego. You can make absolutely anything out of it and the little figures come in all sorts of designs to suit... including a jihadist follower of Osama Bin Laden:

A RANGE of Lego-style fighting figures — including an al-Qaeda terrorist — has been slammed by religious leaders.
The masked follower of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden comes with a rocket launcher, assault rifle and grenades.

Mohammed Shaffiq, of Muslim organisation The Ramadhan Foundation, branded the toy “absolutely disgusting”.

He said: “It is glorifying terrorism — the makers should be ashamed.

Except it's not. It is just a generic bandit, called 'Mr White':

While his other siblings shun the day, Mr. White basks in the sunlight. Boldly attacking when the sun is high, each toss of his 8 fragmentation grenades erupts in a miniature supernova of destruction!

The manufacturers also make the good guys too, although they don't warrant a mention. Presumably because it's ok to glorify some kinds of violence but not others.
Their range consists of this bandit chap, some American army figures and your more traditional baddies, Nazis (which also gets a mention in the paper).

Fox News ran with the 'story' and gave the ower of the company, BrickArms, the right of reply:

We do not sell an ‘Osama bin Laden’ miniature figure. We sell a generic bad guy minifigure with a Ninja scarf head wrap, the same minifigure that we have been selling for over a year now, with no associated ‘outrage.’

It does not represent anything; it is simply a bandit — a bad guy for the good guys to battle. Attempt to assign it a ‘personality’ only serves to create controversy that does not exist.

Quite.

I also wonder if those pictures on the Suns' website are actually copyright of the Sun, they look everso similar to the ones on BrickArms site...