The Muslim prophet Mohammed and his son-in-law walk into a gay bar. No, it’s not the set-up for a joke, it’s the plot of Iranian artist Sooreh Hera’s latest film. And if you’re Lars Vilks (the Swedish cartoonist who controversially depicted Muhammad as a dog in 2007), showing the film might not get you a laugh so much as a head-butt.
Vilks recently showed Hera’s film while speaking about artistic freedom at Uppsala University and the film caused a small riot. One student came up and head-butted Vilks so hard that it broke his glasses. Others began chanting “Allahu Akbar” (‘God is great’) and rushing the dais, causing security to tackle several and keep others at bay with pepper spray. The university said they probably won’t invite Vilks to speak again.
Hera made her film to expose the hypocrisy between homosexuality and Islam. According to her, married Muslim men in Iran and Saudi Arabia frequently sleep with other guys even though homosexuality can still get you imprisoned, whipped, or even publicly executed. So she invited gay two Iranian exiles to conceal their identities by wearing masks of Muhammed and his son-in-law Ali and then suggestively posed them.
One of her other films, Allah Ho Gaybar, showed pictures of kissing Muslim clerics, naked men at Pride parades, and gay Holocaust prisoners set to Electric Six’s Gay Bar. The Hague Municipal Museum refused to include her work in a public exhibition because they feared it “could offend certain groups.”
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Since then the 34-year-old director has received numerous death threats with a few e-mails even threatening to burn her naked and put a bullet in her mouth. Sooreh Hera isn’t even her real name; it’s an alias to protect herself and her family.
The backlash against Vilks and Hera’s art reminds one of the recently cancelled productions of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi. Putting religious figures in gay situations seems to piss people off even though it’s the most direct way to engage religious/sexual hypocrisy.
Cam
You have to just shake your head at the fact that the “University won’t invite Vilkes “back” because DURING a presentation on free speech people were upset and tried to stop him from speaking. Hey, University, how about arresting the person who came up and headbutted him?
james_in_cambridge
I hate the religious right. I want to put them in a rocket ship traveling right into the sun until I see or read a story like this (which has become very common) and I actually begin to respect them; Me, a biracial gay boy respecting the fucking religious right!! That’s how out of control the Muslims in Europe are: they’re making me respect our theocrats at home, who when you “insult” their religion, just bitch and moan. They don’t behead anybody; they don’t threaten to rape & execute or head butt women. They protest like CIVILIZED human beings. Congratulations Muslim crazies: you’ve once again outdone yourselves (and for those who are inevitably going to defend these wackos, think long and hard what’s going to happen to people like you if these shitheads ever come to power anywhere in Europe)!!
Don’t ever forget boys (yes boys) like these who are killed by their governments in the Middle East every day…. simply for being gay http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/postphotos/orb/style/2006-07-20/5.htm
We have to stop humoring these fascist pigs now!!!!
ousslander
Tying crazed Muslims can be compared to right wing christians with their desire to impose their beliefs on everyone else, those who rpotested the corpus christi play did not physically attack the playright or it’s presenter.
There is a dif between those who say we should burn in hell and those that try to gladly send us to our deaths and or hell.
let the apologists start their braying.
Baxter
It’s a good thing Islam is a religion of peace. Oh wait.
Lamar
WTF a headbutt?!!! A freakin headbutt?!!! Was the person a ram or something. Some people need to calm down. I don’t really get what the point of the exhibition was however, it seems like it was to piss of religious fanatics but won’t that just hinder gay rights?
ossurworld
Religious fanatics are dangerous people.
B
No. 3 · ousslander wrote,”Tying crazed Muslims can be compared to right wing christians with their desire to impose their beliefs on everyone else, those who rpotested the corpus christi play did not physically attack the playright or it’s presenter.”
While “Christians” did murder doctors performing abortions.
Islam was founded roughly 600 years after Christianity. If you assume it would take as long for Islamic militants as Christian militants to start cooling off, it isn’t surprising that it hasn’t happened yet: 600 years ago Christians were still burning people at the stake.
