Every time I see a “Coexist” bumper sticker (and I see a lot of them in Berkeley), I think of soft-headed liberals who don’t understand the first thing about jihad. One of those Coexist fans just got mugged by reality (in Irving Kristol’s famous words), not in Berkeley, but in Paris.  

Jihad Watch reports:

“Street Artist Combo Brutally Attacked for Pacifist Tag Post Charlie Hebdo,” by Coline Milliard, artnet news, February 5, 2015 (thanks to BD):

It seems like something one would be hard pressed to disagree with: the word “coexist,” written on a wall using a Muslim crescent as the letter “C,” a Star of David as the letter “X,” and a Christian cross as a “T.”

But in Paris, this particular iteration of the popular inscription—here, created by the street artist Combo, who also pasted a life-size photo of himself next to it—didn’t go down well with everybody. Le Monde reports that four young people asked the artist to remove it last weekend, and beat him up severely when he refused to do so.

Combo ended up with a dislocated shoulder and many bruises.

The attack is characteristic of the inter-religious tensions that plague France and have been exacerbated by the Charlie Hebdo tragedy (see 12 Killed at Magazine Previously Attacked for Satirical Cartoons). Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. “It would only add fuel to the fire,” he told the French newspaper.

A former adman, the artist has taken his politically-charged street art to Los Angeles and Hong Kong, where he pasted printouts of web pages forbidden by the Chinese government. “My pieces function in a disruptive manner, they surprise, and appear up where they shouldn’t be,” he said.

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. To his friends asking him whether he was “going to jihad” in Lebanon, he answered, “I’m going to ji-art.”

Jihandists have no interest at all in coexistence. They want domination. That’s pretty simple, but beyond the understanding of people who pride themselves in their sophistication.  Cobo is lucky to be alive. Let’s hope he wises up.