Lars Vilks And Opportunistic Islamophobia.

[Posted By Lara Keller 22/5/15 Updated 18/10/20] Blog Table Of Contents

According to the British “Sunday Times” newspaper last Sunday [http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/Europe/article1522121.ece] in a feature on the Danish Artist and Cartoonist Lars Vilks, there is more to the shootings on the 14 February 2015 in Copenhagen than was initially reported. In an echo of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Lars Vilks gives the impression of an aging (68) second rate artist, enjoying the undeserved notoriety from his offensive and crudely drawn cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Vilks was an obscure professor of art theory at the Norwegian Bergen National Academy of the Arts. In 2007 he had trouble finding a gallery, in his native Sweden, to exhibit his drawings of the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog (an animal seen as unclean in many Middle Eastern cultures). He claimed these drawings were inspired by a vogue in Sweden for amateur “roundabout dog” sculptures. The centre-right liberal Nerikes Allehanda (regional newspaper based in Örebo in central Sweden) then agreed to publish the drawings.

This sparked an international controversy, similar to the one two years earlier surrounding the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Vilks and the Nerikes Allehanda editor received death threats. The most sensational one, that was widely reported, was claimed to have come from al-Baghdadi of Islamic State in Iraq, of $100,000 for Vilks’ death. The only source for this was SITE, a public relations organisation that claims to research information about terrorism. This organisation is run by Rita Katz, an Iraqi-Jew and committed Zionist, who was educated in Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University. SITE has a reputation as an unreliable Zionist front.

Vilks then started a career as a provocateur for Islamophobia. In 2010 he was head butted (but uninjured?) at a lecture he was giving in Uppsala University. He was showing a film called “Allah Ho Gay Bar” by the Iranian-Dutch artist Sooreh Hera. It depicts gay men wearing Mohammed and Ali masks. Some are semi naked, in sexually suggestive poses. Apart from the obvious insult to the Prophet Mohammed and his son in law Ali, the film appears vacuous, cold and ironically homophobic. It depicts gay men as faceless sexual objects.

Sooreh Hera is yet another Iranian exile from a once wealthy family, who preferred the dictatorship of the Shah, to the current Shia Fundamentalist dictatorship. She claims to be standing up against the hypocrisy of the treatment of gay people in the Middle East. Her motives require doubt.

Vilks has also been doing a series of talks for right wing groups. The racist Norwegian Islamophobic online magazine “Document.no” has a sister organisation “Documents venner” (Friends of Document). He has, as an example, presented a lecture for them in 2010 on “art and freedom of speech”. On September 11th 2012 he gave a speech in New York at a conference given by the right wing SION (Stop Islamization Of the Nations) organisation, and hosted by the well-known Islamophobic extremist Pamella Geller. Notice that SION claims to have Muslims on it’s board, such as Dr Wafa Sultan, a wealthy Alawite Syrian and keen supporter of the genocidal gangster Bashar al-Assad.

This gives some background to the event at the Krudttønden Cultural Centre in Copenhagen on the 14 February 2015, at which Vilks was due to give a talk on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression.” Film director Finn Nørgaard (according to the Sunday Times he was an organiser not just a member of the audience) was shot dead by Omar El-Hussein at this event. The next day El-Hussien shot dead Dan Uzan, who was a volunteer guard at a coming of age bat-mitzvah, at the Great Synagogue in central Copenhagen. Dan was a 37 year old Jewish man of mixed Israeli-Danish descent, with a reputation as a generous and much liked figure in the Jewish community in Copenhagen.

El-Hussien was then later shot and killed by police. He was 22 years old, and of Danish Palestinian descent. Five police officers, who happened to be assigned to protect these venues, were injured in the gun battles.

In this context the actions of Omar El-Hussien do not appear as insane radical actions of a “terrorist” inflamed by anti-Semitism and hatred of Western values. Instead they seem to be an act of criminal and misguided revenge, inspired by genuine acts of hatred and violence against Muslims. The irony is that his actions will only lead to more hatred and violence against Muslims. They give strength to Islamophobia in the West, and give cover for ethnic cleansing in Israel-Palestine (which has been a consistent policy of mainstream Zionism) because the Zionists will claim that there must be space for the majority of Jews who do not live there.

A story behind this one, shows the role of a player who facilitated this chain of events. Ulf Johansson was in 2007 the editor of the centre-right liberal regional newspaper “Nerikes Allehanda” (NA), who published the original offensive Vilks cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Ulf Johansson is now News Manager for the main state television broadcaster “Sveriges Television” (SVT). Before NA, between 1997 and 2003 he was editor of a conservative regional newspaper “Smålandsposten”, based in the Southern Swedish town of Växjö. In 2002 a national scandal started about police in Växjö selling arms to criminals. Ulf Johansson played a small part in this, by failing to publish information about concerns over the official investigation into this crime.

In 2008 this exemplar of dodgy journalism then received a prize and a payment of 10,000 Kronna from Swedish Journalist’s Club, for heroically publishing the Vilks’ cartoons. A proze given in the memory of the truly courageous journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She exposed the extremely violent and corrupt nature of Putin, including his atrocities in Chechnya when he was a member of the KGB. Putin had her assassinated. Again reality outdoes satire.

In 2011 Ulf Johansson became the program manager for the national news on SVT (the main government television broadcaster in Sweden). He appears to have done very well from his decisions to exercise “journalistic freedom” in the interests of the establishment. His rise coincides with centre-right governments in Sweden between 2006 and 2014.

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