Los Angeles bows to Islamic propaganda

Heads are rolling and infidel blood is pouring – play the Caliphate rag, boys.

While we're at it, why don't we hold a massive, regional art exhibit praising and honoring Islam itself? For its many contributions to culture. It should go far beyond musty, old Islamic museum collections and launch into video, lectures, children's classes, performances, music and poetry. Whatever helps the cause.

The Los Angeles Islam Arts Initiative, or LA/IAI, will "investigate" Islam through the arts (but not too closely). This massive Islamic love fest involves 30 cultural institutions throughout Los Angeles "to tell various stories of traditional and contemporary art from multiple Islamic regions and their significant global diasporas."

LA/IAI will host dozens of exhibits and performances related to Islam in some way from September and throughout 2014. If you live in greater Los Angeles there will be no way to escape, should you not wax enthusiastic or are related to a victim.

The Doris Duke Islamic Art collection, which has been available to Calfornians for decades, is the base for the events. Another major exhibit, "Shangri La: Imagined Cities," was commissioned and hosted by the Department of Cultural Affairs, or DCA. This is a shared enterprise between public and private galleries, museums and universities. One of the donors is National Endowments for the Arts.

TRENDING: Impeach!

Duke's collection is lovely and non threatening, jewelry, vases and large architectural pieces. Contemporary work seems neither offensive nor militant either. The exhibits aren't a concern in themselves. USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena plans an exhibition on the folk tradition of Pakistani bus painting, which is quite charming.

But why do this massive campaign now just though, when ugly elements surrounding Islamic beliefs besiege us?

Because liberal Los Angeles policy makers are just hip, kind people? Because they "get it," unlike those poor headless schmucks littering Iraq?

Truly all museum and big cultural initiatives are planned far in advance, and undoubtedly LA/IAI did the same. But even if they began a decade ago, it doesn't reverse Islamic aggression at the time or now. This feels inappropriate and forced, a city-wide effort at re-education using art as a vehicle. Propaganda.

Statements from LA/IAI claim the city's "substantial populations from areas with strong Islamic roots make L.A. a compelling location for this initiative." Really?

Los Angeles County is less than one percent Muslim (92,919 in 2000), which is the least represented major religion in California. Compare that to 552,000 L.A. Jews in 2003 – almost six times as many. But Jews will be holding their breath a very long time if they hope to see their culture and religion celebrated across this city. I doubt it's on the docket at many Los Angeles museums, like the cultural blitzkrieg launched now.

The Latino population of Los Angeles County numbers 4.7 million with the majority Catholic. But Catholicism is neither celebrated, nor are the Christian Armenians, who number as many as a quarter-million or so in greater Los Angeles. These minorities share a common history of horrific persecution by Muslims in their countries of origin (excepting Latin America, but Muslims did hit Spain).

Carolina Miranda, critiquing the extravaganza for the Los Angeles Times, enters the spirit of L.A.'s four-month plan for Islamic promotion. She tenuously links traditional southern Californian architecture with the Moors. While that may be true, you can bet almost every immigrant or settler in the region was Catholic, not Muslim, until relatively recent times.

Regardless, LA/IAI hopes to avoid political controversy by being "inclusive and welcoming, with art as its central focus." As proof they offer that "Islamic art (in their case) includes work created by non-Muslim artists from Muslim-dominant countries, work by Muslims creating art in non-Muslim dominant countries, and work by artists culturally influenced by Islam." This is somewhat confusing and akin to relegating all Western art as "Christian." In reality all this work does in fact deal with Islamic culture, which is a religion, not a place nor race.

Few entries even whisper criticism and certainly none openly. Yet LA/IAI claims the Islamic extravaganza "seeks to stimulate the global conversation in connection to cultural, political, and social issues." That is manifestly not the case if you observe the art and conversations. Incendiary political issues (terrorism, genocide) and cultural issues (female mutilation, etc.) are deftly swept away.

Surely Islamic nations have and continue to produce stunning and creative art. This is a non-starter in our current situation. Perhaps officials in Los Angeles believe news from Iraq, Syria and Nigeria is part of a giant fraud perpetrated by ex-employees of George W. Bush. At any rate, it apparently doesn't matter much.

Understand it is utterly taboo to question a non-Christian religion in America, even if leaders of that religion are attempting to annihilate all civilized life on the planet. Exhibitors for LA/IAI may be allowed to "question" (but never pointedly) and generally gush on in a non-threatening and utterly irrelevant manner.

