Jihadist violence cows "fearless" artists into silence: "The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat"

Shocka!
You mean that threatening people actually works?!

I guess Catholic priests, Christian Fundamentalists and other Christian denominations should learn from Muslims.

Oh wait. Christian theology doesn't condone violence. I forgot that. My mistake.

Would have thought it just as likely for this 'cross-dressing potter' to have his throat slit for being a cross-dressing potter as for (so-called) art attacking islamism.

Just loathsome cowards then.
Yes, keep on telling us about your 'edgy' and 'provocative' shit disguised as art; when the chance came for you to do something, you ran away.

Art, like democracy (and civilization in general)is incompatible with Islamania. It's that simple.

Islam will scare the world's cross dressers into becoming crescent dressers.

I just can't figure out if that's really a bad thing.............

Forget art. Internet satire is where it's happening, baby. Nobody does it better:

http://archief.retecool.com/comments.php?id=13539_0_1_30_C9

Is it okay to loathe the British, now? I mean, it is so easy to ridicule the Dutch, weenies that they are, and the French, well, that goes without sayin, n'est-ce pas? But the British? The once, mighty, manliest of manly countries, now so pussified, that the mind just reels.

At least he's being honest about it.

If you can't attack Islam for fear of being killed, then society has become Islamic by default.

They're afraid.... of Islam.

Isn't there some kind of word for that...?

Do these people HEAR themselves speak? Life in a welfare state is about actions without implications. In this case, one's words disconnected from implications. If one can be morally sick this is a grand example.

'Avant garde' and 'cutting edge' art is meaningless. It is over twenty years ago that an artist in New York mutilated himself filmed it and exhibited the 'performance' as art. Twenty years ago there was no further to go and yet they go on and on and on.

Keep up your good work Robert Spencer, the deluded left and artsy types are finally starting to understand what many Muslims are about. ie Oppression and violence, in that name of allah.

There is however one area of art that might find expression without much danger. That is graffiti art. Hundreds of stencil images of the Modoggie image could be painted in an evening without much danger.

Theo Van Gogh and Lars Vilks are artists. Phony self-described 'iconoclasts' like gaghan, clooney, and this grayson perry are running jokes. They should try doing something useful in life, like being a janitor or fry cook, instead of pretending to be artists. They don't even have the imagination to percieve how ridiculous they look.

Grayson Perry, the cross-dressing potter, Turner Prize winner and former Times columnist, said that he had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.

Highly provocative, ha! All it's provoked so far is thousands of pounds in prize money. But it doesn't seem to have provoked any threats, so it seems that it's not really very provocative. By his own admission, he's afraid to be really provocative. It's like the difference between provoking your pet hamster in its cage, and provoking a mother grizzly bear in a wilderness area in Idaho.

This means that Grayson Perry is free to vent his frustration on other religious groups.

I agree, Perry and all the rest are two-bit useless cowards.

Good point, Grobari. This "artist" may still have a target on his/her back.

At least this development, this admission, now allows assorted magazines -- ArtForum, Art in America, and so on -- to discuss what might be termed "Censorship and Islam" or "Fear As A Weapon In Jihad" or "Free Speech and Islam" or even "Islam and Art" and make a number of points.

What are those points? That those who make the threats, or carry out the threats, are supported, and not denounced, by every organized (and unorganized) group of Muslims. That such threats are considered perfectly legitimate. That there is no free speech in Islam, and the willingness to threaten mayhem and murder against all those who, Infidel or ex-Muslim, dare to mock Islam, comes from the Muslim view of Islam, and of Muhammad, being beyond all mockery, and specifically, comes from the behavior of Muhammad in welcoming the murder of Asma bint Marwan, a woman who dared to mock, in verse, Muhammad, and was killed for her prosodic pains. That, by the way -- is this yet in ArtForum, or Art in America -- that Muhammad would not enter a house that had dogs and statues in it, that the consequent lack of sculpture in Islam is bad enough, but the destruction of vast amounts of Christian and Hindu and Buddhist statuary, over 1350 years, and right up to the present (see those Bamiyan Buddhas, see that statuary even now being blown up in Pakistan by what are primly described as "militants"), will not suddenly stop when Muslims, through demographic conquest, take over large swaths or even whole countries, in Western Europe, and that the same hostility, in Islam, that can be observed toward statues also applies to paintings of living creatures. This is something everyone interested in art -- that is, art aside from Grammar-of--Ornament curlicues which is all, aside from mosque architecture, mostly that of mosques, and calligraphy, mostly devoted to Qur'anic passages -- that Islamic art offered for 1350 art-stifling, art-destroying years.

