SAIC's Wafaa Bilal censored

When Wafaa Bilal asked us to shoot an Iraqi, no one objected. In fact, he received international acclaim.

As part of his 2007 interactive project Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month at FLATFILEgalleries in the West Loop, where he lived, worked, and dodged more than 65,000 paintballs. To call attention to the everyday violence plaguing Iraqi civilians, Bilal—a native of Iraq who now teaches at the School of the Art Institute had set up a website that allowed visitors to chat with him or blast him with a paint gun. Many shot first and apologized later, after seeing the website’s video footage of an increasingly frazzled Bilal confined to his wrecked makeshift bedroom. Inviting us to pretend to shoot American soldiers, however, has landed Bilal in a firestorm of controversy.

The artist was supposed to present Virtual Jihadi, his follow-up to Domestic Tension, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State earlier this month, but as Stevenson Swanson reported in the Chicago Tribune, the exhibit was shut down after less than a day. Virtual Jihadi is a video game that encourages players to fight their way to a bunker where President Bush is hiding, and—in the guise of Bilal’s avatar—blow W. up. Someone called the FBI. RPI’s College Republicans declared the school’s art department a “terrorist safe haven.” And William N. Walker, RPI’s vice-president, expressed concern about Virtual Jihadi’s link to Night of Bush Capturing, the Al Qaeda video game Bilal used as a template. (Walker failed to mention that Night of Bush Capturing is based on a 2003 American video game: Quest for Saddam.)

Maybe I hate freedom, but I find this appalling. Bilal isn’t advocating the assassination of the President. He’s trying to call attention to young jihadis’ motives and recruitment methods and jolt us out of our indifference to the Iraqis who have died in the war—human beings whom many Americans only recognize as the kinds of stereotypes who appear in Quest for Saddam. In June 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that 50,000 Iraqis had been killed since the 2003 invasion; current estimates vary from Iraq Body Count’s 82,109 to The Lancet’s infamous report of more than 600,000. One of these casualties was Bilal’s brother.

After RPI censored Bilal’s work, Virtual Jihadi reopened at Troy, NY’s Sanctuary for Independent Media. For one day. Then the city shut down the Sanctuary, citing "code violations." Incidents like this make me hope someone is developing the video game Night of Bush Impeaching. In the meantime, you can learn more about the current status of Bilal’s project at wafaabilal.com.