Controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks
(Wikipedia Commons)WATCH OUT, AIR PASSENGERS! Islamic terrorists have hit upon a new and ingenious weapon: human heads. Their own, in fact, and the hotter the better. This impacts not only everyone’s security, but our press freedom as well.
Last night at the University of Uppsala, 63-year-old Swedish artist Lars Vilks turned up to deliver a PowerPoint presentation about a new art project of his regarding religion and press freedom. Witnesses described the atmosphere in the packed lecture hall as “extremely aggressive.” Expecting trouble, a dozen police officers stood at attention nearby, standard procedure for the controversial artist’s appearances ever since he published a caricature of the prophet Mohammed in the form of a dog in the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda in August of 2007. The officers painstakingly checked the briefcases and knapsacks of all 260 spectators. When Vilks finally entered the hall, about twenty men and women started shouting at him. “Swine!” one man called out. Another yelled: “You are a failed artist!” Vilks proceeded to take photos of the demonstrators with his cell phone, provoking them even further.
Around ten minutes into the presentation, which was broadcast live on a local TV station (you can watch the entire lecture and the resulting chaos HERE in Swedish), a man in the front row jumped up and charged at Vilks, butting him with his head and hurling him against the wall. Three more sprang up and charged at Vilks as well. Others rose to their feet, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Police quickly subdued the attackers and hustled Vilks away to safety. The artist, whose glasses were crushed in the incident, told the Swedish press “I wasn’t injured, but pretty shaken up.” The police arrested three men in their twenties. The crowd finally broke up about a quarter of an hour later amid cries of "swine!," "idiot!," "Mohammed! Mohammed!" and "You must respect us!"
What was Vilks’s presentation about? It concerned pushing back the boundaries of freedom of expression and featured images of Holocaust denier David Irving, the infamous "Piss Christ" photo (which outraged fundamentalist Christians when it was first displayed in 1987), a graphic Robert Mapplethorpe picture, and sexual images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The images that sent the attackers into action were from a short Iranian film depicting two gay men with Mohammed masks engaging in sexual intercourse. “That is pornography!” some of the Muslim men present cried out at the sight. “It insults the Prophet Mohammed! You can’t show that here!”
According to journalist Thomas Anderberg from the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, who was present, two Muslim men in their forties directed the operation from the rear. It took several minutes to quiet the room down again. Part of the problem was the PowerPoint presentation itself, which the police were unable to stop. The two gay “Mohammeds” continued to have sex on the screen while the police scurried around wielding clubs and pepper spray.
Vilks’s enemies seem to be closing in on him. “My lecture in Jönköping was halted before I could even deliver it,” he complained to the press afterwards, “and now this happens. I was stopped with physical violence, and I think it is problematical when the mob gets to decide.”
Violence and threats of violence against artists have been commonplace in Scandinavia ever since the right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of twelve Mohammed caricatures in 2005, provoking violent protests across the globe. On New Year’s Day of this year, Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his granddaughter survived an axe attack on their home by fleeing to a specially designed panic room. "In 2007," the BBC reported, "a group linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq offered a $100,000 reward for killing Mr Vilks, and a 50% bonus if he was 'slaughtered like a lamb' by having his throat cut." Earlier this year American authorities arrested one Colleen LaRose, a Muslim convert calling herself "Jihad Jane," and accused her of recruiting assassins to kill Vilks. The Irish police arrested four men and three women in March of this year for plotting to do the artist in. He had already received several murder threats, including two from Somalia in January, and has been living under police protection ever since he published his "Roundabout Dog" cartoon in September 2007, after it had been turned down by an art exhibition.
No comments:
Post a Comment