I might add that the Muslims I’ve personally met are a lot more tolerant than you would think based on the behavior of a few extremists. I’ve even met Muslims who drink alcoholic beverages and eat pork (they were gay too, and obviously have no desire to live in an Iranian-style or Taliban-style theocracy).
Bill Perdue
@james_in_cambridge: If you say that somemuslims are intolerant jihadists you’re correct. If you say all muslims are intolerant jihadists you’re a racist.
So which is it.
@Lamar: Attacks on the three abrahamic cults – christer, judaic and islamist – especially for their oppression of GLBT folks is legitimate. Satirizing them mercilessly is legitimate. None of that does any harm to our movement and while it’s best not to initiate physical fights we have to be willing to defend anti-bigoted and anti-religious figures and events.
@ossurworld: The only real difference between the anti-GLBT actions of islamist like the US armed and trained jihadists in Iraq or the killer ayatollahs of Iran and christer and judaic religious bigots is their ability to harm us, not their intent to harm us.
Islamophobia is racism.
Tallskin
Bill, if Islamophobia is racist, so is christophobia.
Anyway I do genuinely have a phobia, ( ie a FEAR) of both islam and christianity. I also despise both religions with a passion. I would also say the same of judaism for exactly the same reason, but for the fact that, in general, it doesn’t play much part these days in creating or endorsing homophobic ideas – even though judaism fucking invented homophobia!
Saying you hate arabs, semites, pakistanis, italians, blacks, columbians, americans, british etc now that would be racist. But I don’t see that a religion that one freely chooses is a racial category.
Bill Perdue
@Tallskin: Islamophobia began as a product of zionist efforts to justify their invasion and occupation of Palestine. Now it’s mutated and is used as a tool to justify the US wars to control the flow of oil in South Asia.
It’s characterized by a blanket condemnation of muslims in all nations, at all times, and irrespective of cultural differences. It’s expressed as “That’s how out of control the Muslims in Europe are” by someone who doesn’t have a clue about the varieties of European muslims and who’s apparently never heard of the genocide against muslim in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Muslims are people, not ogres and the attempt to paint them as monsters or sub-humans is not a bit different than what the KKK and the Nazi’s said.
Islamophobia is rampant in Europe and long ago replaced anti-Semitism as the chief ideological component of fascist politics. In the US it’s used as an excuse for genocide from Palestine to Pakistan.
Opposition to christer, islamist and judaic homohating is a different matter altogether and if that’s what you’re talking about then we agree.
The ayatollahs of Iran, the muslim clerics in Nigeria who embrace stoning gays and lesbians and the US backed jihadist pogromists in US occupied Iran need to be suppressed, arrested, tried and executed. I’m sure that the revolutionaries who recently took to the streets in Iran and the oil workers in Iraq are more than capable of doing just that. But if you want to paint all muslims with the same brush then we don’t agree.
BTW, christer anti-LGBT bigots in the US, the ones whose hate speech murdered Matthew Shepard, Sakia Gunn, L. King, Gwen Araujo and hundreds of others over the years are always trying to turn reality on its head and claim that we persecute and oppress them. These same christer scum, including Obama buddy Rick Warren, are the chief impetus behind the christer Ugandan law legalizing the mass murder of GLBT folks.
The historic and absolutely correct suppression of christers by the French and Russian revolutions was not ‘christophobia’. It was the will of the people, including christians who saw the ultimately reactionary nature of the cults.
Christians are doing the oppression, not being oppressed.
[img]http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/wp-content/jesuswithriflethumb.jpg[/img]
james_in_cambridge
@Bill Perdue: How about this…a significant plurality of Muslims are either Jihadists, quietly support them or feel so attacked that they side with the crazies out of spite. In the UK, you have even “moderate”, western-born Muslims advocating for separate Sharia courts. You wanna guess how women and gays will be treated in these Sharia courts in Europe (which are already secretly operating)? Clearly the way Islam is taught or the way it is, I don’t know which, is incompatible with Democracy (and many clerics says so openly). They ALL need to live by Western rules and values, which involves respecting our right to make fun of Muhammed if we want for the hell of it, or go back to their hell-holes. Is that clear enough??
