Sweden again (so much easier than talking about Sharon’s corruption)
Karen Alkalay-Gut’s Tel Aviv Diary continues to be poignant. Read her interesting comment on the Zvi Mazel (Israeli Ambassador to Sweden) affair:

The story of the Israeli Ambassador Zvi Mazel keeps swimming in my head - Did Mazel have a right to destroy the exhibit because it seemed to give something of a rationalization to the terrorist who killed more than 21 people in Haifa? In some way the whole question isn't about 'rights' - but about emotional reasons - on all sides.

and life is life and art is only art. So let's get a grip on what's important here - Mazel might be a philistine but he didn't hurt anyone. i don't think there was as much moral dissection of the terrorist as there has been about him.

On the day before yesterday, in Yediot Aharonot, Nahum Barne’a called both artist and ambassador – rude. And yesterday, Shlomo Avinery, in the same newspaper, wondered what some Israeli artists, who were supportive of the art piece being shown in Sweden in the name of “freedom of expression”, would think of an aesthetic expression of PM Yitzhak Rabin’s murderer. They would probably say, he claimed, that it was Fascistic art. And they would be right. And this was exactly the case in Stockholm - Fascistic art, an aesthetic expression of violence and death.

Should the Ambassador have done it? I think to myself. No, it had the opposite affect of that desired.

But still