Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler will certainly have a Herculean task, should Peter Dutton’s coalition win the upcoming election (as seems increasingly likely). As I recently reported, Chandler has been tasked, as putative arts minister, with not just running the razor across government arts funding, but to especially weed out anti-Semites getting fat on the taxpayer dime.
She’ll have her work cut out for her. The yartz are a rank field choked with Jew-hating weeds. The recent exposure of Creative Australia’s funding of Muslim artist Khaled Sabsabi and his works celebrating terrorism, including a former Hezbollah leader, has laid bare the tangled web of anti-Semitic luvvies.
If you thought these incompetent whores would be chastened by being caught out, think again. Like the Muslim leaders whining about the expose of Jew-hating nurses in Sydney, the arts wankers are throwing a self-righteous tanty.
The fallout from this affair keeps expanding. Staff have walked out of Creative Australia offices. Artists have huffed and torn their smocks and signed petitions in protest (which never, ever happens). Lindy Lee resigned from the Creative Australia board despite reiterating her support for Sabsabi to be nixxed in her exit letter – a decision in which she participated, after all.
And then there’s Simon Mordant, co-chairman of Luminis Partners, who resigned as a biennale ambassador and told the Guardian that he’d pulled a “significant” funding pledge for the project. We hear it was $40,000, roughly what Simon spends on Cohibas and Brunello each month at his villa in Italy. His business partner Ron Malek spent the weekend shaking his head in embarrassment at Mordant’s unalloyed sanctimony.
“It’s outrageous,” Mordant wrote of the Sabsabi decision on Instagram. “I have resigned as an Ambassador to the now cancelled project and withdrawn my financial support – this situation is unacceptable. Maybe the Pavilion should remain empty in solidarity with Khaled. A very dark day for Australia and the Arts.”
Mordant is acting the classic self-hating Jew, if not a nascent Kapo (the Jewish collaborators with the Nazi regime, who earned a reputation for sadistic brutality).
Mordant, who is Jewish, hasn’t posted any messages of solidarity for the Jewish artists who were doxxed, abandoned and relentlessly excluded since the October 7 massacres. Not a word from Mordant until Monday when he suddenly sought to clarify his support for Sabsabi – an artist who boycotted the 2022 Sydney Festival because the organisers received $20,000 of Israeli funding to stage an Israeli choreography display – and posted a whimpering statement saying he would never support an artist “that glorifies terrorism, racism or antisemitism”.
Except that that’s exactly what he’s been doing for years. Much to the delight of the Greens, who have been front and centre of the tide of anti-Semitism since they marched happily along with the Muslim mob bellowing ‘Gas the Jews!’ at the Sydney Opera House in 2023.
When even Sophie McNeill is lavishing you with praise and thanking you for your “leadership”, as she did online, it might be time for a walk through the hall of mirrors.
The web gets ever more tangled.
Mikala Tai was the other prominent figure to walk out of Creative Australia “in support of Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino”, as she wrote on Instagram […]
Creative Australia program manager Tahmina Maskinyar, who resigned with Tai, and whose posts online have included calls for the eradication of Israel (“From the river to the sea …”) and “intifada until victory”, which Liberal senator Sarah Henderson called “grossly offensive anti-Semitic content”. Creative Australia said these sentiments didn’t breach the agency’s code of conduct.
Like anything to do with ‘the arts’ and a generous pot of other people’s money, it’s all as interrelated as a Muslim wedding.
Shireen Taweel, who we mentioned last week – she’s affiliated with Tai and received Creative Australia grants of $45,200 in 2023 and $32,500 in 2022; Anna Louise Richardson, the wife of artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, a panel assessor, received $31,729 in March 2021; Amrita Hepi received $35,715 in 2023; and Sabsabi was awarded three grants of $8500, $5000 and $7680 between March 2022 and October 2023 (he also received much larger grants in 2018, 2019 and 2020, prior to Tai taking up work at Creative Australia).
Chopper Read famously said that ‘posh people love crims’. It seems that arts luvvies love anti-Semitism even more.
