Expect I'll be visiting the right wing sites to see how they cover these two stories. I can make an educated guess, though.
Roy hopes Saddam's fate for Bush
Writer Arundhati Roy, who wants an ongoing anti-globalisation conference to launch a campaign to shut down US companies, said Sunday she hoped President George W Bush would share the fate of the captured Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"If Saddam Hussein deserves to be humiliated and have his fillings counted and his hair checked for lice on primetime TV, then so does George Bush," Roy told about 100 people at a leftist convention on the sidelines of the World Social Forum.
"Saddam Hussein surely ought to be tried for crimes against humanity. But so should all his accomplices in the US and Europe," she said.
"To applaud the US army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler," Roy said.
Doubt that's going to go over too well.
Meanwhile, over in Europe: Israeli Ambassador Kicked Out of Swedish Museum After Vandalizing Art
The art installation, called Snow White and located in the museum's courtyard, 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 photo of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the female lawyer who blew herself up in the Haifa suicide bombing attack in October which killed 21 Israelis.
"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," the ambassador told Swedish news agency TT.
According to museum director Kristian Berg, the ambassador went berserk in front of the 400 specially-invited guests when he saw the piece.
"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," he told TT.
Life-threatening? Well, I'm sure the ambassador will be sternly rebuked for this display of. . .
Sharon praises art vandalism
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has praised the Israeli ambassador to Sweden for vandalising a Stockholm art exhibit about Palestinian suicide bombers, saying the "entire government stands behind him".
[. . .] Sharon expressed unreserved support for the ambassador's action.
"I called our ambassador in Sweden Zvi Mazel last night and thanked him for his strength in dealing with increasing anti-Semitism, and told him that the entire government stands behind him," he told a cabinet meeting.
"I think Ambassador Mazel behaved in an appropriate way," he added. "I think the phenomenon (of anti-Semitism) is so serious that it would have been forbidden not to have acted on the spot.
Dror Feiler, the Israeli-born artist who created Snow White and the Madness of Truth, said it was supposed to call attention to how weak, lonely people can be capable of horrible things.
Israeli-born anti-Semites are the worst kind, you know.
Back in the previous article:
One of the two artists who created the work, Israeli-born Dror Feiler, told AFP the ambassador was "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."
The other artist, Feiler's Swedish wife Gunilla Skoeld Feiler, told daily Expressen that the work was "not a glorification of the suicide bomber."
"I wanted to show how incomprehensible it is that a mother-of-two, who is a lawyer no less, can do such a thing," she said.
"When I saw her picture in the paper, I thought she looked like Snow White, that's why I gave that name to the piece," she added.
Well, see, there's the problem. That's practically treating her like a human being, when everyone knows the Paleostinians are subhuman savages, etc., etc. Oh, that reminds me, in that thread at Tacitus' place, someone did write:
This quote:
"When I heard Bush was coming here I couldn't believe it. I was
outraged and disgusted, and I just think it's a photo op. It's so
transparent," said Kathy Nicholas, a flight attendant from Atlanta, who
was among hundreds of local supporters protesting Bush before his
appearance at the tomb of the civil rights leader.
From:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,108508,00.html
Looked to me as a faint echo of the Palestinian repsonse to Sharon's
visit to the temple mount. I wonder how similar are the sensibilities.
I wonder what the fuck he's talking about, but that's me.
Ah. And the art destruction story has already spawned a thread at Little Green Footballs. Eh, Static Shock doesn't start for another few hours -- and why it's premiering on Sunday here in Chicago is (Batman) beyond me -- so where's the harm in having a quick look?
Update: Oh, right. Because they're horrific racist morons over there. How could I forget?
As usual, the more I look at this, the more I'm reminded of why I avoid the political stuff lately. From Haaretz: Swedish envoy: artwork exhibited in Stockholm 'in bad taste':
[Sweden's ambassador to Israel Robert Rydvberg] said that the artwork was not a justification of suicide bombers. "The piece is about a Palestinian woman having murdered innocent civilians. It mentions the names of the tragic Israeli victims in Haifa. It is not a justification of suicide bombings. It is in my view an example of bad taste, but I think the whole issue has been blown out of proportion."
Which doesn't quite match the headline, but it's hard to fit all them words in.
[Israel's ambassador to Sweden Zvi Mazel] was unrepentant about damaging the "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" exhibit at Stockholm's Historical Museum. "My wife and I stood there and began to tremble," he said on the Ynet site. "There was the terrorist, wearing perfect makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of blood of my brothers and the families that were murdered."
The envoy told Haaretz that his protest was not spontaneous; he had planned the act after learning about the exhibit in the local press. He said he could not understand how an exhibition devoted to preventing genocide can feature a work that casts the murderer of 22 Israelis as Snow White. "In my eyes, that's not art; it's abominable," he said.
So, that's premeditated destruction of a work of art. By an ambassador. Is it possible to satirize something like this?
The exhibit is the work of an Israeli expatriate musician and artist, Dror Feiler, who has been active in "Jews for Israeli-Palestinian peace," a Stockholm-based group opposed to Israeli activities in the territories. As background music to his exhibit, the Tel Aviv-born Feiler mixed music from Bach's 199 Cantata "My Heart Swims in Blood." Feiler castigated Mazel's action as vandalism.
"At last, he managed to render something which caused a political outcry - that's what is called artistic terror," Buki Greenberg, a friend of Feiler's and fellow musician-artist, said Saturday.
Feiler told Army Radio Sunday morning that his artwork was misunderstood. "The display itself is against violence. It can be summed up by a biblical quote: 'He who spills human blood shall have his own blood spilled by man,' and this is exactly what we need to put an end to. The Israeli ambassador caused diplomatic and political damage to Israel, and since he is an intellectual midget, his actions were similar to those of a stall owner in a third world country," Feiler said.
Historical Museum Director Kristian Berg said that the exhibit will remain on display. "You can have your own view of what this piece of art is all about, but using violence is never, ever allowed, and it is never allowed to try to silence the artist," he said.
In recent months, Israel's Foreign Ministry has invested considerable effort to ensure that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is kept off the agenda of the genocide conference. "The goal has been to prevent the Durbanization of this conference," a top Foreign Ministry official said Saturday, referring to the eruption of anti-Israeli protests at the 2001 human rights conference in the South African city.
I mean, I can't, but perhaps others are more imaginative.
No one, with the possible exception of Kristian Berg, comes out looking good on this one. The artist was trying to provoke a reaction -- possibly a discussion, but that quote from his friend ain't encouraging -- and the ambassador was only too happy to oblige.
Lost in all this, of course, is the perfectly reasonable question of why a "mother-of-two, who is a lawyer" would choose to kill herself and twenty-two others.
OccupationalHazard.org 10.15.03: Ticking bomb - Vered Levy-Barzilai - Ha'aretz
Four months ago, Hanadi Jaradat stood over the freshly dug grave of her brother Fadi and vowed to avenge his death. "Your blood will not have been shed in vain," she is quoted as saying by the Jordanian daily Al-Arab al-Yum. "The murderer will yet pay the price and we will not be the only ones who are crying." Weeping bitterly, she added: "If our nation cannot realize its dream and the goals of the victims, and live in freedom and dignity, then let the whole world be erased."
But why ask questions you already know the answers to?