Lets go back to Ingmar Bergman. He once called Protestantism, “a wretched kettle of fish.” How to understand this Swedish pastor group and its anti-semitism? Bergman was always interested in the reasons, osbscure and unknowable behind unmotivated cruelty and the role of religion within this context. In his Seventh Seal, God seemed absent for the world, lending itself to a gnostic interpretation and Bergman’s own sense that hell is created by human beings on earth.
( see link at end) :The exhibition features a poster which calls Israel “the hole[y] land,” the center noted. The poster features an image of rats, presumably Israelis, eating away at a cheese-colored map-like mass, presumably the territory of ‘Palestine,’ without realizing that they are about to get caught in a mousetrap. One of the rats has a gun slung over his shoulder….
---“It should come as no surprise that far right extremists should celebrate this art exhibit as “Swedish painters understands jews to be violent noxious animals” http://www.nationell.nu/2012/03/15/svenska-konstnarer-uppfattar-judar-som-valdsamma-skadedjur/ , but the real question is what do Swedes who are not racists think? We note that the sponsoring organization provides educational assistance for “church and Society”.--- Read More:http://tundratabloids.com/2012/03/swedish-church-depicts-jews-as-rats-swc-demands-its-removal.html
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, stated in the press release that “animalization of Jews … set the stage for the murder of 6 million Jews in the 1940s. Since then, Soviet and Arab and Muslim anti-Jewish propaganda used the very same method. Now it has surfaced in 2012 Sweden.” The exhibition was reportedly inspired by the journey of two Swedish artists, Stefan Sjöblom and Larz Lindqvist, to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“We call on all Swedes, whatever their political views, to denounce this hate masquerading as art,” said Cooper, “and join in demanding an investigation as to whether government grants directly or indirectly are being used for this presentation.” Read More:http://www.timesofisrael.com/swedish-art-exhibition-to-feature-anti-semitic-symbolism/
---Tim Whitaker, editor of PW, said that “it never occurred to us” that the front page could have been seen as offensive. Originally, he said, the idea was to use the dog on the sleigh as the lead image — that is, until the hamster one was presented. That animal is the pet of Liz Spikol, the newspaper’s senior contributing editor. Spikol said that once it was decided to have “cuteness” as the theme for this year’s guide, cute animals came to mind. She added that, as a Jew herself, she doesn’t find the image offensive, and she doesn’t “understand why Orthodoxy would be offensive.” A rodent as a symbol for the Jew has a long and notorious history, which becomes apparent even if you do a rudimentary search on the Internet. Nazi propaganda throughout the 1930s — films, posters and other images — depicted Jews as rats and other vermin; the point was to portray Jews as subhuman creatures who were unclean and in need of extermination.---Read More:http://www.phawker.com/2007/11/25/media-when-is-a-hamster-just-a-hamster/
What Bergman posed as question was whether we, humanity, by an act of faith can attain a sense of community and a better world. Bergman was always pulled between the idea of god as love and god as a chillingly frozen type of monster, an anonymous figure, an agent for the dissolution of salvation. In Hour of the Wolf and some other work, we see Bergman’s conception of a Christian God, at least within the Swedish sphere as something terrorizing and destructive posing grave risks for humans and able to bring out destructive forces and not the opposite.
ADDENDUM:
( On Schindler’s List) : In the film, the Nazi commandant Goeth describes Jewish people as “vermin” and as “rats.” In this depiction of the Jews, Goeth is following the tenets of Nazi propaganda which were ceaselessly pounded into the minds of people in Nazi Germany and in the occupied territories. Why did the Nazis depict the Jews as “vermin” and as “rats?” What purpose did it serve them?
ANALYSIS: Reducing the Jews to these despicable images, the Nazis sought to dehumanize (or demonize) the Jewish people, to push them beyond the boundaries of human and moral obligation, to reduce them to the “other.” The Nazis believed this was the necessary first step in the process of first isolating the Jews and then exterminating them.Read More:http://www.southerninstitute.info/holocaust_education/slguid8.html
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As an aside, The Wiesenthal Center is part of the anti-semitism industry. They almost need incidents like the above; if there was no anti-s
ism, the group would die out. The life of Wiesenthal in Austria, working out of a humble office and desk though, is quite remarkable. In any event, it doesn’t look like anti-semitism is going to go away. But, it should be said that the level of consciousness, albeit with many setbacks, is much higher now than it was even forty years ago…
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