Posted on 01/17/2004 9:26:13 PM PST by Valin
Few places on earth seem likelier to soothe diplomatic tempers than the refined surroundings of a Swedish museum. So 400 invited guests quietly consuming canapes could be forgiven their amazement when an ambassador erupted in violent protest at a work of art depicting an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber. Zvi Mazel, Israel's ambassador to Sweden, ripped out electrical wires, grabbed a spotlight and hurled it into a fountain, causing it to short circuit and become a potential death trap.
The installation Snow White and the Madness of Truth, located in the courtyard of Stockholm's Museum of National Antiquities, featured a basin filled with red water, designed to look like blood. A sailboat with the name Snow White floated on the water, and placed like a sail was a photograph of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer who blew herself up in the Haifa suicide bombing in October which killed 21 Israelis.
Normally inoffensive, the Swedes provoked the sort of shocked response exponents of Britart only dream about. Kristian Berg, the director of the museum, said of Mazel: 'He pulled out the plugs and threw one of the spotlights into the fountain which caused the entire installation to short-circuit and made it totally life-threatening.'
Mazel defended his actions: 'For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the victims. As ambassador to Israel I could not remain indifferent to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality. This was not a piece of art. This was a monstrosity.'
One of the two artists who created the work, Israel-born Dror Feiler, said the ambassador had been 'totally unreasonable and undiplomatic' and would not listen to his explanations. 'He said he was ashamed that I was a Jew,' Feiler said. 'We see this as an offensive assault on our right to express our thoughts and feelings. Mazel tried to stop free speech and free artistic expression from being carried out in Sweden.'
Mazel was escorted from the building. Anna Larsson, a spokeswoman for the Swedish foreign ministry, said: 'We will contact him on Monday to arrange a meeting. We want to give him a chance to explain himself. We feel that it is unacceptable for him to destroy art in this way.'
The attack happened at the opening of Making Differences, held as part of an upcoming international conference on genocide. In Israel, foreign ministry spokesman David Saranga said the exhibit broke an understanding that the scope of the conference would not include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
'Israel called on the Swedish government to remove this exhibition because it is a glorification of a woman suicide bomber that killed 21 Israeli civilians in a restaurant,' Saranga said. 'If Sweden won't do so, Israel will consider its participation in the conference.'
Ah, but it is only his own right to express thoughts and feelings he cares about. He does not allow the ambassador to interpret his "art" in an interactive way.
And yesterday when another man placed a small boat with a portrait of the self-confessed murderer of Ms Lindh next to the installation, Mr Feiler called him a person with "dictatorial tendencies."
ScaniaBoy
BTW, I suspect the 'installation' in question was unmitigated crapola. Far from being anything a person of ordinary sensibilities would acknowledge as art.
God forbid any Swede should get hurt at an exhibit glorying a mass murderer. That was probably written with no sense of irony at all. How appalling stupid and insenstive can the people on the left be? It's not enough to be anti-semitic, and self-loathing, but roll in completely brain dead and it's a bad sign for Western civilization.
It is just as sick as "art" glorifying the holocaust. How about a festive arrangement of Nazi-harvested human skin lampshades?
There are, besides the dead, countless hundreds of Israelis, men women and children, living every day in agony with burns that never heal. Blinded and brain damaged and maimed and disfigured. Rat-poison dipped screws buried in their spines and brains.
And the sick Swedes glorify such an insane murderess, and condemn the angry ambassador.
I could almost, almost, wish that a "Palestinian performance artist" would detonate a car bomb outside of the museum next to a queue of eager museum visitors. Then perhaps the Swedes would understand.
Or would the ghoulish Swedes just rush about with cameras, snapping shots of body parts and screaming children? Dreaming of their next prize-winning museum piece?
Again that poem is the "Moslem" view which to any sane observer is at best madness, and in my view utterly evil. We should not try to "understand" Islam. If Islam has any respect at all it is because of those so called Moslems who don't truly follow Islam as it really is.
Lol, Valley Girl speak.
Like totally... fer sure?
They seem a heck of a lot more worried about a "potential" death trap (as if anyone is going to jump in the red water!) than they are about the ACTUAL deaths of REAL PEOPLE in the suicide bombings. Yeeesh.
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