“McJesus” brought hundreds of angry demonstrators out into the streets in Haifa, protesting the offense to the religious feelings of Christian believers. Earlier someone threw a firebomb at the museum's exterior, and three policemen were injured in a confrontation with the protesters.
We may recall the case of a hamsa with the inscription “Idbah al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) produced by Gal Volinez and displayed at Sapir Academic College, which aroused the anger of a student who destroyed it; or the portrait of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in the nude at an exhibition of students' work at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, which ended with the removal of the work and the resignation of the head of the art department, Larry Abramson; and the video clips by Natali Vaxberg, who defecated on the Israeli flag; and the white flag that Ariel Bronz rammed into his posterior at a Haaretz cultural conference. Provocation always works and always arouses one of the major questions that preoccupies us here: Is freedom of expression an absolute value or it is it relative? [...]
Culture Minister Miri Regev was quick to contact the executive director of Haifa's municipal museums, Nissim Tal, demanding that he remove the work. She wrote that she had received “many complaints over the serious offense caused to the Christian community’s feelings” and that “contempt for symbols sacred to religions and many believers around the world as an act of artistic protest is illegitimate and cannot be displayed in a cultural institution supported by state funds.” She also added a threat that the Culture Ministry would withhold support from the Haifa Museum of Art. [...]
So not only freedom of expression is a liberal, Western value and therefore unnecessary in Regev’s opinion, but culture as a whole becomes a dubious idea. Culture has become a dirty word that is identified with leftists, and it is the antithesis of the most basic and important characteristic of the Jewish people in its own view, which is to be a special people.
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