The local council for Margate in the United Kingdom has removed from its tourism website a promotional page for an art exhibition in which Israelis appear to have been depicted as a bloody demon, it said on Monday.
Separately, Royal Holloway, University of London, a public research university and member institution of the federal University of London, is facing legal action by a non-Jewish Zionist student it suspended for alleged hate speech after he told an anti-Israel activist that her keffiyeh, a shawl that has been popularized as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, looked like a “tea towel.”
These controversies unfolded in the media amid coverage of the suspected torching in London on Sunday of four ambulances belonging to the Hatzola Jewish emergency group.
Thanet District Council, where Margate is located, told JNS that its tourism promotion website, Visit Thanet, “lists many events, activities and exhibitions,” including the one featuring anti-Israel imagery. But, “Once the council was contacted regarding the nature of the content, the link to this exhibition was removed,” a spokesperson for the council said, adding it “is not affiliated with the gallery or this exhibition.” The council “apologises sincerely for any distress or offence that has been caused,” the spokesperson said.
The exhibition was by Matthew Collins, a former art critic for the Evening Standard, titled “Drawings Against Genocide.” Thanet is a popular holiday destination in Kent. A page recommending the private gallery where Collins’s works were on display was removed after criticism over its content.
Before the removal, The Telegraph quoted Chris Philp, a Conservative politician who serves as the shadow home secretary—the opposition party’s point person for home office affairs—as saying: “This extremist Labour council is supporting an openly antisemitic exhibition. These pictures are dripping with sickening antisemitic tropes, and all those involved in this should hang their heads in shame.”
Other paintings by Collins showed a man, possibly Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, eating a baby, and an Israeli soldier dancing on blood. “Shocked by the use of Nazi imagery—the room is full of the Star of David pasted around figures meant to be Israelis and the Jewish ‘lobby’,” wrote Zoe Strimpel, an author and columnist who is Jewish and who visited the gallery on Saturday.
The artist was present during her visit, shouted her down as an Israeli government mouthpiece, and others booed her until she left amid jeers, she wrote on X.
The chargé d’affaires at the Israeli embassy to the United Kingdom, Daniela Grudsky, wrote on X: “This isn’t art. It isn’t free speech. It’s antisemitism—crude, aggressive, and completely indefensible. It should be treated with the full seriousness of the law.”
Local police told The Telegraph they are looking into complaints alleging racist incitement by Collins.
In the court case being prepared against Royal Holloway, University of London, student Brodie Mitchell is alleging discrimination was behind his recent suspension for telling Huda El-Jamal, the president of Royal Holloway’s Friends of Palestine Society: “You’re wearing a tea-towel on your head.”
Mitchell said this to El-Jamal on campus after she told him to put on a kippah because he’s a “wanna Jew,” The Telegraph reported. Mitchell was suspended from the university for the duration of a nine-week investigation by Royal Holloway “for alleged conduct that could be considered hate speech,” whereas El-Jamal was not punished for her comments. This shows bias on the part of the administration, Mitchell said.
Meanwhile in Ireland, graffiti reading “Juden raus,” German for “Jews out,” appeared on the signs of a popular Cork woodland. The letters HH, short for Heil Hitler, also featured in the graffiti in Ballybrack Woods, a well-known walking trail outside Douglas.
CorkBeo, a local news site, quoted Councillor Peter Horgan, who lives in the area, as saying: “It’s an utter disgrace.”
