War, children, it’s just a shot away:
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.
AdvertisementThe 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.
“We have a very small space at the moment in which to display the whole sweep of Islamic art,” said spokeswoman Egle Zygas. “They didn’t fit the theme of the current installation.”
But it’s not certain Mohammed will go on display when the Met finishes its $50 million renovation in 2011.
Three years ago, the Met changed its “Primitive Art Galleries” to the “Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas” for the sake of political correctness, said author Michael Gross, author of “Rogues’ Gallery,” a book about the Met.
Just recently, it decided its highly anticipated “Islamic Galleries” will be given an awkward new name ahead of the 2011 opening. Visitors will stroll around rooms dedicated to art from “Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia,” according to a museum press release.
Islamic art expert Kishwar Rizvi said the Met — which has one of the world’s best Islamic collections — has nothing to fear from Mohammed.
“Museums shouldn’t shy away from showing this in a historical context,” said Rizvi, historian of Islamic Art at Yale University.
Coming from a professor at Yale, (which censors not just images of Mohammed but the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald) that’s pretty rich. But then, as the American Association of University Professors quipped when criticizing Yale Press over their refusal to republish the Danish Mohammed cartoons, “We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.”
I repeat what I have said before: if there were virtually no Muslims residing among us and traveling in our country, as was the case until 40 years ago, the constant threat of Islamic terrorism would not exist and the need for humiliating and demoralizing security measures to fend it off would not exist. All of this absurd nightmare is due to the fact that Muslims now reside in the West in significant numbers. Without believing Muslims among us, there would be no Muslim sharia proponents, no Muslim jihadists, and no Muslim terrorists among us. Yet—because of the liberal belief, accepted by virtually all people in our society, that we must never make any negative generalizations about a nonwhite or non-Western group, no matter how unassimilable or dangerous it may be—no one ever notices this screamingly obvious fact.
In other words, it’s the immigration, stoopid! Muslim immigration must be stopped or greatly restricted otherwise, this war will go on for decades and decades and thousands of Americans will be killed here at home.
The po-mo, multiculti folks will sit there with smug smiles on their faces and tell us that the only good art is transgressive art … like a Madonna executed in elephant dung, or a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine, or a photo of a man with a rectally impacted bullwhip. But their bravery shrivels away to nothing when it comes to art that depicts a certain denizen of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s one thing to be praised in the New York Times for offending the sensibilities of breeders in the flyover states, it’s another thing to have your head cut off by someone who has adopted the value system of a murderous seventh-century pedophile.
The offending Mohammed cartoons should be reissued with the face changed to Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.
The caption could read: “These cartoons were originally too offensive to publish when they referred to Mohammed. Fortunately, they can be published now that they represent Western men.”
I think that would have a good effect.