A letter, signed by some dozen British artists and calling for cultural boycott of Israel, was published in the Guardian on February 14. The timing could not have been more ironic, as only hours after its publication a Jihadist Danish shot and killed a Jewish volunteer guard in Copenhagen, while he was securing a seminar discussing the freedom of speech. As the
Times of Israel reports, a variety of public figures have cried out against the letter, depicting it as "offensive" and "racist". See, for example, these bold words from Laura Marks:
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| Copenhagen Shootings |
Laura Marks, senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, alluded to the timing of the boycott letter, calling it “offensive” in an interview with The Times of Israel.
“There is something ironic in the demand for a cultural boycott and the demand not to engage when the attacks in Copenhagen and Paris were made on people who wanted to express themselves,” Marks said.
Marks claimed a cultural boycott of this sort is also “racist.” “As the APPG report makes clear, negative language towards Jews becomes the norm if you don’t challenge it,” she said.
“How do we change attitudes if people want to close down communications? Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and [these artists are effectively] saying that they will continue to work with all sorts of awful regimes and that Israel is the only one they aren’t going to deal with.”
On Monday, an editorial in The Times weighed in, saying, “The egregious campaigns for a cultural boycott of Israel are stoking ugly, atavistic movements in Europe. These need to be confronted by civilized opinion. Israeli governments are fallible but the Jewish state is a force for democracy in a region that is short of it."
We recommend artists focus, for now, on some other countries to pursue in the realm of cultural boycott. For instance: Syria, Iran, Yemen, maybe even North Korea. Isn't that an idea, huh?
