RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to the New York Times:

A pro-Palestinian group slashed and spray-painted a century-old portrait of Arthur James Balfour at the University of Cambridge on Friday, defacing a painting of the British official whose pledge of support in 1917 for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” helped pave the way to Israel’s founding three decades later.

The group, Palestine Action, said in a statement that the destruction of the portrait in Trinity College, Cambridge, was intended to call attention to “the bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued,” particularly in light of the current conflict in Gaza.

A spokeswoman for Trinity, whose alumni include King Charles III as well as Balfour himself, said in a statement on Friday that the college “regrets the damage caused to a portrait of Arthur James Balfour during public opening hours” and that it had notified the police. A Cambridge police statement said officers were on the scene to investigate a report of “criminal damage.”

We’ve been outraged before by this rubbish from activists, none of whom could draw a stick figure if they were playing ‘hangman.’

But this represents a new low in activist barbarism. In the past, environmental activists, such as those I described here, in 2022, merely chose to damage glass covering artwork, or color water of historic fountain sculptures, or glue themselves to the floor or the frame of western masterpieces, they always justified their acts by claiming they weren’t actually damaging the paintings, though that is arguable to some extent.

Now they are genuinely damaging the paintings, this one by famed portrait artist Philip Alexius de László of Hungary in 1914, who painted other insightful works such as these:

This is the kind of damage to irreplaceable art the Taliban did, just before 9/11.

The other difference from the previous attacks by environmentalists, is that the art attacked did have a connection to their own antisemitic cause and twisted versions of history. Previous attacks were strange and random, done primarily to draw attention to the attackers themselves. These attacks really are targeted at Jews and the erasure of history. Balfour, recall, wrote the 1917 Balfour declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish state. That’s what these savages are after in this attack.

Some important observations about what was attacked here from scholar Judea Pearl (father of Daniel):

It’s all about the Jew-hate.

And like all Islamofascists, they hate women, too:

So Balfour becomes a metaphor for the Western Civilization that derives from Judaeo-Christian heritage.

The really ugly message from this violent attack is this: Support Jews or Israel and we will slash and kill you, which is very much what Hamas has already demonstrated in Israel and what these freaks are threatening here.

Shocking, the freaks who did this are still on the loose. There have been no arrests. There is one report from a British journalist that one of them carried an expensive designer handbag.

The freaks may have been western leftists, possibly repurposed environmental protestors, who in the past were always paid. And if so, it may mean that someone paid these people to do what they did, which amounts to terrorism against Western Civilization. If so, it would be consistent with Hamas’s threat to do the same things they did to Israel onto Israel’s supporters in the West. And there is no depravity Hamas won’t stoop to.

That means the West needs to reassess its unwillingness to defend itself and the ideas that made it great, and whether it ought to be focusing its efforts on criticizing and undermining Israel over its effort to rid the world of Hamas. Hamas may very well be attacking us from behind the cloak of Western loonies and that needs to be investigated. Whatever is done, the savages need to be caught and punished hard for this, or they will do it again. And they must be forced to answer questions about their sponsorship because something very threatening is going on with this art attack. They’re slashing art now and if they get away with this, it won’t be long before they start slashing people beyond Israel.

Image: Screen shot from Middle East Eye video, via YouTube