In Dresden, a statue of a nude woman in a crouching position has just been removed from the plaza where it has been on display for decades. The officials who removed it were anticipating that the hundreds of Muslim migrants moving into a new dwelling, a former hotel, located near the statue, would be offended, but even before they received a single complaint from Muslims — who had not yet moved in — those officials decided to remove the statue to an out-of-the-way place in the courtyard of an office complex, where it was felt far fewer people would be likely to see it. So Muslim sensibilities, or what were guessed at to be Muslim sensibilities, are now to determine what can and cannot be on display in a German city. The indigenous Germans, and foreign tourists, are now to be deprived of the pleasure of viewing the sculpture in a well-travelled and accessible spot. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this fine-arts censorship can be found here: “No country for fine art: Nude sculpture removed from outside new asylum center in Germany over religious sensitivities,” Remix News, September 7, 2023:

Local authorities in the German city of Dresden have ordered the removal of a bronze sculpture depicting a naked woman from the vicinity outside a new asylum shelter, with critics claiming they have done so over fears the new arrivals would find the statue offensive.

The removal of Die Sinnende (The Sinner) sculpture took place ahead of the first of 140 migrants moving into the all-inclusive accommodation on Friday; the facility is expected to eventually house 280 migrants in total, which Remix News reported on earlier this week. The city has taken over the building on a 10-year lease for €432,000 a year.

“We are housing only men here — from Afghanistan, Syria, and Venezuela,” said Dresden’s construction mayor Stephan Kühn (Greens).

“The Sinnende has left its usual place and is now situated in the courtyard of a large office complex,” a council spokeswoman told the German newspaper Bild. She claimed the local authority had simply wanted to create more space in the entrance area, but this narrative has been contested.

Holger Zastrow, the chairman of the FDP parliamentary group in the Saxony parliament who represents the same party as Dresden city mayor, Dirk Hilbert, claimed this reasoning was “false.”

“Art is banished from public space to the backyard because of assumed sensitivities,” he told Bild. “This is not acceptable. I demand of the administration that the sculpture be returned to its ancestral place,” he added.

There was no need to “create more space” for Muslims going in and out of their new, quite luxurious residence (with large single-occupancy rooms, a hairdresser, a gym, a canteen serving three meals a day, and a “leisure activities” coordinator, to help these idle Muslim economic migrants fill up their days); the plaza is very large and the statue of the crouching female not quite life-size; on its plinth, it took up very little room. The real reason it was moved was fear of how Muslims might react to such an offense to their sensibilities. Might they respond by trying to smash the statue? Muslims have for years been smashing religious statues and breaking altars in churches all over Europe; why would they not do the same to such an “immodest” statue?

What will this submission do? It will encourage Muslims elsewhere in Germany, and in Europe, to think that they can dictate the public art that will be allowed on display. If they claim that nudes offend them, and “they cannot be responsible for what will happen if a certain statue is not removed,” what official will keep such a statue on view? No one wants to be blamed if after a statue has been complained about, remains in situ, and then is damaged or destroyed. It’s easier to submit to a Muslim diktat.

And why would Muslims stop with statuary? What about those offensive paintings in museums, such as those that depict slave girls in a harem, or a Muslim slave market with European slaves being examined by potential Arab buyers, or “orientalist ” depictions of stereotypical burnoosed Arabs, waving their scimitars, riding their camels into furious battle? And what about al the paintings with Christian themes? Why should Muslim visitors to museums not be shielded from paintings of the Christ child, or John the Baptist, or the Annunciation, or the Dormition of Mary, or Christ on the Cross, or the Flight From Egypt, or the Last Supper? These offend Muslims; cover them up, or put all such paintings in a separate wing of European museums, that will be clearly marked so that Muslims will not, by mistake, enter those rooms where they would be exposed to Christian scenes and iconography?

And what about all the memorials in Germany — and also, on a lesser scale, in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands — to the Holocaust, with the symbolic statues of the murdered, the lists engraved on stone of those deported from each city, the plaques on walls that tell the viewer that it was here that the Jewish ghetto once stood, or where Jews were gathered to be sent by cattle cars to their deaths in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec? Would it really be wrong to move, or covered up, or efface, some of these Holocaust memorials? After all, that was all so long ago, and now that Muslims are living in the midst of Europe, shouldn’t we consider their feelings? So many of them think that the world has heard quite enough about the Holocaust, which only encourages sympathy for the “Zionist entity” and that, of course, will never do. All of these statues, representing a murdered child or family, all these plaques, and these stark commemorative stones with names of the deported engraved, ought to be, if not put into permanent storage, at least placed far from where Muslims are likely to see them. Hats off to those Dresden officials who, putting their fingers to the wind, have sensed how to behave to make sure that these “new Germans” have nothing to complain about.