Just look at this. A Guardian report about a large and rather over-excited football banner brought into a Belgian football stadium:
The banner which said Red or Dead referred to the Standard colours and also showed a drawing of a masked man with a knife and the head of Anderlecht midfielder Steven Defour, who used to play for Standard before moving to rivals Anderlecht.
The display caused uproar and the interior ministry said it is considering sanctions that could include a five-year stadium ban and a fine of €5,000 (£3,742) for each individual supporter involved. “We’re working together with police to catch as many of the authors of this banner as possible,” a spokeswoman for the interior ministry said.
The foreign minister, Didier Reynders already called the banner “tasteless, stupid and unacceptable.” Defour was sent off in the match Standard won 2-0.
So far so boring. It’s not clear what offence has been allegedly committed here. Is poor taste now punishable by the European state?
But what’s this?
The BBC website too is covering this story . But something seems to be … missing:
Yes. Astonishingly like a grotty little Third World local newspaper inflicting petty censorship on its readers, the BBC has cut out not only the severed head but also the curved sword!
Why?
NO EXPLANATION. But is this a hint?
Most Standard Liege fans said the image “went too far”. Some Standard Liege fans argued that it was a reference to a horror film – Friday the 13th – and an expression of free speech … Most people in Belgium did not think of the film Friday the 13th but of the beheadings in Syria.
Get it? ISLAMIST LUNATICS might somehow be associated with the image. Why is that meant to be a bad thing, to the point of being so bad that the BBC (a body funded in part by a vast poll tax on UK citizens) censors an image of a Belgian football banner?
Here is Jason himself, in busy beheading mode:
And, going back to Great Artists depicting famous Biblical scenes, Judith knows how to wield a goodly knife:
The Independent actually enjoys this. The artist was a women, Artemisia Gentileschi! What’s not to love about two feisty women methodically butchering a drunk man? Feminism in action:
There is plenty of sensation to enjoy, the blood-stained sheets, the flesh. But Gentileschi’s emphasis is on how hard it is, how long it can take, to kill someone. She stresses the hows and difficulties. The strain and strength in Judith’s parallel arms, driving the sword through spine and gristle, is evident. The visual confusion of plunging arms and gripping hands – whose is whose? – mimics Abra’s trouble keeping control of the man, holding one arm down while another breaks free.
Meanwhile over at the V&A the high custodians of our culture are scurrying to take away from sensitive Muslim eyes any historic representations of Muhammad:
When the V&A was asked if it held any images of Muhammad after the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it said there were none. A US expert later provided a link to a poster in its collection, with the inscription “Mohammad the Prophet of God”. That page in the database was deleted last week, but can still be found in a cached version. A spokeswoman said their original response was “an honest error”.
“Unfortunately we were incorrect to say there were no works depicting the prophet Muhammad in the V&A’s collection,” a spokeswoman, Olivia Colling, said in an email, adding that the image had subsequently been taken down because of security concerns. “As the museum is a high-profile public building already on a severe security alert, our security team made the decision that it was best to remove the image from our online database (it remains within the collection).”
Here’s that picture, by an Iranian no less:
Never in British history has the state and its official and semi-official formations been as overbearing as they are now. And never before have we seen such idiotic and ultimately suicidal senior gutlessness in the face of an absurd yet menacing minority on grievance overdrive.
This is how freedom dies. Not with a bang, or even a modest show of defiance, but with a querulous post-modern apology.
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