Muslims are offended by Katy Perry’s latest music video “Dark Horse,” claiming the video promotes blasphemy and is insulting to Islam.

Muslims are upset because at one point in the video a man wearing a pendant with the word ‘Allah’ written in Arabic is zapped by Perry, and disintegrates. In the light hearted pop video Perry plays a campy Egyptian queen who rejects suitors by zapping them with lightning and turning them into sand.

For some Muslims, the silly pop video is deeply offensive to their fragile religious sensibilities. A petition at change.org demanding YouTube remove the video has already received over 48,000 signatures.

The petition hopes to win major support to show “that people from different walks of life, different religions and from different parts of the world, agree that the video promotes blasphemy, using the name of God in an irrelevant and distasteful manner would be considered inappropriate by any religion.”

Although the number of signatures on the petition continues to grow, they are dwarfed by the video’s YouTube numbers. So far “Dark Horse,” which was posted to YouTube on Thursday, has received more than 31 million views.

The attempt to censor any artistic expression is always a morally dubious activity. The fact that Muslims would attempt to censor Perry’s video is a ridiculous and juvenile response to what is quite frankly a harmless pop video. To think these imbeciles believe their imaginary god would take offence to a Katy Perry video of all things staggers the imagination. It would be a shame if YouTube caved to pressure coming from some silly religious extremists, and removed the video.

Dark Horse is Perry’s third single off her new album “Prism” and is currently sitting at number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 list.



The supposed “blasphemy,” the episode with the Allah pendant, can be seen at 1:15 of the video.