When the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections in Egypt, Islamist extremists covered the statues in Alexandria, calling them the product of “a corrupt and infidel civilization.”
When ISIS conquered the Iraqi city of Mosul, it banned statues as “idolatry” and destroyed many of them.
Today, to witness the great purge of female forms, there is no longer any need to fly to the Tehran of the ayatollahs, the Kabul of the Taliban, the Damascus of the former Al-Qaeda throat-cutters, or the Gaza of Hamas.
Just turn on our evening news, where Europe blurs classical female statues – just as they did in Rome’s Capitoline Museums during the visit of Iranian President Rouhani.
France 2′s 8 PM news, Tuesday, May 19. A statue of two lovers is blurred. In the background is the work Amour in Issy-les-Moulineaux, created by Louis Cosme Demaille, a famous 19th-century sculptor (photo).
To which theocratic prescription has the French “public service” submitted?
As if it were pornography, two bodies reaching for each other – polished marble, classical erotic tension – suddenly become obscene. Are we paying symbolic jizya with our pixels?
It is the same theocratic prescription that triggered chaos at the Jacques-Cartier middle school in Issou, outside Paris, where teachers went on strike after receiving threats from Muslim students. During a lesson, a teacher showed first-year middle school students a 17th-century painting, Diana and Actaeon by Giuseppe Cesari, which depicts the passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Actaeon surprises Diana and her nymphs bathing unclothed at a spring.
The bronze copy of the Medici Venus, from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, once belonged to Nazi Hermann Göring. It was sunk in the lake in front of his estate in 1945 and recovered in 1990. The original is in the Uffizi in Florence. The artwork is now “offensive” by woke standards: the Commissioner for Equal Opportunities decided that the bronze statue had to be removed from a federal office in Berlin-Weißensee.
Take Le Parisien: the major Paris daily pixelated the face of Muhammad when reporting on a teacher in the United States who lost her job after showing a celebratory miniature of Muhammad.
Freedom of expression has become an offense for which it is not worth risking assassination. Islamist terror has worked, transmitted and encouraged by the intellectual terror of a left that has bet everything on the Muslim electorate.
The blurred statue in Issy-les-Moulineaux is not a picturesque detail. It is the symptom of a surrender. And surrenders have never ended well for those who signed them. It starts with hiding the kippah, then the mezuzah, then the “blasphemous cartoons,” then the words “Eastern Christians” in advertisements and goes on to an innocuous statue. What is next?
Good night! Good Sharia!