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Now, a museum dedicated to Van Gogh's oeuvre is asking whether it is "appropriate," in anno 2020, to exhibit a drawing by Degas.

To be sure, it's not just any drawing. The sketch in question depicts a bathing woman from behind, her derriere revealed in all its flesh and glory. It is also a drawing the Amsterdam-based Van Gogh Museum purchased last year at auction for the eye-widening price of $6 million.

Yet apparently even before acquiring the "Bather," part of a series Van Gogh is known to have especially admired, museum staff discussed the issue of whether it could or should be placed on view. Earlier this month, the Van Gogh Museum's new director, Emilie Gordenker, observed on Dutch national TV that while she is pleased the work is now hanging in the museum, she considers it important to address the question of "whether female nudes are appropriate for people of all cultures."

This, as everyone immediately understood, was code, a subtle way of asking, really, whether nudes should be exhibited at all in a museum located in a city where Muslims happen to live.

It's not the first time a question like this has been asked. In 2006, a Berlin opera house canceled its performance of Mozart's "Idomeneo" out of concern for the "incalculable safety risk" posed by a scene depicting the severed heads of Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, and Neptune. A year later, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague bowed to pressure from Muslim radicals who threatened the museum if it exhibited photographs by Iranian art student Soorah Hera that depicted gay men disguised as Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali. The works were removed from the exhibition, and Hera was forced into hiding. And following the death threats and assassination attempts against several European cartoonists who had depicted the prophet Mohammed, a sin in Islam, gunmen stormed the editorial office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Twelve people were killed and11 injured in the attack.

But since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Western cultural leaders have tended to be less willing to compromise on these issues. More important, there is nothing blasphemous about the Degas drawing, nothing about it to send radicalized Muslims into a violent rage. It poses no "security risk" to the museum. What's more, no Muslim or Muslim group has threatened to take action, or even mentioned any discomfort with the drawing, at least publicly, nor has the museum indicated otherwise. And no one appears to have requested it not be placed on exhibition.

So why, then, the debate?

"The role of museums is changing," Gordenker told TV program "Buitenhof" on Feb. 9. "They are increasingly seen as part of the culture and society around them."

But is that really new? Many in the art world can recall the uproar when, in 1999, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off all subsidies to the Brooklyn Museum over its plans to include a painting by the artist Christopher Ofili of the Virgin Mary, created with oil paint, glitter, and elephant dung. (The work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.) The museum refused to bow to his pressure, and the public by and large stood with it. You do not censor art, the public declared. You especially do not censor art without first understanding it. And the censorship of public institutions is not an American value.

Even in the Netherlands, the public has long been involved in museum decisions. In the early 1990s, the Dutch government paid an American restorer $800,000 to repair a painting by Barnett Newman in the collection of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum after it had been slashed by a vandal. The restoration was a failure. The government sued the restorer, Daniel Goldreyer, but not before both the media and the public had expressed their outrage at the cost, and that it had been paid to a restorer outside the Netherlands.

But more importantly, who declared museums the center for such critical sociological debates, and when? Moreover, while America removes Confederate statues from its plazas and the Netherlands' own national museum, citing the Dutch history of slavery, no longer uses the term "Golden Age" to describe 17th-century Dutch culture, shouldn't the real reason not to exhibit a $6 million Degas drawing – if it is to be censored at all – be the artist's rabid anti-Semitism?

Rather, we could talk about what there is to see in Degas' work: about his passion for depicting movement in a static image, about the line and color that so bewitched Van Gogh. Or we could talk about curator Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho's observation that "all the colors of the rainbow can be found in [the bather's] skin." We – or the museums – could teach people how to see.

In fact it was just this that, in 2005, inspired Holland's most celebrated curator, Rudi Fuchs, to bring a group of Moroccan-Dutch youth to the Rijksmuseum in an effort to teach them about art. The painting he selected: Rembrandt's "Jewish Bride" – a work, coincidentally, that Van Gogh himself once wrote brought him to tears. Not one student had a word to say about the fact that the bride was Jewish. Not one student had anything to say about the man's hand on the woman's breast. They talked about the painting while a reporter for Dutch national daily Volkskrant took notes. And when one student admired the gold jewelry the bride wore, Fuchs pushed her forward to the painting. "You don't see gold," he told her. "You see paint. Only paint." To another, he said, "Art is fantasy. You can see things in a painting that only you see. What do you see?"

