Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Elder of ZiyonAt first glance, you may not notice what's painted on the side of Biggie's gas station and convenience store at the corner of E.55th and Cedar.
Amongst other religious and political commentary, is one image that's so disturbing, so grotesque, we have to blur it out in order to post it or use it on TV.
The picture shows a priest engaged in a sexual act with a baby. There's writing on top that says, "Talmudic priests in Church. Sex with minors permitted." It's an image that Biggie's owner Abe Auiad told us - flat out - he stands behind.
"That's a circumcision," says Abe Ayad.
The owner is trying to say that this is actually an image of a priest doing a circumcision on a baby. The problem is that the wording up above says, "sex with minors permitted."
It turns out that this Abe Ayad has been putting up offensive murals for years...and they are often nakedly antisemitic.
The owner of Biggie’s, Brahim “Abe” Ayad, a forty-something Palestinian-American who lives in North Olmsted, once explained to Douglas Guth of the Cleveland Jewish News that the murals represent his “protest against ‘evil-doing Zionists’ who, among other offenses, he claims, took away his Palestinian father’s land to make way for the state of Israel.” Ayad further explained that “[t]he shocking imagery on his walls are his way ‘of fighting fire with fire,’ and that ‘[i]f they want to insult me, they should know how it feels to be insulted.’”
Previous complaints about the murals have gone nowhere.
