Two armed men who were killed while trying to storm a Texas conference center where an exhibition of cartoons depicting the prophet of Islam was taking place were simply misunderstood street performers, it was claimed today.

The Muslim Society of Islamic Street Theater and Pavement Arts has said that the two extremists who attacked the Curtis Culwell Convention Center in Garland, 15 miles northeast of Dallas, were actually taking part in a piece of performance art and had hoped to be considered for inclusion in the competition.

The society’s spokesman, Mohammed Kartounz, told the Dandy Goat’s Terrorism and Art correspondent that the men, who on Sunday opened fire with AK-47s and were killed by a police officer with his service pistol before they could be cut down in a hail of semi-automatic gunfire from enraged gun enthusiasts, were enacting a “metaphorical living portrait,” representing the “ironic contradictions within a religion that claims to be the religion of peace but is home to the world’s most bloodthirsty mass killers.”

“It’s also likely that they intended to create a four-dimensional sound tableaux with the firing of their weapons and shouts of ‘Allahu akbar,’” he added.

“There is a long tradition of Muslim street theater going back to the dawn of Islam in Arabia almost 1400 years ago, which has largely been overlooked by Western cultural historians and whose significance is frequently misunderstood,” said Mr. Kartounz.

He pointed out that the long and bloody schism between Shia and Sunni Muslims originally started as a dispute over artistic differences amongst actors in an Islamic improvisational mime troupe in Yemen, some of whose members had wanted to start incorporating dialogue into their performances.