You tell me Bill, these fascist pigs who head-butted Lars Vilks, a woman, who treated her the way they would their “disrespectful” wives in Saudi Arabia or Iran, are they part of your moderate Muslim majority? Because they all seem moderate until you do something they don’t like, then they stab you in the neck, literally. Their culture is sick and I don’t know if like you said time is going to cure it or perhaps they need to be dealt with in other ways until they cleanse themselves of ignorance and paranoia. But you are the kind of sad idiot that gets used by those that want to kill you, because you think you’re being tolerant. Would you find it acceptable for a Jew in Nazi Germany to collaborate with the Nazis? (yeah I’m pulling out the Nazi card and it’s very apropos.) So exactly why are you collaborating with a culture that wants to eliminate you? Because it makes you feel all patronizingly warm inside about how tolerant you are? Wake the fuck up!!! Or don’t…people like you that don’t move out of the way when a train is coming at them at full speed simply lack a survival gene….I supposed it’s Darwinism at play.
Bill Perdue
@james_in_cambridge:
“Their culture is sick” is racist. “Their religion is sick” is not racist.
Racists and Islamophobes like you seem to forget that the main victims of islam are the people who live in muslim countries or muslim communities, especially GLBT folks, women, working people, students and youth. Our goal is to support their anti-religious struggles not smear them with racist ravings and claim that they’re subhuman. Then you want to kill them, all of them.
Actually, I’m as intolerant of racists like you as I am of islamist jihadists and their christer brothers.
james_in_cambridge
@Bill Perdue: Sweetie, granted anyone can be prejudice but I’m biracial & often get mistaken for Puerto Rican or Arab so shove your little “you sir, are a racist” speech. I’m the one who’s going to get pulled out for extra special treatment at the airport because of the way I look, not you. I don’t need your lily-white ass to explain to me what racism is. Nothing you say is going change the fact that I don’t want Muslim culture to dominate Europe or especially the US because it IS bringing with it secret Sharia courts, more violence against women, children and gays and even more Religion into the world, which is the last thing humanity needs. Look at not just the UK but France, Sweden, the Netherlands and all the Muslim violence directed at Jews & Christians there. Respect ALL our laws, including our free speech laws or go back to Sharia hell. We shouldn’t have to compromise one tiny bit of our freedoms, including the freedom to be offensive, to these lunatics and their enablers like you!
Bill Perdue
What makes you think people like you can’t use racism for assimilationist purposes?
ewe
Too bad for those who prefer to control the opinions and views of those that oppose them. TOUGH. They need to be told to turn the channel if they don’t like it. These religious icons are all twisted fantasy figures and fanatical ideation anyway. Their influence should be challenged. It is dumming people down far to low.
Bill Perdue
@ewe: Agreed. And in Europe our main religious enemies are christians.
ewe
@Bill Perdue: These prophets are all fantasy driven. Too many people have suspended reality when it comes to them. They were human beings with faults just like us and they should not be put on a pedestal. Their teachings have been distorted. We are not talking about reality here. If we were i would respect religion but none of it is real. It’s just hocus pocus nonsense and a terrible disservice to humanity. It makes one wonder if any of these people really existed. Control and profit driven. All of it should continued be challenged and dragged into our daily consciousness.
Bill Perdue
@ewe: All that’s true. I think we should push for the suppression of hate speech, secularizing thier schools and colleges to prevent rape and taxing them till they drop.
