Beth Stuart’s Delibels, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is an extremely concerning exhibition not for what it says but for what it is — artfully coded antisemitism. All the more reprehensible for its coyness.
The art pieces are enigmatic, engaging. In each, a black ledge of replicas tops a long black mesh. The objects — fabricated seeds, fruit, pizza crusts, nuts — suggest the relics of the once edible, the spectral word within the title — but now not-indelible. The nourishing solids have become transitory, passing, forgettable. Each piece poses a once-digestible solidity on a wavering base.
What’s problematic is the full-wall text — in spectral grey — that accompanies the sculptures. Stuart interweaves Luther Burbank, the history of some berries, nuts and phrases, with three cases of supposed genocide: the Armenian, the alleged Palestinian and finally our Residential Schools. As a whole, the work may contrast the self-renewal of nature’s produce with humans’ murderousness. The Palestinian focus, a friend suggests, adds a more accurate echo to the title: libels. The work is an implicit endorsement of the Hamas attack on Israel on October7, 2023. So one-sided is her perspective that she does not mention Hamas even once.
Stuart precisely echoes the allegations of Jewish genocide, infanticide and illegal oppression of the Palestinians that an as yet unidentified vandal wrote on the outside wall of Congregation Emanu-el, the Victoria synagogue (the oldest operating in Canada). Police plan to charge the vandal with hate speech and incitement to violence — if they ever get around to identifying and catching him. All they have is a video of him. AGGV appears unperturbed that their platformed artist’s statement parallels that yob’s.
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Of course the term “genocide” — here first used re: the Armenians — was coined in reference to the Holocaust. It means the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people. One example: the Gazans’ elected government, Hamas, is constitutionally pledged (Article 7) to eliminate WORLD Jewry. Here’s another: in 1948 Israel accepted the two-state solution but the Arabs instead launched their continuing war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel.
In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform. As Stuart revives Goebbels’ “big lie” he must be chortling in his grave.
The Palestinian claim is also an affront to the frame of the two real victims of genocide. Incidentally, a large delegation of Canada’s indigenous leaders recently visited Israel to express their support. Knowing the Jews occupied these contested lands 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, the Jews are their model in across centuries surviving colonial oppressors, ultimately to reclaim their land, language and identity. Later Stuart parallels the Canadian government waste of a million dollars supervising a protest — against ending the Kamloops burial search — with Canada’s financial support of Israel’s self-defence. Israel parallels the indigenous not the wasteful oppressors.
Stuart first mentions the Jews as a threat on the Armenian border, then by implication responsible for their population drop from 27,000 to 1,000 in Old Jerusalem. No, the Jews did not slaughter the Armenians. They were, however, reluctant to let the later term “genocide” refer back to them, however, given the uniqueness of scale that the Nazis launched — and that Hamas intends.
Then the Palestinians are Israel’s innocent victims: “I saw a social media post in November 2023 that showed someone opening an aid truck in the Gaza Strip and it was full of thousands of white shrouds. Not food or medicine.”
Though the professor does cite her scholarly (?) source she omits the obvious cause of that Palestinian inconvenience. Just weeks earlier — their government Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed over 1,200 people, mainly civilians, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape and mutilation — that they and the Gazan citizenry celebrated. They made exultant videos of their atrocities.
Hamas pledged to repeat that attack throughout Israel and the West Bank. Ignoring that detail, Stuart blames Israel for the aggressor Palestinians’ ensuing difficulties, like shortages of clean and desalinated water, medicine, food, etc. And their crop of shrouds.
Indeed she blames Israel for all the Palestinians’ suffering, especially the self-inflicted. Palestinians not Israelis set those forest fires (with no loss of Green Party support). Since 1948 the deaths, expulsions/departures and losses all resulted from the Palestinians’ choice of war over peaceful coexistence with the Jews.
Again ignoring October 7, Stuart revives the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews: They want to kill your children! Even when they don’t need Christian blood for their matzo.
