Perhaps unable to find gigantic [CENSORED] signs to cover the artwork, individuals erased many drawings yesterday. While no one has taken credit for this as of yet a few spotted were recognized as members of the student Muslim group.
The self-appointed campus Mutaween has evidently decided it is the morality police at UIUC. UIUC now has de facto student-led censorship of free expression. They went to great effort to undo our work - but to no avail.
There were just too many to handle. Over 150 across two quads. The vast majority of those remained all day Friday and were no doubt seen by thousands. The pictures are now floating around the internet, posted at this and other blogs like The Friendly Atheist, as well as reddit, digg, on flickr and imgur. You can't wash it all away.
Any question about the silencing of criticism is now over. This is no longer just about Viacom/Comedy Central but about what is permissible on our own university campuses. AAF will continue to fight against opponents of free expression in any way it can.
6 comments:
I think that picture perfectly summarizes how ridiculous the whole thing is.
The Muslim community knew about the chalking. If they wanted to censor it, don't you think they would have just come out after you drew them and erased them or something? They didn't threaten you or prevent you from expressing your views. Your last statement: "Any question about the silencing of criticism is now over. This is no longer just about Viacom/Comedy Central but about what is permissible on our own university campuses." I saw no response on your part to the modifications made to the images (things like piss be upon him, "f***" added on before it, etc.), just consider them writing stop over it a form of their free expression. Frankly, I had no problems with this event until this post. You make it sound like the Muslims on campus are out to stifle free speech like the revolutionmuslim group. I have yet to hear of threats against you for this.
Anonymous, as far as we can tell, that's exactly what they did. We chalked foellinger that Thursday night, including writing in big letters, "Tolerance, not Terror," but by the time I got to the quad on Friday, at around 9:30, that whole area was completely wiped out. Foellinger was one of our main points where we put down our messages, which is unfortunate because erasing it probably made the average person more confused as to our purpose. That was also when I noticed some "revisions" to some of the chalkings, as seen in the picture in this blog post. I did not see the examples you pointed out, such as adding "f***" before Muhammad.
And then, later that Friday, I was still in class, but I had heard from multiple people (not in AAF) that they had seen a group of people taking the time to erase "Muhammad" from the stick figures. Not just one person, but the effort of many. And while it is possible that a coordinated effort was done by a group of individuals, it is also very likely that the MSA was somehow involved.
And by doing this, those people are telling the world that they have the same beliefs regarding free speech and freedom of expression as those extremists- anything that is offensive towards Islam must be erased and censored. And while they obviously disagree on the course of action that must be taken to those individuals breaking their beliefs, their views on freedom of expression still remain the same.
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I sort of like the tactics of whoever removed the word Muhammad a day later.
People had time to see it already, so the message was out there, in practice it didn't silence AAF. It took more effort to remove it than to create it and the stick figures were left behind to show where and how many names they removed. If there were a lot of unnamed stick figures, the sheer effort put forth was impressive.
In a way, the removal was a form of free speech in itself. I don't know if the removal was done with this intended nuance (I'd guess that it wasn't and leaving the stick figures was to save time,) but if it was, I am impressed.
Of course, whoever removed to Foellinger chalk almost immediately is a totally different situation where silencing our message was paramount.
You know bob!, I think I have to disagree with you. Just because many individuals already got the chance to see it doesn't mean that you're not erasing people's creations. I think when they crossed out "Muhammad" and wrote STOP in all capitals it was fine, as the original creation and their "revision" of it were pretty separate and obvious, but simply erasing parts they didn't like gives a different message.
And, besides, they actually did it during the day on Friday, so I'm sure there were still a great number of people who never saw them.
And in that respect it's kind of like tearing out certain pages of a book before it gets widely read by people to the point where it has another message entirely. That feels like censorship to me.
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