Mick Hartley

Camilla Long braves Matthew Collings’ Margate antisemitism show:

Why is this kind of thing happening in our society? In our towns, on our streets, in our cities, online? It’s not just scrotes and Palestine activists who are targeting Jews and hating on them. It’s lawyers, doctors, police, politicians and artists.

That the middle class is gripped by antisemitism may seem silly, and it’s true Margate in particular is ridiculous — the first thing I see on coming out of the station is a man in a wig, make-up and a miniskirt. But here’s a thought. How many people have made an artist like Matthew Collings successful? He has poured out Jew hatred for years now. How many casual bystanders haven’t stood in his way?

Most immediately there is Thanet council, which promoted his show. It’s apologised, but why the council ever felt the need to advertise a man who a) can’t draw and b) boasts about how many thousands of pictures he already sells, while comparing himself to Goya, I can’t fathom.

What about the police? When they came down to the gallery, I’m told, they saw nothing wrong. Did they even know what they were looking for?

Or let me put it another way. How can the police spend thousands of pounds telling us that we need to be careful about “words” but then let someone spell out 130 reasons why he thinks we should hate Jews — sorry, Zionists — in a public space? Where are the Lucy Connolly coppers now?

And then there are the other artists: the people, ironically, with the real power. Until recently Collings was a visiting tutor for the Tracey Emin Foundation, although I note his name has gone from her site. Is this kind of thing what the artistic fraternity thinks is great art? Attacking Simon Schama and people who can’t speak out?

You may not feel artists are important, nor even students, academics, left-wing columnists or people on television who repeatedly ask why Jews must be given special treatment (another antisemitic device). But these are the people who give the scrotes licence, who tell them it is fine — in fact, that it is their moral duty — to drag the problems of Palestine here.

With their help, Islamic activists have shut down schools, infiltrated universities, captured unions and wholly subsumed the left, whose politicians now cannot do anything except robotically repeat, “This is wrong”, even when gazing on the charred remains of ambulances owned and run by Jews in Golders Green. To deny this now is madness.

This isn’t to diminish the horrors of Gaza. There was terrible suffering and still is. But these people do not want to understand or even admit Jewish suffering, or the dangers and evils of Hamas. In Collings’s exhibition there are no pictures of Jewish women being raped, or tiny Jewish babies being killed, or people being maimed and starved and brutalised, even though those are things that actually happened (unlike most of what he puts in his pictures).

As I said last week, Matthew Collings would seem to be a seriously disturbed individual. Yet here we are now, exhibiting his vile garbage in an art gallery. “Oh yes, it’s anti-Zionism, you see. Not antisemitism at all”.

As Dave Rich noted: “These are the kind of wild antisemitic scrawls that used to only show up in hate mail incidents. Nowadays you can get an art exhibition out of it.”