But this is not the discussion Gordenker seems to have had in mind when she suggested that museums should stimulate conversation. Rather, it appears, she meant that a museum should create buzz so people will come – and this, she has certainly accomplished. The Degas drawing has now become the star attraction at a museum dedicated to the work of a different artist entirely, whose masterpiece sunflowers and sketches of peasants in the field will go unregarded as visitors seek out the fleshy buttocks of a comparatively unimportant "bather."

Yet meantime, museums as well as churches across the world still quietly spotlight their portraits of the Madonna nursing a naked baby Jesus. In the name of cultural sensitivity, should these now come down as well? Should the question even be debated? Rather than insisting on the normalcy of nudity, rather than teaching the importance of form and history and the painting of light along the curves of thighs and shoulders, rather than asking 'what do you see?,' opening the minds and eyes of those still stumbling in the dark, shall we just turn out the lights? Shall we stumble, too, in solidarity? Is that how it works?

Yes, it is important for a museum to inspire conversation. But not this conversation.

Because, as with the rampant "trigger warnings" on American campuses, such indulgences of small-mindedness and ignorance produce nothing, leaving only the slow death of the Enlightenment, of knowledge, the tragic, dark destruction of all we are, and all we could have been.

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism, will be published by Potomac Books. Follow her at @radicalstates.

Reprinted with permission from IPT News.

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All that journalist Dalia al-Aqidi was asking for was a brief interview, one-on-one, to air on a TV station in the Middle East. She was, after all, one of the region's best-known and most accomplished international reporters. But then-newly-elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused even to respond to her request. Now al-Aqidi, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in the United States since 1988, is challenging Omar to represent Minnesota's 5^th Congressional district.

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The decision to run for office didn't come easily to the 51-year-old al-Aqidi. But "after Omar was elected, her activities and her statements – it offended me as an American, as a Muslim, and it offended me as an immigrant, and that made me concentrate on her activities," she explained in a recent Skype interview.

Omar's non-response to her interview request, though, was what ultimately set her on her current path. "After that I said, 'I don't want to interview her. I'm going to talk to her district, and talk to her people.'"

In the process, she found that although Omar is herself a Somali refugee, many of her constituents, and particularly those in the Somali community, felt much the way al-Aqidi did. "Ilhan Omar is trying to give a false picture of what immigrants want," al-Aqidi says. "People now think Somalis come to the US to sit and get handouts, and come for free this and free that – it's not true at all. [So] now a large percentage of her own Somali community can't stand her anymore, because they see the damage she is doing to them."

Worse, the former journalist believes, is that Omar insists she speaks for Muslims. "No," al-Aqidi says. "She speaks for Islamists, not Muslims. But people don't always understand that. That's when people like me come to explain: your faith is between you and God, but Islamism is an agenda. Like this she is harming the Muslim communities."

It was this realization, too, that inspired her to run for office. "No one told me, 'Dalia, go run.' I chose it because I really believe she is harming the country, she is harming the state and our district here, by her positions, locally, nationally, and internationally."

Seated in her new home in Minneapolis – al-Aqidi moved to the city from Washington, DC just four months ago, after deciding to join the Congressional race – the elegant blonde cannot disguise her annoyance. But her anger is overpowered by a very clear sense of purpose: to oppose what she sees as efforts by organizations such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others to groom Islamists for local and national elections.

"That is extremely scary for someone like me who fled and ran away from these agendas," points out Al Aqadi, whose work for the past 10 years has focused on exposing radical Islam and Islamist movements. "I think it is my duty to stop it when I see groups starting to develop these agendas here. I mean – where else will I go to? The moon?"

Hence despite their superficial similarities – both Muslim, both refugees, both women – al-Aqidi and Omar couldn't be more different. While Omar hews to the far "radical" left of the Democratic Party, al-Aqidi is running as a Republican. And while Omar pushes an identity politics agenda, al-Aqidi adamantly opposes the identity politics trend.

Similarly, she roundly condemns the Somali-American's frequent anti-Semitic remarks. In a statement to the publication City Pages, she declared: "I love America. Maybe Ilhan Omar also does but you wouldn't know it from her public comments ... Her constant anti-Semitism and hateful rhetoric are toxic and serve only to gain attention for herself and position herself as a celebrity."

By contrast, al-Aqidi has already tasted celebrity; she has no need to run for office or speak on controversial subjects to get there. As a child growing up in Baghdad, she went to school with Saddam Hussein's sons. Her parents, both famous in the Iraqi theater world, separated when she was a small child. Hussein, she explained in the Chicago Tribune in 2004, allowed young Dalia to remain with her mother, rather than live with her father, as mandated by Iraqi law. By then, Dalia was already a child television star herself.

