10 Most Infamous WWE Ruthless Aggression Era Controversies
7. THAT Muhammad Hassan Angle
By the summer of 2005, all "We're just trying to mirror society" pretence had been abandoned. The Muhammad Hassan character was a terrorist, and if that was not clear enough, WWE booked an angle that was revoltingly similar to the vile, very real video nasties of kidnapped journalists being murdered at the hands of terrorist cells.
Ahead of the Great American Bash, the Undertaker defeated Hassan's manager Daivari, following which Hassan appeared by the stage. He fell to his knees in prayer and summoned five ski mask-clad men to the ring. They attacked 'Taker - on a show taped on July 4, which surely put a smile on the faces of those who had chosen to celebrate Independence Day with WWE - and then choked him out with piano wire.
This sparked a furore; the footage was scrubbed from the Sky Sports broadcast on July 8 after the London bombings terror attack resulted in 52 deaths. This, cynically, did not appear to have been carried out in the interests of decency, since the footage aired on UPN.
The network was decidedly not happy, ordering the character not to appear on the show the next week. Incredibly, in a promo shunted to dot com, Hassan again insisted that he wasn't a terrorist, and that people only assumed him to be one.
Nobody believed that, not least of which UPN, who applied pressure on WWE to abandon the character entirely.