Pictures From An Exhibition

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

An exhibition of drawings by the fanatical antisemite and “artist” Matthew Collings has just opened in Margate, in England. I urge people to examine his daubs online, that he apparently did recently and not, as the ocular evidence would suggest, when he was in kindergarten. But if the form of his “art” is that ordinarily produced by children between the ages of 5 and 7, his antisemitic content is more often found among grownups — demented, sinister, disgusting grownups. Don’t believe me? Well, images of many of his brightly-colored scrawls can be found here. And here is a story about this entire outrageous episode:

An art exhibition that opened this weekend in Margate, a seaside town in England, features nearly 100 drawings that promote antisemitic tropes, feature swastikas, target Jewish or Israeli individuals, and deny violence that took place during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Drawings Against Genocide” at the Joseph Wales Studios will be open until March 29 and is organized by the groups Art for a Free Palestine and Thanet for Palestine. The artist behind the drawings is Matthew Collings, a 70-year-old writer and former art critic who has been openly critical of Israel. There are roughly 100 drawings in the exhibit critical of Israel, Jews, the “Israeli lobby,” and more, according to Art for a Free Palestine.

One drawing in the exhibit shows members of a so-called Israel lobby that is “nuts and utterly in control,” while other drawings accuse Israel of apartheid and committing a genocide against Palestinians. Several drawings feature a Nazi swastika, often alongside the flag of Israel, while one artwork in particular depicts ancient Israelites with horns. A separate piece shows two Sotheby’s auctioneers eating babies with blood dripping from their teeth and one of them is Sotheby’s French-Israeli owner Patrick Drahi. The drawing claims he is a “fanatic Zionist” who eats babies alive.

Eating babies alive? In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of using the blood taken from murdered Christian children to make their Passover matzohs. Now, it seems, in Collings’ view, the blood isn’t enough to sate Jewish appetites; they need to eat the whole child, and while it is still alive.

Another drawing in the exhibit shows an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier spewing blood from their mouth and hands, while another shows an IDF soldier standing over a pool of blood and a human skull. A separate drawing denies that sexual violence took place during the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while another falsely claims there is “no reliable evidence whatsoever” about some of the violence that took place during the massacre.

“No reliable evidence” of gang rapes, of tortures, of mutilation of bodies, of murders? But of course there is: there are the corpses of girls with stab wounds in their vaginas, of women with their breasts sliced off, of members of a family who had been tied together with wire and burned alive, the corpses of men whose genitalia were cut off, corpses of both sexes with their eyes gouged out.

Has Collings forgotten about that grisly evidence, photographs of which have been made available? Has he forgotten that the Hamas killers, proud of their handiwork, took photos of their victims, to show to their proud parents back in Gaza? One of the Hamas murderers was recorded while he spoke jubilantly to his mother on the phone: “Mom, I just killed ten Jews!” But for Matthew Collings, those stories of Israelis raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered are just part of a “hoax” — one of so many that the Jewish state has pulled off.

Did no one on the district council look at the pictures being shown before promoting the exhibition? And which is worse — that the members of the Thanet district council knew what that exhibition contained and still recommended it, or that they hadn’t bothered to find out, and recommended it?

Don’t you think the police, who took no action in this case, would have done something if the targets of hate had been not Jews but, say, black people? And wouldn’t the police be full of solicitousness, in the current insane climate, if the victims of Collings’ hate had been Muslims? Of course, had the target been Muslims, the police would not have had to intervene; the art gallery, and all of its contents, would have been immediately destroyed by the local chapter of the “Sons of Allah.”

Collings said in an Instagram post that the drawings are “directed against the horrific genocide against the Palestinians being perpetrated by Israel.”

Here we go again: “genocide.” “Horrific genocide.” Yes, by all means ignore the hundreds of thousands of tons of humanitarian aid that the IDF has sent into Gaza. Ignore, too, the millions of leaflets that the IDF dropped on Gaza, the millions of text messages it sent to Gazans, the millions of robocalls it made to Gazans, all to warn civilians away from areas about to be targeted. Pay no attention to the conclusion reached by West Point Professor John Spencer, an expert in urban warfare, who concluded after studying the Gaza war that “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”

Art for a Free Palestine said the exhibit “is about raising consciousness and welcoming people to learn about the UK government’s connections to the Israeli lobby and its continued manufacturing of precision weapons on UK soil that are used to target and murder civilians in Gaza.”

Oh, I think there is really no further need to “raise consciousnesses” about the “Israeli lobby.” Tens of thousands of demonstrations, some with hundreds of thousands of participants, have been held all over the world in the last few years and have made it impossible not to hear all about Israel’s lobby and its efforts to hide the truth about the “apartheid, genocidal Jewish state.”

Matthew Collings is not a brave voice standing alone. In crayoning his antisemitic filth, he’s joined a cast of millions. Take a look again at his pitiful squibs that would not be out of place in

a children’s edition of Der Stürmer. Let’s not call for his exhibition to be closed down. That would only make him a martyr to free speech. Just put it on your list of Things To Ignore. And I will now take my own advice, and from now on, when it comes to the execrable Matthew Collings, I promise to stay mum.

Photo credit: screenshot.