"But growing up," she explains now, "probably by the age of 16, 17, when I started looking around and seeing what was happening, say, to my neighbors, to others, not me and my family but what was happening to others in the country, that's when I started thinking this is not right – that these – the Iraqis, and I was one of them – are being brutalized by Saddam Hussein. And that was when my ideas and my political life started to mature. I started noticing and analyzing what was happening around me. You don't have to be a victim of someone to stand against him."

Celebrity found her, too, as a journalist: she reported for The Voice of Free Iraq from Saudi Arabia, for Voice of America from Washington, DC and later became a White House correspondent for various Middle Eastern venues, including Al-Arabiya, until entering the Minnesota race.

Along the way, while working in Saudi Arabia, she met the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens. "He was the one who convinced me my future was in America, and he was the one who made it possible for me and my family to come to the United States," she recalls.

It is perhaps the same sense of injustice that drove her as a teen to oppose Saddam that has made her so vehement in her opposition now to Ilhan Omar: Although she is not Jewish, she is deeply offended by Omar's many anti-Semitic statements and strong anti-Israel stance.

Similarly, Al-Aqidi spent last Thanksgiving helping to feed 250 of Minneapolis' homeless, while Omar, she told the New York Post, "doesn't even talk about homeless situation in Minneapolis, which is extremely cold and there are not enough places of shelters for them to sleep in [sic]."

She is also particularly concerned about Muslim women in America, especially immigrants, who are often subjected to oppressive, patriarchal rules and traditions of their lands of origin.

"Sometimes when immigrants come to the US, or any Western country, they don't integrate with the community and with the country," she explains. "They have their own rules that they brought from back home. And that puts pressure on girls and young women growing up. I'm not calling on them to leave their beliefs," she adds, "but to understand the values of the country they've moved to. "

What's more, she says, many of these women are often afraid to reach out. Consequently, she believes they will continue to be endangered – the more so as long as non-Muslims refuse to address these issues in the name of political correctness. "You have to be politically correct," she laments, "and I will never be politically correct. If I see something that is wrong, I will be clear. I will call things by their real name. It's the journalist instinct in me, which I think will make me a very good politician."

This, too, distinguishes the Iraqi-born candidate from the Somalia-born incumbent: Omar has long used identity politics, born of the emphasis on political correctness, to silence discussion about such uncomfortable topics as honor killings and domestic abuse in American Muslim families. "She uses that system designed to push any serious discussion or debate by using her identity as a shield," al-Aqidi argues. "She has this defense mechanism that if you criticize her for her stance or her statement or not doing her job, you are 'Islamophobic' or 'anti-colored women' or 'anti-immigrant.'"

At the same time, she notes, laughing, "I am also exactly like her. I am a woman. I am Muslim. I am a refugee. I am not a white supremacist." This, she believes, makes it possible for her to debate Omar on the issues and the problems of both the community and the nation.

Yet for all her talk of Ilhan Omar's unpopularity, al-Aqidi has her work cut out for her. She has been criticized heavily for the fact that she only just moved to the state, while Omar has lived there for nearly a decade. But the candidate counters that she has been coming to the area for a while – since, following Omar's refusal to sit for an interview, she first started speaking to the congresswoman's constituents and community leaders in her district. "That was how I started coming here," she notes, "and I fell in love with this district and I fell in love with this city. Sometimes you love a city for its buildings or it bridges, but this city has a soul, and that's why I fell in love with it. I loved this city even before I moved. I was waiting for any chance I had to come here. It's a city of music and art and food. Prince was from here. I love Prince."

But is love of the city of Minneapolis enough? She is among six Republicans listed for an August primary. And the state's 5^th district, which she hopes to represent, is heavily skewed for Democrats. It voted heavily for Omar, and according to Jewish Insider, "the last time a Republican served as its representative was in 1962."

Moreover, she is likely to receive some pushback from other Republicans, most notably for her insistence that Saudi Arabia, as she told the Investigative Project on Terrorism, "works with the United States to fight extremism" and that support for Saudi Arabia is in the interest of the United States – a position that contradicts the beliefs of many in the counterterrorism community.

Despite these hurdles, al-Aqidi remains undaunted. "It's not for me," she says. "This is the first time in the US political history that Muslims stand against Islamists. And it should be just the beginning. It will be the beginning of many to come."

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism, will be published by Potomac Books. 

The post Who is the anti-Islamist Muslim woman challenging Ilhan Omar? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.