Make sure this message is well and horrifyingly understood by all those who study art or "love art" or "make art" or at least allow themselves to believe that they do so.

This is the kind of thing they will not hear from those ranting right-wing commentators, who think they are so good at alerting people to what they continue to call "radical Islam" or "militant" Islam because they can't think straight -- and are afraid as well - to call it, simply and truthfully, Islam. But once they hear it, once they understand it, they will have a hard time thinking of Islam the same away again.

And the same needs to be done in "Nature" and "The Lancet" (doubtful under its present management) and "Science" and "Scientific American" and every other journal devoted not to technology but to the enterprise of free and skeptical inquiry, which Islam not only suppresses, but in inculcates, in its brainwashed adherents, the habit of mental submission.

At least he's honest. Just like the reason Private Eye gave when not publishing the mohammed cartoons. Every other newspaper cravenly didn't publish, not out of fear (no sireee), but out of high standards and no wish to gratuitiously offend anyone.

Greetings:

"Fazli Ali, 66, the former estates manager there told the London police: “Hamza and his cronies threatened me several times. I was head of security but they even threatened to kill me. Ours was a peaceful place but he wanted to turn it into a political arena.”

I copied this paragraph from a previous poster's link. What struck me was not that Hamza was a militant Islamic extortionist but that the targeted mosque in Britain had a "head of security."

Keep your powder dry and your hatchet as clean as a whistle.

Is the papal fatwa on Andre Serrano still in force?

This is very true but not new as we can witness with all the orientalist artists, but there is one who was not afraid.

Alfred Dehodencq who painted The execution of a Jewess

http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2007/05/cover-art-is-reproduction-of-alfred.html

Fear did not stop Goya

Nor did it stop

http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2007/10/art-in-face-of-terror.html

In the next link there was no problem with the first two paintings

But the third,you can guess the reaction

http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2006/07/art-critics.html

Grayson should reconsider. Think of all the publicity he could generate if he did choose to insult Islam. After all, wearing a dress isn't much of a gimmick thesse days and normally there are only about 15 people who pay any attention to this Brit-Art rubbish.

Now I understand why the artists go after Christians, because the worse thing to expect is simply peaceful protests and letter writing.

bigcatgirl13106 - "Now I understand why the artists go after Christians, because the worse thing to expect is simply peaceful protests and letter writing".

Maybe you could you view that as a compliment.

zaltys

"After all, wearing a dress isn't much of a gimmick these days"

Have you seen the dresses this guy wears!!!!? Style is 1940's, for a 12 year old with short lace flared skirt and a long wig - and he's about 50 with five o'clock shadow.

Chickensh*ts. But dung Madonna, cross in urine, etc, etc is OK. Cowards.

That this situation would arise, was obvious from the time when Salman Rushdie came under a death sentence from Muslims. At that moment, freedom of expression became history, in the very cradle of its birth. It just has taken some time for this to become apparent.

The situation is now much worse. Freedom for artists and writers, to criticise social norms, is no more, threatened as they are by "hate thought" legislation from the NuLabour government and the EU, and the pervasive fear of Muslims amongst us.

Coupled with the fact that ordinary people in the UK are now subject to security measures more draconian then in WWII, and the ever present fear of being blown part, surely the time has come to ask ourselves, if the immigration of unassimilable people who have an active hostility to the culture and traditions of the UK, has been such a good thing.

Now here is some really gear art, and would you believe it, it is islamic and fatwa worthy

Enjoy

This picture may be offensive

http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2007/11/busting-islamic-mythes.html

"At least he's being honest about it.

If you can't attack Islam for fear of being killed, then society has become Islamic by default. "

I agree.

Some of the comments above are disgusting. Some seem to imply that artists should censor themselves from commenting on christianity too and that cross-dressers should break their habit. I would have thought that we should all be supporting freedom of speech (and dressing) here, not raving against artists.

And remember: Jesus was killed for blasphemy. Any system that denies people the right to explore new ideas is a bad system.

Jesus was killed because the Romans didn't want any competition. Blasphemy, indeed.

Jesus was killed because the Romans didn't want any competition. Blasphemy, indeed.

Did they really

That these "fearless" artist types are scared mum by the jihaddis has been obvious for years.

Most of the "artists" out there like nothing better than annoying people, particularly people who are strong on ANY traditional convictions. And who better fits that description than the absurd jihaddis with their medieval enthusiasms?

What's surprising is that one of them admits to being scared into silence.

I honestly never expected that.