Sigh: French graffiti artist reports attack by gang over Coexist artwork

Combo is a French street artist known for Banksy-style graffiti mostly in France, but around the world as well. He was born to a Lebanese Christian father and a Moroccan Muslim mother, according to The Guardian, and as such is a symbol of French pluralism. He has tagged walls in Paris, Lebanon (“Less Hamas, more hummus”), and Hong Kong (“pasted censored Google pages on walls”). His message is a sort of naive but unobjectionable peace-is-good, everybody-live-together, anti-repression one.

But someone objected, as Combo was painting the “Coexist” emblem of bumpersticker fame in Paris:

A French graffiti artist has told how he was attacked by a gang after refusing to take down a mural calling for religious harmony in Paris.

The artist, known as Combo, was left with a dislocated shoulder and bruises across his face after being set upon in a ghetto in the east of the capital.

He had just finished a design that featured the word ‘coexist’ written with a Muslim crescent for letter C, a Star of David as the X and a Christian cross as the ‘T’.

It was accompanied by a life-size self-portrait and his tag ‘combo’.

He was allegedly beaten by a group of four young men who warned him against painting the image anywhere else and demanded he shave his beard.

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.

“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.

Combo says he won’t reveal anything more about his attackers because it would “only add fuel to the fire,” in Paris (Ed this quote was corrected). If we accept his story at face value, we can use our powers of deduction to determine who might object violently to a Coexist message, seemingly without recognizing irony, and also have a fixation with beards.

Le Monde, The Guardian, and the Daily Mail are all reporting the incident, but it has not made an appearance in American media outside of blogs. The Daily Mail’s story is accompanied by a photo of Combo, showing pretty bad facial bruising, so there’s evidence of an injury. His past work, aimed at bringing faiths together, seems to offer no indication of motivation to fabricate such an attack. But in the absence of a police report or corroboration, it’s important to at least note the possibility. Looks like it’s probably legit.