A few of the exhibits are on loan from Israeli museums, and that is making some Arab artists and intellectuals freak out.
BDS France organized a campaign to boycott the exhibit, and they got some fairly famous Arab figures to sign on, like Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, former PLO official Hanan Ashrawi, and US academics Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad. In total they gathered 250 signatures of Arab intellectuals and entertainers.
The petition said the Institute holding the exhibition "would betray its intellectual mission by adopting this normalizing approach - one of the worst forms of coercive use. and immoral art as a political tool to legitimize colonialism and oppression ”
On Sunday, the president of the Arab World Institute and former French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, insulted the BDS open letter and its signatories, saying that the petition was "laughable."
"It's a reaction that seeks to divert this exhibition from its deep meaning, which has nothing to do with this or that political debate," said Lang, in a radio interview. He noted that out of 300 objects being exhibited, only about four came from Israel.
"It is a trivial and somewhat unfortunate matter, especially since I myself contributed to highlighting the Palestinian culture as no other person or institution has ever done,” the IMA president added. "It saddens me to note that people, some of quality, writers and philosophers, let themselves get carried away, a bit like sheep, signing a text whose veracity they have not even checked", he added.
Jack Lang is pretty much telling the BDSers that they are idiots. Then he added that their boycott is meaningless: "The exhibition is a hit and gets an enthusiastic response, and every day the crowd is considerable."
