Hat tip, Strappado. Another artist is terrorized for offending Muslims.
A Berlin gallery has temporarily closed an exhibition of satirical works by a group of Danish artists after six Muslim youths threatened violence unless one of the posters depicting the Kaaba shrine in Mecca was removed, it said on Thursday. The Galerie Nord in central Berlin said it had closed its "Zionist Occupied Government" show of works by Surrend, a group of artists who say they poke fun at powerful people and ideological conflicts.
The exhibition, titled "ZOG — Surrend," aims to attack neo-Nazi propaganda and an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory named ZOG — short for "Zionist Occupied Government."
The Kaaba poster also showed people walking around the cube-shaped shrine under speech bubbles containing the ZOG slogan.
On Tuesday, four days after the exhibition opened, a group of angry Muslims stormed into the gallery, shouting demands that one of the 21 posters should be removed, said the gallery.
"They were very agrressive and shouted at an employee that the poster should be taken down otherwise they would throw stones and use violence," the gallery's artistic director Ralf Hartmann told Reuters.
The Muslims objected to a depiction of the Kaaba -- the ancient shrine in Mecca's Grand Mosque which Muslims face to say their prayers -- which gave a "bitingly satirical commentary against radicalism," said the gallery in a statement.
Surrend's web site. Gallerie Nord web site. Additional source.