Khaled Sabsabi, the Muslim artist dumped as Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale for valorising terrorists and terrorism, has finally spoken publicly. To apologise? To humbly concede that his work – at best – could be construed as supporting terrorism? To stand up for the right of Australian Jews to live unmolested by violent anti-Semitism?
Pigs will fly on night journeys, too.
No, it’s all ‘poor-fellow-me’ whining.
In an interview with ABC Radio National’s The Art Show, Sabsabi described the impact of the Commonwealth arts funding body’s February decision as “devastating”.
He says two artworks that triggered Creative Australia’s decision – raised first in the media and later in parliament – have been “grossly misrepresented”.
What’s to ‘misrepresent’ about a video of 9/11 and the caption ‘Thank You Very Much’? Videoing himself cosplaying as a terrorist leader? Do tell.
Thank You Very Much includes footage of the hijacked second plane crashing into New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
The footage is coupled with vision of then US President George W Bush thanking first responders in the days immediately following the attacks, before he launched the war on terror in retaliation.
YOU, a multi-channel video and sound installation first exhibited in 2007, features Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of the Lebanese political party and militant group Hezbollah, who was killed in an Israeli air-strike in 2024.
Note how the ABC frames Nasrallah: as merely a leader of a political party. A ‘political party’ listed as a terror organisation by 25 countries and entities, including the Arab umbrella group the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.
The ABC isn’t done with the weaseling, though:
Hezbollah was not listed as a proscribed terrorist organisation by the Australian government until 2021.
The ABC is fudging grotesquely here. In fact, Hezbollah’s military wing was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2003. The ABC had to know this. It wasn’t until 2021 that the entire organisation was totally proscribed. Other countries, such as the US, listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation as early as 2006.
Then there’s this stunning double-speak from Sabsabi:
Sabsabi says his artwork has been misread.
“It’s dangerous when artwork becomes politicised and weaponised.”
Um, what else is his work, but politicised? If others have read the political angles and taken issue, well, what did he expect?
Sabsabi strongly rejects the characterisation of him in parliament and the media.
“Those works have been grossly misrepresented,” he says.
“Those works are about the brutality of war and the sensationalism of propaganda, and how propaganda starts with one ideology or idea, and it manifests itself and grows and grows … to become a distortion. It’s important to understand that,” Sabsabi says.
OK – a distortion of what? Please elaborate.
It should be noted, though, that Sabsabi boycotted the 2022 Sydney Festival in protest at the presence of an Israeli artist, with Israeli government funding.
It might also be noted that something is conspicuously missing from Sabsabi’s self-pity party in this piece: repudiation of terrorism or anti-Semitism. Which is odd, because even the ABC draws attention to the nexus between Sabsabi’s biennale appointment and the grotesque anti-Semitism of the past year, largely promulgated by Muslims in Australia.
It pays to consider the highly pressurised environment in which Creative Australia’s decision was made.
Reported incidents of anti-Semitism have been on the rise since the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war on Gaza.
In the same period, reported incidents of Islamophobia have also spiked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australia’s cultural sector has been riven by the Gaza war, mirroring – and, at times, exceeding – the toxicity and polarisation in public discourse.
It probably didn’t escape readers that the ABC just couldn’t mention anti-Semitism without adding the reflexive ‘Islamophobia’, which is a grotesque false equivalency: anti-Semitic incidents far outstrip alleged ‘Islamophobia’. Certainly, Muslims in Australia aren’t having to hide their identity, aren’t being attacked in the streets by mobs of ‘protesters’ or having to go to school under the watch of armed guards.
When hundreds of Jewish Australians swarm the Sydney Opera House, chanting, ‘Gas the Muslims’, then maybe mealy-mouthed, two-faced apologists like the ABC might have a point. Till then, though, we can see their false equivalency for what it is: a disgusting whataboutism.
And we’re entitled to suspect that Sabsabi’s work is exactly what it appears to be.
