A year ago, Australia was in an uproar when the government decided not to send a work by a Lebanese Australian artist, Khaled Sabsabi, to the to represent the country at the 2026 Venice Biennale, after it was revealed that he had created pro-terrorist video artwork installations.
Two of them are shown here. One from 2007, "You," repeatedly portrays videos of former Hezbollah terror leader Hassan Nasrallah as angelic figures of light, which the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney said "suggest divine illumination."
The other shows the planes crashing into the World Trade Center and then shows President Bush saying in a stutter, "Thank you very much," which is what Sabsabi named the installation.
These pieces are not "ambiguous" as the narrator in the videos claims. Sabsabi himself makes that clear even as he ingenuously says that they are about "humanity."
Thousands of Australian artists signed an open letter protesting that this decision was an assault on artistic freedom.
Australia's Jewish Independent looked at the signatures of both letters and found that over 200 of the same artists protesting censoring Australia platforming a pro-terror artist also supported censoring every Israeli artist.
In fact, Khaled Sabsabi himself signed the letter supporting censoring Israel's exhibit.
The Israeli art piece by Ruth Patir was not about celebrating war or terror. It reimagined fertility goddesses as real life mothers.
Jewish artists in Australia have been under siege. 600 Jewish creatives were doxxed, and several of them have been victims of discrimination in the art world just because they were Jewish. As the newspaper notes:
The Jewish Independent knows of several shocking individual cases including an established artist dropped by a gallery that had represented her for years; a young gallery worker who left her job after being confronted with antisemitic stereotypes; and an emerging artist with a recognisably Jewish family name who went from having several projects a year accepted to having every application rejected since October 7.The situation is so dire that sculptor Nina Sanadze has founded Goldstone Gallery for the express purpose of platforming artists cancelled for political reasons, predominantly Jewish and Israeli artists.
We see the same hypocrisy in the academic world every day, where pro-terror and even antisemitic positions are justified as freedom of expression but any pro-Zionist voices are silenced for supposedly moral reasons.
But here we have a list of people who sign their names to diametrically opposed petitions that prove their own hypocrisy.
(h/t Jill)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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