Perhaps the throat slashers and baby killers will melt with gratitude: "They understand us – isn't it marvelous? There is no need to kill you now, we will go to someone else, perhaps Cincinnati, to demand an Islamic Appreciation Month."

I say this indelicately and rather crudely to make a point: The rarified atmosphere of art is a red herring to divert the rotten scent of death trailing Islam as it is practiced in much of the world now. Perhaps not when Doris Duke amassed her collection before the subway bombs, bloody videos and emptied cities – but there is an agenda. As a government-promoted (and majorly funded) initiative, this is not art for the sheer joy of it, arising from the glad hearts of the people.

If art galleries and initiatives like LA/IAI allow artists to speak on realities and truth instead of obfuscation and magical thinking, they deserve respect. As they stand, most endeavors to promote Islamic culture are the art world's equivalent of money laundering. It covers the blood quite well through a veneer of respectability and cloaking.

To raise one's voice against any aspect of Islam is "hateful," "racist," crude or barbaric – so they claim. And the veiled threat of ostracism and liberal disrespectability is evident in the words of Amitis Motavelli, curator for the program at DCA.

First he slathers guilt at the feet of Hollywood for the "huge role" they play in "creating a picture of what is and isn't Muslim." I guess it was Hollywood all along, not bombs, beheadings or genocide. What did we know?

"This image is spread internationally," Motavelli charges, as if an intentional message is sign of a poor script, and lectures Los Angeles to "look at multiple views" – which is moronic. You couldn't find a city with more views if it was built inside a giant kaleidoscope and run by schizophrenics. Still these pedants preach human rights to us, not to Muslim terrorists, raised in Islamic culture.

This may be an angry backlash at Hollywood for their successful 1990s movies such as "True Lies" and the danger of Middle Eastern terrorists. They seem quite prophetic 20 years later, proving Hollywood's power to mold modern perception. Apparently this is what they hope to unmold, replacing the will to survive with rationalizing, fear and political correctness. Isn't this why we support the arts?

"We want to show the multiple perspectives that exist in any culture," Motavelli exhorts and reminds us that art "humanizes people," which is true, but it hasn't worked on any terrorists yet that we know of.

None have converted in abject awe before a Renoir or DaVinci. Islamic militants destroy even their own historic mosques, art and history as they did in 2012 in Mali. This should be no surprise after 14 centuries, ad nauseum. Mujahideen blow up art or sell it for weaponry. They are meth addicts on a grand scale and will sell a Rodin for the copper. Motavelli's remarks to the City of Los Angeles seem inane and pointless as regard our current existential threats by Islam.

The exhibits aren't bad, as traditional mosaic work and especially calligraphy are a high Islamic art. Some of the new works are intriguing, especially the few that come cryptically close to raising questions about Islam.

Iranian women push the envelope just a smidgeon, such as Halah Anvari's work in "A Woman is Worth a Thousand Questions" experimental film and video at REDCAT on Oct. 27 and 28, 2014.

Still from "A Woman Is Worth a Thousand Questions," experimental film and video, REDCAT

Anvari "questions what it means to be an Iranian woman, both in her own country and in the West."

Personally, if I were a woman living in Iran, Somalia or Iraq just now, I would "question" creating female militias or having a sex change. Perhaps the entire world will someday grow weary of Islamic victimization of women. Meanwhile most just hint at the slightest uneasiness.

"Hoy Space" by Roya Falahi is a series of photographic tableaus, which incorporate her own sculptural work on themes of Iranian-American identity and culture. Whoever wrote the piece on Falahi for the LA/IAI site did a masterful job of leap-frogging over the obvious. Scenes that include detached female heads with bloody and almost obliterated faces, they found "technically flawless and often deeply ambiguous."

"Hoy Space" by Roya Falahi

Ambiguous? The "woman" here appears beaten beyond recognition and apparently beheaded. Since it matches up to real life so much lately, reacting with "ambiguity" seems more bizarre than the scene itself. This reticent writer ventures merely a "focus on depictions of the head/upper body," which resonates with "visual and psychological impact."

Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. This coy rationalization of clear truths could be a metaphor for the LA/IAI flotilla of events this fall and the push by the NEA and other agencies to promote Islamic culture.

Because that's just how we roll in America now – if you will pardon the morbid pun.

SOURCES: laislamarts.org / Los Angeles Times, Carolina A.Miranda / United State Conference Catholic Bishops / 2000 U.S. Census / Out London / culturela.org