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The Disgusting Defacement of Lord Balfour's Painting

(Spectator-UK) Brendan O'Neill - Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now "pro-Palestine" activists are taking aim at art. Witness the fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge University - an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will do precisely nothing to help people in Gaza. The slashing of the painting was carried out by a member of a group called Palestine Action. She walked up to the 1914 portrait and sprayed it with red paint before wielding her knife to cut it to shreds. Why target Balfour? Because he played a key role in creating the modern state of Israel. And to the manically Israelophobic, there are few sins as grave as that. There was something deeply unsettling about this Taliban-style assault on a piece of art. An individual, under the spell of some kind of fear or animus, using violence to try to cleanse the world of a sinful image. It feels like a Red Guard-style effort to scrub "the problematic" from public view. Such wanton cultural vandalism is the rage of the entitled, destroying art in the name of "saving Palestine." It's the theater of self-righteousness. The slashing of that painting was not merely a performative assault on a Dead White European Male. It was also a noisy, violent signal that anyone involved in the creation of Israel is evil and deserves erasure from public life. It was a clamorous declaration of intolerance towards anyone who helped to found or who supports this allegedly evil state. What will no doubt be justified as an anti-imperial act was in truth an imperious expression of haughty English disgust for a tiny state overseas. Some seem to be in the grip of a kind of Palestine mania. Their feverish obsession with Israel and the idea that it is a "uniquely murderous" entity belongs less to the realm of reason than to the sphere of moral delirium. Why does Israel-Palestine induce in some people more wrath and more emotion than anything else happening in the world right now? I know why I think it does.
2024-03-11 00:00:00
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