Diary of Fools Holiday Gift Guide

Merton Sussex, Personal Shopper to the Stars

As a full-service blog, we here at the Diary pride ourselves on helping you, the reader, find news you can use, in order to assist you in sailing through life with slightly less effort than a greased burrito sails through Reno Gruber's digestive system.

To that end: Just In case you were looking for the perfect Christmas gift for the little blossoming terrorist or genocidal maniac in your life, the Diary is here to help! These Lego-style fighting figures have recently hit the market in the UK. Really. No, I'm not making this up. Granted, they're not "official" Lego® toys per se...But they ARE customized by an UK Lego dealer known as BrickArms. And sure, there'd probably be an import tax involved with getting them here, but doesn't the tiny animal-torturing bastard in your life deserve the very best?

First up, the Islamic fundamentalist "freedom fighter" comes with a rocket launcher, assault rifle and grenades. He has a removable kaffiyeh-style head scarf which, when taken off, reveals a smirk, and some swarthy stubble. How delightful! Now your children can enjoy fantastic flights of playtime fancy, pretending to detonate their toys in miniature open-air marketplaces, staging insurgent raids into coalition base camps, and even driving miniature truck bombs right up to the gates of fully-assembled playsets! For added realism, your kids can then smash them into the tiny brick-bits Legos are in their base form in order to simulate rubble! Isn't imagination wonderful?

(Note to terrorists: THIS IS, IN NO WAY, SHAPE OR FORM, INTENDED TO BE A DEPICTION OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD. It's just your average, garden-variety, crowd-murdering, 72-virgin-coveting, overzealously deluded religious jihadist lunatic. Osama bin Lego, if you will. So please don't blow up the Diary HQ.)

Mohammed Shaffiq, of Muslim organization The Ramadhan Foundation, branded the toy “absolutely disgusting.” He said: “It is glorifying terrorism — the makers should be ashamed. We should be coming together to unite against terrorism, but how is that possible when children are playing with toys like this?”

He then went on to express zero detectable level of outrage or condemnation over actual, real-life Islamic terrorist attacks that have killed millions, but I'm sure that's coming from their community any day, now.

Next up, we've got a delightfully adorable depiction of a tiny Schutzstaffel Major, complete with Ruger sidearm, leather visor cap and tiny "SS" lapel pins. Personally, I've always felt that the entire Third Reich was vastly under-represented in the toy world, especially in toys intended for younger children. Hey, If we don't send the message that Nazis were only misunderstood ne'er-do-wells in really sharp uniforms, kids will have to take their cues from movies...And then they'll think the entire party was made up of pasty-faced dummkopfs in ill-fitting olive drab who ran around hollering unintelligibly gutteral gibberish at each other while waiting to get shot by heroic, square-jawed G.I.'s. We really can't afford to let bigotry creep into play time, can we? Kids have to be TAUGHT to hate, y'know.

Rounding out the collection, we have this charming little Stoßtruppen (Stormtrooper), who seems impossibly happy to see you. With his cruel little smirk, authentic M1935-style Heer helmet and matching grenade launchers, he's a delightful plaything kids can use to re-create the classic "Shock Troop" tactics used by these impossibly brutal WWII-era Axis special forces. Among them: Decimating Allied lines by bombarding them with special poison-gas artillery shells designed to neutralize their integrity, then infiltrating quickly and efficiently in the ensuing confusion to strike hard at pre-identified weak points in order to slaughter any remaining pockets of resistance without mercy. Who says learning can't be fun?

Hey, don't judge. Remember: the history books are written by the winners, and each side always thinks THEY'RE fighting on the path of righteousness while the war is actually happening. Sure, upon being shown these cute little suckers, Edie Friedman, director of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, said: “These distasteful toys are something we could all well do without, especially when there is so much tension around,” but what the hell does she know?

In case you're interested in picking these up for yourself, be sure to visit the BrickArms website. They run about £9.50 each (currently, about fourteen bucks), and are apparently in pretty high demand. To wit: at the moment, the BrickArms.com ordering system is deactivated due to "overwhelming order volume." But, don't worry. I'm sure it'll be back up soon. Until then, you can certainly feel free to peruse their selection of other tiny objects and personnel of death and terror, including precious little Kalashnikov assault rifles, cute-as-a-button M4 Carbines, and even a classic Louisville Slugger, which I'm inclined to believe isn't a part of this collection for the purposes of letting your li'l homunculi hit homeruns over their world's tiny fences. Unless by "homeruns" you mean "the patellae of welshing Mob borrowers."

Happy shopping!