Yes. You are, in fact, antisemitic.
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| Some of Matthew Collings' "art". |
Matthew Collings is one of the grandees of the British art world. From gallery shows to television documentaries, he occupies a spot as a public artist, much like Waldemar Januszczak and Sister Wendy, as a popularizer of "difficult" art, bringing art from the ivory tower down to the masses.
An art exhibition in Kent, England, is showcasing imagery rooted in classic antisemitic libels and denying documented atrocities from the October 7th Hamas massacre.
The exhibition — “Drawings Against Genocide” by British artist Matthew Collings — is on display at Joseph Wales Studios in Margate.
The collection includes roughly 100 works targeting Jews, Israel, and the United States. Several drawings portray Jews as horned, demonic figures standing atop piles of skulls, alongside phrases such as “we love death.” One depicts French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi consuming babies, echoing centuries-old blood libel myths used to incite hatred and violence against Jews.
I will say this as clearly as I can. Being against the current Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu is not antisemitic. If so, then the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who regularly protest the Likud / religious nationalist government would be antisemites. The people who comment on this blog and who read it, I'm sure, share a common animus towards the Netanyahu administration. (There was one former commenter who caped for Netanyahu on this blog. I eventually banned him when he decided that he was more of a real Zionist than one of our Jewish members.)
But using antisemitic tropes to criticize that government is nothing but rank racism and hatred. It is a page out of Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter. It is nothing but the blood libel which has led to the oppression of Jews for the entirety of European history, and their mass extermination a mere eighty years ago.
Collings is not new to antisemitic controversy:
Collings denied the accusations and claimed his work targets Israel rather than Jews. His record has drawn renewed scrutiny. In 2019, he was briefly selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate. The party suspended him after he dismissed concerns about antisemitism and made inflammatory remarks about late former Chief Rabbi of the UK Lord Jonathan Sacks.
It should be no surprise that he's a Corbynite. And how does making inflammatory remarks about a former Chief Rabbi "criticise Israel"?
This makes me sad, because I have had occasion to watch a few of Collings' television programs, and found them to be informative and enlightening. And I do, at times, draw a distinction between the artist and the art, for example with regards to someone like Clint Eastwood, or the late Robert Duvall. But this falls into the realm of Ezra Pound, whose virulent hatred of Jews led him to Italy during World War II to make propaganda radio broadcasts for the Italian fascist government. After the war, the US government confined him to an asylum; the great and the good of the literary firmament howled that he should be released. And, to be frank, Pound had a much greater influence on modern poetry than Collings has had on modern art.
It is now de rigeur among the leftist creative class that art can only thrive with the destruction of the Zionist settler-colonialist project. Peace and freedom can only be achieved once the PLO's flag is hoisted over Jerusalem, and the former Israeli Jews either expelled, murdered, or living under Muslim sufferance as dhimmis. The House of Islam, with fifty-two nations where Islam is the official state religion, is under unendurable oppression unless a government led by Hamas takes its place as the fifty-third Muslim nation. In pursuit of this utopia nothing is too extreme.
It pains me to inform people who hold to this view that you are not, in fact, virtuous freedom fighters for the indigenous. If you were, then you'd support a Jewish state, as Jews are the indigenous people of Palestine, present in the land without interruption for three thousand years. Arabs by comparison are Johnny-come-latelies. Rather than dismissively asking why don't Israeli Jews simply return to Warsaw or Crown Heights, one should ask why Palestinians don't return to Jeddah. (And none of the American contingent aching for a new Holocaust are volunteering to depart from these shores and make restitution to indigenous American nations.)
The fact of the matter is that "antizionism" is nothing but antisemitism dressed up in new clothes for a new age. Equating Zionism with fascism and racism is simply a gross perversion of the meaning of words. Are there Zionists who are racist? Of course there are. No group is immune from perfidy. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister under Netanyahu who is in charge of Israel's police, makes claims against Arabs that eight decades ago would be on a par with statements made by Adolf Eichmann against Jews. Zionism, though, is not Ben-Gvir. Zionism is the proposition that Jews, with their voluminous history to draw on for evidentiary support, need their own homeland which they can defend, or the Jewish people will, sooner or later, be exterminated as the ultimate Other in countries in which they've lived for centuries. A Gentile antizionist, in the end, would look upon this extermination with sang froid. A Jewish antizionist hopes for just a little bit more life as he helps shovel the crematoria.
I have grown absolutely tired of the justifications. I much prefer Nazis; there you know where you stand. The Left hides its racism and hatred behind lofty appeals to peace and human advancement. They will call it peace even after they make a desert.