She cites a possibly Jewish “pundit” on Israeli TV Channel 14 in an “early 2024…. clip… saying every Palestinian over the age of four years is a potential terrorist and a necessary target of war.” So her sculptures’ mesh bags are the “Because they’re the size of a four-year-old child. That quoted statement does seem monstrous — until you recall its context.
First, to represent Israel she chose the right wing news, politics and satire channel that even in Israel is considered extremist. Second, regarding October 7 a Hamas spokesman flatly stated “There are no civilians in Israel” — i.e., only targets in war. In fact a captured Nukhba solider told Shin Bet he’d been instructed to kill Israeli children “because they’ll grow up to become soldiers.” Among their many child victims was one infant whom Hamas reportedly microwaved to death in front of its parents. Twin infants taken hostage were murdered. When Stuart attributes this monstrous “morality” to Israel, she not only blames the victim but charges them with doing what they suffered. This is intellectual dishonesty beyond the liberty of art.
Third, Stuart’s allegation of extreme child abuse actually is true — but is a charge properly laid against the Palestinians. As Hamas has militarized their hospitals, schools, playgrounds, mosques — thus inviting their wartime attack — they have even more callously weaponized their own children. Their martyrdom culture encourages and rewards the very deaths of their children that they then bewail and blame upon Israel. Parents send their children to summer day camps to train as soldiers. Their schools — abetted by the UNRWA — continue to teach their children to hate and to kill the Jews.
Golda Meir’s sad prophecy still holds: “We won’t have peace until the Arabs decide they love their own children more than they hate us.” The West’s reflex to blame Israel for the Gaza children’s deaths only encourages that vile abuse to continue. As does Stuart. Our “progressives” have that blood on their hands.
This widespread antisemitism has a clear cause. A world with 57 Moslem states, not one a democracy, cannot tolerate the existence of one slender sliver of a Jewish state — that is. While the October 7 savagery initially appalled the civilized world, within days — before Israel even began its response — there was an eruption of aggressive support — for Palestine! The slogans — From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, Globalize the intifada — implicitly called for the elimination of the Jewish state, the latter for Jews here too. Israel proven vulnerable, antisemitism internationally erupted unbridled.
Today we witness attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions unseen since the Nazis. It’s as if the October 7 barbarity made antisemitism fashionable again. The recently unspeakable can now be yelled. A Toronto teacher can tell a six-year-old girl that because she’s only half-Jewish she’s only half animal. So we find the absurdity of Queers for Palestine, like Feminists, Christians, Artists, all campaigning against Israel — their sole defender in the region — and for an ethos that does persecute and would annihilate them. Regrettably the press, many governments and many arts organizations have bought into that folly. Now add AGGV.
Only at the end does Stuart finally acknowledge the October 7 barbarism. She celebrates it!
Early Stuart cited the invasive Himalayan blackberry which Burbank brought from Armenia, whose slaughter was cited as an historic precedent.of the Jewish one. It’s thus an emblem of genocide. When she finally addresses the October 7 slaughter it’s to plant a new generation, like her blackberries, a hardy new crop — planted to eliminate the Jews. “For the second spring since October 7, 2023, the blackberry hedges are blooming.” Ah, yes, more October 7s to come. This last one worked so well against the Jews. The blackberry blackness of the dead materials is her harbinger of hope, a perverse fertility.
The Gallery has issued a defence. Its pretence to the rich ambiguity of a work of art is irrelevant because Stuart’s art is the sculptures. The problem is the destructive distortion of history in her statement, her polemic. No ambiguity in her position, just a warping of history.
Today’s cultural assault on the Jews is a clear revival of 1930s Germany. Here’s the compelling difference: We know what resulted then. Some then may have feared what might follow. We know what did. Yet we have willingly gone back there, on the street and in the art gallery.
If Stuart does not know better the AGGV should. Their visitors and their supporters deserve better than to be nourished on poison. From May 24-October 26 their visitors are being unwittingly injected with this prejudice. This Gallery leaves the dire prospect of a much Lesser Victoria.
In fact, the large pro-Palestinian (i.e., anti-Jewish) demonstration that — illegally — throttled Victoria’s downtown last Saturday afternoon — with police protection, of course — darkens our prospect even more.
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