Between the Battlefield and the Canvas

We have in Arabic the popular saying, “The free [not busy] act as judge.” But in America, it seems the free act as painter. In one of the most ironic perceptions of modern politics, we hear that former U.S. President George W. Bush has turned to painting since leaving the White House. He will display his “art,” which includes 20 paintings, in the April exhibition. So after two terms and two campaigns to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, “adorned” with his sagas of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and support for Israel, he, now influenced by Churchill’s 1948 “Drawing for Entertainment,” has begun flirting with brushes and colors.

Thus, history has granted this symbolic event, which moves between the battlefield and the arts. Other artist-politicians have attempted to put a price on their art, ignoring the gruesomeness and blood of the thousands of victims behind their works.

Ehud Barak, for example, plays the piano fluently. But the undeserving Zionist general should be applauded not for his musical “creativity,” but for the “creativity” of murdering Palestinians and the “art” of sniping the heads of their children. His greatest creation was the “defensive shield” which “brightly” outlined the massacres in the Jenin refugee camp and the towns of Nablus and Ramallah.

The examples of painters who mask their ugly politics and vaunt their art and literature to justify their indiscriminate killings under the banners of pro-democracy, anti-dictatorship are too many to name. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, in addition to his ruthlessness and militarism, made many beautiful paintings between 1908 and 1913 in Vienna. His bright colors certainly contradicted his efforts at ethnic, political and cultural extermination, and only failed to mask his racism.

Bush, who was influenced by Churchill not only in form but in substance, also has come to resemble Churchill in a more grim way, reminding us of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima during World War II. While the Allied forces were battling the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan, Churchill spent some time painting. When asked how he found time to do so in light of the pressures of war, he said, “There is a time for everything you want.”*

The irony not only lies in their expansive policies and narrow outlines. At the time that Churchill signed an order to produce the hydrogen bomb, he won the Nobel Prize for literature for 1953. Similarly, the butcher responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Menachem Begin, won the Nobel “Peace” Prize.

*Editor’s Note: This quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.