Posted on 01/24/2004 7:43:39 AM PST by knighthawk
Israel's Ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, is in hot water with the Swedish Foreign Ministry in frigid Stockholm. While attending an art exhibition intended to complement an upcoming government-sponsored conference on "Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibilities," the ambassador unplugged three spotlights illuminating an exhibit entitled "Snow White and the Madness of Truth."
Pictured in a small ship floating in a pool full of blood-coloured water, is a homicidal Snow White, not out of Hans Christian Anderson, but an Islamic Jihad homicide bomber who mass-murdered 22 Israeli Jews and Arabs at a Haifa cafe last October. Hanadi Jaradat is shown "with the smile of an angel," accompanied by strains of Bach's Cantata 199, My Heart Swims in Blood.
Outraged by a travesty glorifying a terrorist killer while trivializing her victims, Ambassador Mazel did what he did. Maybe he should have just walked out -- and pulled the plug on Israeli participation in the perverse exhibition and the "Preventing Genocide" conference that it has already morally compromised. Or maybe the Swedes should thank him for contributing his own version of indignant "performance art."
Unfortunately, Stockholm's lurid "Snow White" is not an isolated incident. She follows in the footsteps of ugly dwarfs masking propaganda as art such as a 2002 Athens exhibit that glamorized in pink lace, Ayat Al Akra, the woman who blew up a Jerusalem supermarket. In 2001, Hamas sponsored at a Palestinian university a "Suicide Bombing Art Show," consisting of a room-sized installation featuring broken tables splattered with fake body parts, that paid tribute to the bomber who blew up a Jerusalem pizzeria killing 15 people.
The polarized reaction to Mazel's pulling the plug is revealing. In Israel, an understandably overwrought Tova Bahat, whose husband was killed and three-year-old son critically wounded in the Maxim cafe bombing, said: "I'm sorry the artist was not sitting in the restaurant when the bomb exploded." Even the left-wing newspaper, Haaretz, criticized the Swedish government for violating an agreement not to inject the Palestinian-Israeli dispute into the Stockholm conference, and called on Israel to cancel its participation.
On the other hand, Ambassador Mazel, before being asked to leave the museum, was menacingly heckled by several hundred Swedes who sounded like the chorus for a pogrom. The owner of the building in which Israel's Embassy in Stockholm had been housed for 50 years used bomb threats as an excuse to demand the Israelis vacate the premises. Many in the Swedish press joined Arab and Muslim newspapers in portraying the Israeli Ambassador as an "art vandal," while the London Observer asserted that the "ambassador erupted in violent protest" causing electrical wires "to short circuit and become a potential death trap." Never mind that a Dutch TV clip showed this charge was a lie. Lying about Israel has, of course, become the debased common currency of the European media.
The "artists" responsible -- Dror Feiler, a former Israeli, and his Swedish wife, Gunnar -- should not be allowed to squirm off the hook, and escape condemnation for their Snow White travesty that Feiler justified as an attempt "to call attention to how weak, lonely people can be capable of horrible things."
Nor can the Swedish government be excused for its actions in upbraiding the Israeli diplomat while refusing to forthrightly condemn Palestinian homicide bombers. The climate in Sweden for Jews is bad and getting worse. Just listen to Lena Posner-Korosi, head of Stockholm's Jewish community. "It is really to worry about in a democratic society like Sweden that 55 years after the war [Nazis] are showing their ugly faces again," she said after a television program profiling young Swedes who volunteered to fight for Hitler during the Second World War, and a recent poll showing that almost a third of Swedish young people now deny the Holocaust occurred.
What would Raoul Wallenberg, the brave Swede who took such risks to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps, think? More to the point, how has the Swedish government reacted to revelations of officially "neutral" Sweden's shameful history of political and economic complicity with the Axis, and to troubling polls about the prevalence of Holocaust denial among today's Swedish youth?
Unfortunately, despite some perfunctory efforts to memorialize dead Jews, the bottom line is that the Swedish government is as cynical as ever when it comes to live ones. The recent EU report on European anti-Semitism, initially suppressed as too embarrassing, documents that cemetery and synagogue desecrations and violent attacks on Jews have been on the upswing across Sweden. What has the Swedish government done in response to this disturbing trend? It's attempted to appease the primary sources of the new violent anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world -- by voting for a UN Human Rights Commission resolution condemning Israel and supporting "all available means, including armed struggle" to achieve Yasser Arafat's purposes.
At the Swedish government's upcoming anti-genocide conference, they should spare us the false pieties of another moment of silence for the victims of Nazism. Instead, Stockholm's justifiers of the avant-garde homicidal Snow White should do something for the real victims of terror by declaring that Sweden will back the campaign to declare suicide bombing a crime against humanity, thus creating a new tool to go after those who sponsor today's mass murderers.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold Brackman, an historian, is a consultant to the Center.
free republic also continues to be populated by the most eloquent of wordsmiths!
Is it a criticism or a compliment, when a Muslim calls you an "art vandal"? Not only do those people not believe in artistic freedom, they believe that anyone who criticizes Islam should be killed.
Oh, I just remembered. Only Muslims may murder their critics. The rest of us must grant unlimited "freedom of speech" to "artists" and homicide bombers alike.
It occurs to me, that I've been boycotting Sweden ... forever. What the heck have I ever bought from that country?
Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for the National Endowment for the Arts to acknowledge my grant request. I think I deserve it, DON'T YOU???
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