Their hate speech is the main cause of anti-GLBT violence in the US and the EU. And the christer dominationist wing in the US wants to overthrow the constitution and replace it with laws that will make Sharia law look mild in comparison. They helped write the Ugandan law that will be used to murder us if it passes.
james_in_cambridge
@Bill Perdue: Figures. You wanna fight bigots by suppressing their right to freedom of speech. Another Fascist who thinks he’s a liberal. As for me being racist, really? I oppose those who want to oppress me even if they’re the same color as me. You patronize them because they’re brown-skinned like me. Who’s really the racist? You have no problem calling out Christians, who it’s important to note, may SPEAK hateful things about us but they don’t head-butt, behead or stab us in the neck. We can, and rightfully do, call Christians all kinds of names. We put on plays like Gay Christ in TEXAS of all places, with no fear of being blown up or raped and murdered. Put on a Gay Muhammed play in the UK and see how long it takes someone to murder your ass. Our Christians may be crazy but they don’t do anything except bitch and moan. The Muslim crazies kill, rape and blow people up. This is a very important fact you keep glossing over, which is typical of someone like you who is the real patronizing racist.
james_in_cambridge
@Bill Perdue: “Their hate speech is the main cause of anti-GLBT violence in the US and the EU. And the christer dominationist wing in the US wants to overthrow the constitution and replace it with laws that will make Sharia law look mild in comparison. They helped write the Ugandan law that will be used to murder us if it passes.”
You are so disingenuous it’s hilarious. Everything you say about the wacko Christians (and some of them are wacko, no doubt), is what they WOULD like to do. But the Muslims are doing it all right now but they get a pass. I really, really hope your survival gene kicks in one of these days and you wake the fuck up.
Bill Perdue
@james_in_cambridge: If you dare, compare the number of GLBT folks murdered in the US as a result of christer hate speech with the number of gays murdered in the EU by muslims or as a result of muslim hate speech. There was one in London and another in Amsterdam and may have been others. Our rate is between 25-30 a year.
And compare both figures to the number of innocent muslims killed by racists, neo-Nazis and fascists in England, France and Germany. Then add those killed in the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Get back to us when you’ve done the math.
First muslims were put in camps…
[img]http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/07/26/Trnopolje10b[/img]
and then murdered
[img]http://ndn.newsweek.com/media/49/bosnia-karadzic-mass-grave-funeral-wide-horizontal.jpg[/img]
And thanks for confirming my hunch about the assimilationist thing.
james_in_cambridge
You get your figures from…???? I was born Catholic but currently don’t give a flying fuck about any religion so I don’t know what this assimilationist bull is about (I’m half Black, half Irish, not an Arab)…keep making excuses and not responding to any of my points about free speech, Sharia, etc. And if I’m an assimilationist, that would make you a collaborator, the modern day version of the French man who happily bent over for the Nazis.
Bill Perdue
@james_in_cambridge:
Google and get your own figures. If you can.
Please explain why I should waste more of my time on a liar and a raving racist like you when I could be cutting my toenails or doing something equally productive.
james_in_cambridge
Bye Billie boy. Enjoy your nail clipping; it’ll probably be the most intellectually stimulating thing you’ve done all week. And fuck Muhammad & all religion 🙂
Queer Supremacist
@Bill Perdue: I’m sure if all Muslims were white Southerners with buck teeth who never missed a Hee Haw rerun you’d hate them as much as any gay man who doesn’t have his head as far up his ass.
Islamophobia is not racism because Islam is not a race. It is entirely justified by his actions. James_in_cambridge is telling the truth.
Do you even recognize the cognitive dissonance of calling them a cult whose beliefs should be suppressed while defending them against red herrings about “imperialism”?
Fuck Muhammad. Fuck that child-raping proto-Nazi and all who believe his genocidal lies. With no reach-around. They are the real racists. And fuck Marx, Lenin, and and that mass murderer Stalin as hard as they’ve fucked you up. And by the way, Arabs are lily white.
And God bless those who were brave enough to escape that death cult and live to tell the truth about it. And God bless the Zionists who stand up to the genocidal camel fuckers, taking the phrase “never again” seriously.
And James in Cambridge, you GO girl!
Bill Perdue
@Queer Supremacist: @james_in_cambridge: Birds of a feather…