[lit-ideas] Snow White and the Madness of Truth
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:22:02 -0800
[Page 148 of Bawer's While Europe Slept] "In January 2004, Swedish
anti-Semitism made headlines around the world. The occasion was Snow White
and the Madness of Truth, an art installation at Stockholm's Museum of
National Antiquities that consisted of a toy sailboat floating in a pool of
blood in the museum's courtyard. Serving as the boat's sail was a portrait
of a beautiful, smiling young woman - Palestinian suicide bomber Hanadi
Jaradat, who a few months earlier had killed twenty-one people in Haifa.
Accompanying the installation was a text that alternated lines from 'Snow
White' by the Brothers Grimm with excerpts from news stories about Jaradat,
who sought to avenge her brother's death at the hands of Israeli security
forces. The intent of the 'artist' was plainly to win sympathy for Jaradat
and to equate terrorism with legitimate national defense; the exhibition
catalog even described Jaradat as a 'freedom fighter.'
"In short, Snow White was a predictable piece of left-wing political art,
romanticizing and aestheticizing Middle Eastern terrorism from a safe
distance. It would probably have remained obscure but for one simple act:
at a reception celebrating the exhibition opening, Zvi Mazel, the Israeli
ambassador to Sweden, unplugged the three spotlights that illuminated Snow
White. He was immediately escorted out of the museum. When news of his
action (which was duly characterized as vandalism) got out, the Swedish
foreign ministry rebuked him and the Israeli government cheered.
Commentators around the world denounced Mazel, some of them sounding more
outraged by the unplugging of the spotlights than by the murder of
twenty-one people. Largely lost in the controversy was the fact that the
art exhibition was tied to a conference on genocide that was supposed to
focus on the Holocaust; apparently at the Stockholm art museum, as the
Jewish Museum in Berlin, it was impossible to contemplate the Shoah without
invoking the conceit that the Palestinians are today's Jews and the Jews are
today's Nazis."
Lawrence
Other related posts:
