Sunday, January 10, 2010
No more images of Mohammed as the art museum bows to radicalism: 'Jihad' jitters at Met
Is the Met afraid of Mohammed?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art quietly pulled images of the Prophet Mohammed from its Islamic collection and may not include them in a renovated exhibition area slated to open in 2011, The Post has learned.
The museum said the controversial images -- objected to by conservative Muslims who say their religion forbids images of their holy founder -- were "under review."
Critics say the Met has a history of dodging criticism and likely wants to escape the kind of outcry that Danish cartoons of Mohammed caused in 2006.
"This is typical of the Met -- trying to avoid any controversy," said a source with inside knowledge of the museum.
The Met currently has about 60 items from its 60,000-piece Islamic collection on temporary display in a corner of its vast second-floor Great Hall while larger galleries are renovated. But its three ancient renderings of Mohammed are not among them...
What lesson should other groups learn from the success of Violent Muslims in having others self censor to their wishes?
Killing freedom and cartoonists
By Christopher Caldwell
Via The Financial Times
Published: January 8 2010
Excerpt...
A state’s authority rests, as Max Weber said, on a monopoly of violence. In matters of free speech about religion in Denmark, the government monopoly on violence has been broken. There is another player in the market, declaring that cartoons perceived as anti-Islamic are punishable by death. A pattern of political violence against ordinary citizens is something western Europe has not experienced in more than half a century. Some people describe radical Islam as a kind of totalitarianism, or “Islamofascism”. That is an oversimplification. Even if he had contact with al-Qaeda, Mr Westergaard’s would-be assassin was probably working as an individual.
But this power to intimidate, though informal, is potentially decisive. It is the same power exercised by those who threaten journalists in Russia, those who kill policemen in Mexico, or the Ku Klux Klan in the US south of a century ago. Such acts make law. It is remarkable how few people they have to harm to do so. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, was not just mouthing a cliché when he described the attack on Mr Westergaard as “an attack on our open society”. Once a competing source of predictable violence emerges in an open society, government must do something to stop it.
The concepts of “minority” and “majority”, which have for decades provided well-meaning western governments with their main way of understanding justice, are of no help in such a task. Obviously, only a minority of Danish Muslims, and an even smaller minority of Danes as a whole, are violent radical Islamists. But even if that minority is infinitesimal, it is big enough. As long as it can make a credible threat to deal out death to those who disrespect Islam, it can give Islam a privileged status among Denmark’s religions.
For all the mayhem and controversy it has occasioned, publication of the Danish cartoons has turned out to be as revealing an exercise as Mr Rose said it would be. Artists talk about “testing the boundaries” of expression, but they are often fake or obsolete boundaries, things that people wanted passionately to keep hushed up, say, 50 years ago, but don’t really care much about now, such as sex.
But Mr Rose hit a real taboo, one backed up by violence. He thus revealed a terrible problem. Political violence is aimed at promoting a cause – in this case, special consideration for Islam. If a country cannot stop the violence directly, then the public will demand that it stop the violence indirectly, by thwarting the cause the violence serves. The rise of Geert Wilders’s party in the Netherlands, the referendum to ban minarets in Switzerland, the proposed ban on burkas in France – these are all desperate measures to declare that Islam is not the first religion of Europe. “This is a war,” the mainstream French weekly L’Express editorialised in the wake of the attempt on Mr Westergaard’s life. “To flee this conflict would be to buy tranquillity today at an exorbitant price in blood tomorrow.” It concluded: “Banning every kind of full-body cover [the burka] in our public spaces is a necessity.” This is not the non-sequitur it appears to be.
End Quote