Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald evokes the great Cole Porter in reflecting on the dhimmi stance recently taken by the Venice Biennale:
Statues, like paintings of any living creature, are forbidden in Islam. If the Bamiyan Buddhas managed for centuries to survive in Islam, it was only because the technical wherewithal was lacking. Once the Taliban acquired enough Western-produced explosives, they could finish the job.
A little booklet, possibly the most pathetic guide to an art museum ever published, is the “Guide to the Kabul Museum.” I have a copy, published in 1964, long before the Taliban arrived on the scene to see Islamic justice done. There are a few dozen pages, a handful of photographs. It is clear that the ancient Greco-Buddhist civilization of Afghanistan, and of all other non-Islamic civilizations, were reduced mostly to rubble — the flying rubble that we see whenever we see pictures of Afghanistan.
For in Islam, the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic artifacts are of no interest, no valuable. They can be destroyed, they should be destroyed. The tens of thousands of Hindu temples destroyed by the Muslim invaders, a partial list of which was compiled by Sita Ram Goel, are perhaps the best-known example. But what of everything that might have gone into that Kabul Museum but never made it?
The greatest destruction of art works in human history is that wrought by Muslim conquerors on the non-Muslim lands and peoples they invaded, conquered, and subjugated.
What will happen in Europe if it is islamized? If there are already people removing statues, however banal those statues may be, from art expositions now, what will happen in 10 years? In 20 years? Already statues have been vandalized or destroyed by Muslims — in the Piazza del Popolo, and in a church in northern France (a statue of Mary and Jesus). Muslims have been recorded discussing their plans to destroy a celebrated fresco in Bologna that depicted Muhammad in Hell. What else is happening, and is being suppressed from us by worried European governments, whose elites, having been responsible for permitting millions of what are clearly enemy aliens, a classic fifth column, behind our own lines, cannot bring themselves to recognize the problem, and instead are intent on hiding the full truth from their own populations — populations that are getting fed up?
In France, one out of every three babies born is now a Muslim. In 20 years, one out of every three 20-year-olds will, therefore, be a Muslim. What is to be done? Anything? Nothing?
In 1946, the most advanced and tolerant government in Central or Eastern Europe, a model of right-thinking, the government of Czechoslovakia, issued the Benes Decree. By that decree, because of their actions in the recent war (taking the enemy’s side) 3 million ethnic Germans (many, but not all, had been supporters of Hitler and Deutschtum) were expelled from lands that had been populated by ethnic Germans for 600 years. No one in the Western world dropped a tear or uttered a protest. Everyone understood. Everyone still understands today, save for a handful of German revanshisty (as they used to be called in Krokodil cartoons).
When will the Western world begin to realize it faces a mortal threat, small now but growing, and growing precisely to the extent that its Muslim population grows, learns the local languages, learns to present itself with all the cunning suavity of Tariq Ramadan, to ensure the constant confusion and fear that is easy to spread, apparently, among Infidels — all too willing to deny the evidence of their senses.
The Venice Biennale has long been one of those places that prides itself on its daring, its refusal to kowtow to the narrow-mindedness of entirely imaginary bourgeois prejudices. It has long been the butt of jokes for the kind of stuff it has sometimes put on display.
The most famous mocking of the Biennale occurs not in some ArtForum magazine, or one of those that Catherine M. (of “La vie sexuelle de…” fame) ran or runs in Paris, but rather on the silver screen. In “Le vacanze intelligenti” Alberto Sordi, playing a Roman pizza-maker, and his plump wife are sent off by their presumptuous three children (who pay for the trip) on a kind of cultural tour, when all they really want is to lie around and stuff themselves (as, in the end, they do). Among the most memorable scenes is one at the Biennale, where the fat wife slumps, exhausted, in a chair. As she sleeps, a guide comes by with his docile herd of visitors to the exhibition, and they stand solemnly in front of the dead-to-the-world wife, as he discusses her as one more of the art objects to be found.
So here we are, sans Sordi, sans wife, sans anything humorous at all. And the Biennale, with all those people — the same kind who take the contents of the Saatchi collection, or that of Eli Broad, seriously — who are delighted to mock, oh — the Americans, or the benighted Vatican, or some such obvious target. But the mere hint that “Muslims” might be offended — ah, those “tolerant” and “peaceful” Muslims we hear so much about — and this piece must be quickly taken away.
Let no one, ever again, in the so-called Art World start prating about “transgressive” art. They are complete cowards when it comes to any real transgression, the real misbehavior — in this case, the greatest transgression or misbehavior in the Western world is to do anything, anything, that might offend Muslims.
Well, let’s misbehave.