Far away in the land of Sylvania, some woodland creatures have gathered to celebrate Pride. There’s a cross-dressing fox, a PVC-clad boar, a rabbit in full drag on a float. Rainbow flags and bunting abound. But just out of sight, perched above an ice-cream kiosk, are three sinister little figures in black face masks. They could be hedgehogs. They could be squirrels. One of them has a machine gun.
Isis in Sylvania was the work of the satirist Miriam Elia, a set of tableaux which was meant to be shown at the Passion for Freedom art exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London in 2015. The pieces were withdrawn after police said they might cause offence. That the gallery capitulated so easily would suggest that its self-declared “passion for freedom” was limited.
Elia’s display brilliantly lampooned our infantile response to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism, and it seems more relevant today than ever. After the police had sent emails to the gallery declaring that Isis in Sylvania was “not art” and that “all mentions of it should be removed from the promotional materials, social media etc”, Elia responded:
“The decision to censor shows that our establishment is more threatened by satire, clarity and truth than by young men willing to kill, rape and pillage in the name of Islam. Apparently my images were ‘potentially inflammatory’ to terrorists. This is the equivalent of saying an anti-Nazi cartoon in the late 1930s was offensive… to Nazis. Those who justify and protect barbaric totalitarianism, in whichever form, are on the fast track to becoming totalitarian themselves.”
The reaction of the police, of course, exemplified the very problem that Elia had been satirising in the first place.
It should be clear to everyone by now that kowtowing to the wishes of terrorists only encourages them. Last week Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons, was pressurised into overriding parliamentary convention because of an apparent risk to security. He spoke of “absolutely frightening” threats directed at MPs because of their reluctance to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. He also alluded to the murder of MP David Amess by an ISIS sympathiser. “I never want to go through a situation where I find a friend from any side has been murdered,” he said, “I also don’t want another attack on this House.” The word “Islamist” was not mentioned, as though not talking about the problem might make it disappear.
Hoyle is correct that the threat of violence is very real. Nobody would seek to downplay the murder of David Amess at his constituency surgery in Essex in 2021, or the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in Paris in 2020, or the massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. But our tendency to forget these atrocities, and move on as if nothing has happened, is chilling. Many of our politicians are too afraid to address the issues out of fear of being branded “islamophobic”, an absurd neologism often deployed to conflate anti-Muslim hatred with legitimate criticism of Islam.
How much reflection was there after the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 in which children and teenagers were slain? After the killing of Amess there was endless discussion in parliament about how we needed to crack down on social media, as though the radical islamist responsible was motivated by online trolling rather than the creed of a medieval death-cult. We are like the woodland animals in another of Elia’s scenes, blissfully enjoying a picnic while armed and masked assailants appear on the horizon.
So while I have sympathy for Hoyle’s very human reaction to the spectre of violence, it is clear that the failure of politicians to accurately diagnose the problem is only making matters worse. Those few brave individuals who are prepared to speak out are putting themselves in danger. But with a collective effort the risk could be spread and at least become tolerable. After the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, media outlets refused to show the offending cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, but if all of them had done so simultaneously, the threat could have been diluted.
If the speaker of the House of Commons is prepared to modify parliamentary procedures due to threats from far-left cranks and radical islamists, where does this leave our democracy? It is hardly surprising that increasingly we are seeing commentators claiming that the values of liberalism cannot be sustained against this particular brand of authoritarianism. They suggest that liberals are too weak to tackle those who do not share their commitment to individual freedom.
It is true that too often exemptions have been made out of fear of causing offence to religious minorities. Police in the north of England failed to enforce the law against predominately Pakistani grooming gangs for fear of being branded “racist”. The inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing found that security guards held back from intercepting the killer for similar reasons. Sharia courts have been operating in the United Kingdom for decades and, although their rulings have no legal standing, they do hold authority within Muslim communities. And we have seen how police have overlooked some of the worst behaviour at the now regular pro-Palestine marches in London.
But this is not a weakness at the heart of liberalism; it is the failure to properly follow its principles. All branches of liberal thought – from the conservative liberalism of Friedrich Hayek to the social liberalism of John Rawls – share an understanding that the rule of law is paramount. Individual autonomy cannot be preserved if the state is unable to maintain the peace and impartially resolve the natural conflicts of human existence.
A well-intentioned commitment to multiculturalism has enabled parallel societies to flourish within the United Kingdom. In turn, this has granted authority to the most reactionary elements within religious communities. Sharia law may be an ambition for ultra-conservative theocrats, but many female and gay Muslims will not find it such an appealing prospect. We need to stop appeasing these minorities within minorities, small groups of extremists that by no means represent the average British Muslim. And this means that our parliamentarians must retain their courage, even in the face of violent threats.
More than anything, we need to be able to talk about this crisis with honesty and candour. However comforting it might be in the short term, our political class cannot go on living in their Sylvanian fantasy, wilfully oblivious to the masked elephant in the room. This denialism is a form of procrastination, putting off the inevitable for another day. The values of our liberal democracy and our hard-won rights are under threat. It’s time to grow up.
A limited edition book of all the images in Miriam Elia’s “Isis in Sylvania” series is available to buy here. A signed limited edition print of the picnic scene is available here.
Excellent, thank you.
The west, in its desperation not to offend any minority, has bent over backwards to be accomodating, to the point where bullies and extremists are now able to influence legislation and restrict free speech. Instead of standing up to the bullies, the people in power seem intent on caving in to them by introducing ever more hate speech legislation further limiting our ability to challenge extreme ideologies.
Excellent again, and nice use of colour!
I've talked about this before, - what you wrote about is a symptom of weakness and not understanding violence... Some call it woke, some a form of marxism...Add to that mix a clear lack of pride in ones culture and country.
It doesn't matter. At the end of the day all of it is what preceded a PTSD of future coming... And it is coming.
The French deported an imam 12 hours after he got arrested, due to new immigration laws they voted in... What amount of blood, do you, and your readers think we'll need for the same?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68378736
Thank you,
M