“Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”…but they have also glazed over many times when I read the endless and long list of people’s names who are willing to publicly state that Israel is the most—perhaps the only–evil country on earth. They wish to boycott Israel, its products, its academics, its people. Many are well-known names, distinguished names. They are also all conformists and hypocrites, whose standards for Arab and Muslim countries are so low that they do not expect anything but severe violations of human rights among them. Thus, contrary to their own “amour-propre,” their happy little view of who they think they are, in my opinion, they are racists, willing to condemn Muslims and people of color to their murderous leaders—all to avoid being called “racists” themselves. They are also racists because they do not understand that their anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism=racism.
Anti-Semitism is indeed the only acceptable racism and it is not seen as such.
Thus, Hollywood and Broadway stars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, both Americans and Israelis, have now initiated a boycott of the Ariel Cultural Center in Israel.
I have just written a piece which I’ve titled “Artists Without Borders” in which I suggest that other actors, playwrights, painters, academics all visit and perform their magic in the city of Ariel—a city which is currently being targeted with a world-wide boycott of its Cultural Center because it stands “over the Green Line.”
If you are a playwright, performer, rapper, poet, etc. please contact either me through my website (www.phyllis-chesler.com) or Craig Dershowitz at Artists4Israel who may be found through their website HERE.
Artists Without Borders
Why not?
We understand that doctors and other emergency care personnel cross borders and leave their own political point of view behind. If quake victims happen to live under a dictatorship—no matter; if a girl’s face has been burned away by an acid attack, or her nose and ears mutilated by Muslim madmen—no matter; the doctors will continue to treat both the victims and those who attacked them if necessary.
Indeed, in Israel, physicians treat their own victims of terrorism as well as the Arab, Palestinian terrorists who tried to murder them.
Composing music, painting, dancing, singing, acting, writing, thinking, all have the power to delight, illuminate, and console the human spirit. Artists pride themselves on refusing to recognize false boundaries. Once, they believed, as Keats did, that “beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”
That was well before the era of propaganda artists and their propagandized offspring. Artists should not politically censor themselves or each other. Artists should not limit their audience only to those with whom they agree. Communist and Nazi regimes once did this to their artists. Muslim/Islamist regimes have taken up that dubious mantle. And prominent Western artists are joining them.
Has everyone forgotten that the Indian novelist, Salman Rushdie, had to spend a decade in hiding because his work of fiction “offended” Ayatollah Khomeini? Do people remember that the Dutch artist, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered because he made a pro-woman film which “offended” the Islamist sensibilities of his Moroccan murderer? Do they understand that Kurt Westergaard has had to live under armed guard around the clock because his fairly inoffensive Mohammed cartoons “offended” Muslim/Islamist sensibilities? Draw a line between Westergaard and his Danish newspaper, Jyllens-Posten (which was recently the target of an attempted bombing attack), and our own Seattle-based Molly Norris, who suggested that we have a “Draw Mohammed Day” and whom the FBI has just turned into a “ghost” for her own safety?
It is tragic when artists boycott only one country on earth—any country for that matter….
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