Friday, October 05, 2012

You’re Projecting!

A Moroccan-French artist in Toulouse designed a display in which verses of the Koran were projected on the sidewalk. One night, due to a technical glitch, the projector was turned on when no “mediators” were present, so that no one was there to warn infidel passers-by not to step on the sacred verses.

You can imagine the reaction. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and no one was killed or seriously hurt, although there were reports that a kafir woman got slapped for her blasphemous footwork.

The story in French is here.

Many thanks to Michael Laudahn for translating this video, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

A slightly revised transcript is below:

00:00 …but let’s start talking about the incident which occurred last night at the Printemps
00:04 Septembre Toulouse [festival name], an artist’s installation projects
00:08 Koranic verses on the ground. Problem: Moslems have not accepted that
00:12 passers-by are walking over them. — Dear Madam, considering that the exposition
00:16 conditions of my oeuvre are not met, I urge you
00:20 to suspend it. — The decision has been taken. 24 hours after the incident,
00:24 the artist has decided to partially revise his oeuvre. The
00:28 projectors which are installed on the lamp posts along the Pont-Neuf will be demounted, so no more
00:32 Koranic verses projected on the ground, the projection will be made against façades. —
00:36 This is a decision made by the artist, his choice, his oeuvre belongs to him. I find it
00:40 a pity that this incident has created
00:44 tensions, I find it a pity. — Yesterday
00:48 before 2 [am], a technical problem triggered inadvertently the projection.
00:52 Consequence: No mediators present as originally planned,
00:56 in order to explain the artist’s oeuvre, and nobody there to demand that passers-by not
01:00 step on it. One woman paid the price, [don’t quite understand what he says — according to the press,
01:04 she was slapped in the face by Mohammedans for stepping on it]. Rapidly,
01:08 some sixty persons assembled to denounce the blasphemy committed against the prophet.
01:12 No confrontation with the forces of order, nor any arrests,
01:17 but a palpable tension in the quarter. The imam who arrived on site
01:21 to calm down the spirits was welcomed at the mayor’s office, this afternoon. —
01:25 What is your message to the youngsters and the
01:29 quarters which have remained calm… — That they remain calm, because there is nothing
01:33 special, nothing malign, nothing… —
01:37 This is not a provocation,
01:41 this is an accident. — The oeuvre’s author, Mounir Fatmi, of Moroccan origin,
01:45 says he is disconsolate about this incident. His revised oeuvre
01:49 will be projected on Friday…

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

AHhhh that the way to keep muslims away!

Spotlights with korrran verses :)

Anonymous said...

It's a pity a drunk didn't bring up the days takings all over the footpath.

gsw said...

Time for European women to start carrying Tasers at all times.
Actually, I would never go out on the street at 2am without some form of defence.

dienw said...

The art piece is a form of Islamic imperialism and provides an occasion for jihad: enforcing dhimmitude upon the "infidel."

How does a switch get thrown when no one is there to throw it? I suspect there was someone there and did throw the switch: why pass up the perfect opportunity?

Anonymous said...

Whoever did the slapping should of course be prosecuted, but I won't
hold my breath.It all leads back to the same easy conclusion, that a
totally intolerant ideology cannot
be allowed EVEN TO EXIST in a World
where we have all achieved a high
standard of permanent tolerance.

Anonymous said...

Talk about irony. "A totally intolerant ideology cannot be allowed even to exist in a world where we have all achieved a high standard of permanent tolerance."

Neither the adherents of that ideology, nor those who write that it should not even be allowed to exist, have achieved much of anything in the line of tolerance.

Robert Marchenoir said...

What is not reported here is that one Muslim woman who was "offended" by the kouffar stepping on Arabic verses warned the crowd : I'm going to call my buddies from the projects.

Which she did. That's how the 80 "outraged" Muslims materialized in a short time.

We'll probably never know about the amount of prior staging in this incident.

One thing is sure :

- Either a single veiled Muslim woman has now the power, in a French city, to summon by phone a posse of 80 djihadi police whenever she sees fit to feel "offended" ;

- Or she wanted the French to think so, and she succeeded through some trick of hers (the 80-strong team might have been pre-positioned in the vicinity, or she might have summoned 10 people and the 70 others were just strolling around and coalesced when the outrage took place, etc).

Either way, you can draw your own conclusions.

Anonymous said...

What a wonderful idea! There's no law that forbids projecting koranic verses on the sidewalk, so anyone could do it, right? They are rather simple to make at home.


Suppose there were about 10000 of these installed around the world.. XD

Foregone said...

You cannot be an artist and a Muhammadan and that is because, as abrogated, art is not allowed. That aside, the Muhammadan here has put the words of his god onto the dog and bird messed pavements so that the words are upon the filth and so that they may be looked down on by infidels.

If you tried to step on light that is projected onto the ground then the light would be projected onto your shoe, and on the ground beneath would be a shadow. It follows that the infidels were not standing on the verses but were raising them from the filthy ground, which is to say, it is the Muhammadans involved that are the blasphemers.

Anonymous said...

they ought to have bought half a dozen packets of ham apiece and scattered the bacon all over the pavement

Cyrus said...

Anonymous at 9:02pm:
That would be an insult to hams everywhere. Good burghers (burgers?) of the world unite!

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