http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/coexist-street-artist-promoting-tolerance-of-muslims-attacked-by-muslims/

February 9, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield 19 Comments

via Combo Facebook page

Combo is a “street artist”, which is to say he’s a minor pretentious nuisance like Banksy. He “remixes” culture by combining images. The son of a Lebanese Christian father and a Moroccan Muslim mother, he began putting up prints of the infamous Coexist symbol of a cross, crescent and star-of-david, along with messages promoting tolerance toward Muslims in France.
And an image of himself dressed in Muslim clothing. It ended, predictably, badly.

The young French street artist Combo, known for his topical graffiti around Paris, has revealed that he was beaten up in Paris while putting up his latest work: a picture of himself standing next to the word “coexist”, written with religious symbols.
He wrote on his Facebook page that he was knocked to the ground and repeatedly beaten by a group of men as he was pasting up some art on a Paris street late at night. He tried to defend himself from the beating.
During a residency in Bayreuth, he grew his beard and started wearing the traditional Muslim dress—not because he was increasingly attracted to a more fundamentalist version of Islam, but, again, to disrupt established codes.
“Tired that I wasn’t giving up, they left me bleeding and ran off. They promised me the same treatment if I started again and advised me to shave off my beard.” He said that despite threats he would continue to post his work around Paris streets.
His recent work includes pictures around Paris of himself wearing Muslim dress standing next to his own spray-painted comments, such as “did you know Muslims finish their prayers ‘amen’ like Christians and Jews” or “there are 50,000 Muslim soldiers in France”.

Combo though also had some more provocative pieces of street art, including some saying, “The suit does not make the monk. And the beard does not make the imam” and “Did you know that the veil is not a religious obligation”.

Though it doesn’t appear that these messages are the ones that got him assaulted. His unwillingness to clarify who his attackers are, suggest though that they were Muslim.

Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. “It would only add fuel to the fire,” he told the French newspaper.

On his Facebook page, he wrote…

I would stay deliberately vague on the description of the cowards and the exact place where it happened, because for me no matter where they come, skin color, religion or political ideas. In this context they represented only stupidity and ignorance

That makes it all too obvious.

Filed Under: The Point

About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.