When the mask slips...

What happens when an 'artist', a council and a venue conspire to promote racism as art?

It is Sunday 22nd March 2026. This morning, before heading out into my garden to late-prune my roses, I logged onto my laptop to check the day’s news and to have a quick scroll of X, which often shows me interesting stories that the broadsheets have not yet picked up, or perhaps never will. Today, X is full of angry Jewish journalists, commentators and artists, following respected author and Sunday Telegraph columnist, Zoe Strimpel’s discovery of the ‘Drawings Against Genocide’ exhibition. This ‘art’ exhibition is advertised on Thanet Council’s, ‘Visit Thanet’ website, and the artist in question is Matthew Collings.

On the surface of it, Collings claims that this exhibition is a manifestation of his ‘socialism’ and activist support of Palestine. Imbued with emotion and apparent moral rectitude, he asks the website visitor, ‘What are people supposed to do when on our screens everyday we see a genocide unfolding?…one of the worst crimes a human society can commit.’ Yet he is not talking about Iran-backed terror group, Hamas’s pogrom of 7/10, where 1200 mainly Jews were tortured, raped and slaughtered, of course. He’s talking about the Israeli Defence Force’s military response to the ethnically motivated attack.

But the purpose of this article is not to argue the toss over what constitutes legitimate naming and framing of the Israel/Hamas war. This article seeks to expose the racism that has been exhibited in a gallery and amplified by a council. First, let’s look at the art in question:

This is no protest at Israel. The Star of David is the symbol not of the IDF or solely Israel. It is the symbol of Judaism, the religion and Jews, as an ethnic group.

Straight out of the Nazi and medieval antisemitic imagery playbook, here the Jew is portrayed as a bloodthirsty devil. Yet the antisemitism is given a political twist with the ‘Stop Apartheid’ libel.

Collings’ own drawing - it does exactly what it says on the tin.

‘Sadistic depravity’? The Jew is painted as genocidal psychopath. This is Nazi inversion again, and echoes medieval tropes as Jews as the root of all ills.

Here we go again with the Jewish lobby meshuggass. This is the way the hard Left paints Jews as the enemy; Jews as the ultimate white colonial capitalist oppressors, in control of the world.

Simchayoff nails it on X, highlighting the similarity between Soviet propaganda against Israel from the 1970s and Collings’ contemporary rendition of the same libel: the IDF as a bloodthirsty military, akin to the new Nazis, trying to obliterate an entire race and take over the world.

When Zoe Strimpel saw the exhibition, she challenged the artist and was met by aggression. Here is her post on X, which has fortunately gone viral, exposing this grotesque exhibition of racist tropes.

First, it was a disgrace that any venue should exhibit what appears to most sane people as anti-Jewish racism dressed up as ‘art’. What was Joseph Wales Studios thinking? Had the exhibition targeted any other minority ethnicity in this way, I have no doubt the Studios would have refused to host it. Yet, there are Collings’ childish and hateful scribblings for all of Margate (and now the world) to see, stuck to the gallery’s walls like bad junior school art, created by some psychotic Beavis-and-Buttheadesque boy and reluctantly blu-tacked onto his parents’ fridge next to the electricity bill and a jumble sale reminder. Then, there’s the issue of Visit Thanet - a Labour council’s website - having amplified the exhibition (page now removed). Is there no responsibility taken in the council for first vetting what they’re advertising to visitors? Or is it simply that both the gallery and Thanet Council agree with Collings’ apparent message that Jews run the world and are the most uniquely murderous group since the Nazis?

Jewish commentator, Heidi Bachram, rightly asks Kent Police why this exhibition has not been shut down as the racially discriminatory bilge it is?

But what is equally as worrying as the gallery’s and council’s dereliction of duty to uphold the law, is the reaction that the Jewish outcry has provoked on X. Here is the response by esteemed Jewish author, presenter and historian, Simon Schama, to Strimpel’s initial post.

And here are the replies to his perfectly understandable, empathetic tweet.

Schama is trolled by a bunch of antisemitic conspiracy theorists and virtue-signallers, who seem to think Zionists are the ultimate evil, and they and Collings are on the right side of history. In a country where not long ago, two Jewish men were murdered during an attack on a synagogue by an Islamist; in a world where antisemitic murder and attack are on the rise, they are defending anti-Jewish racism being sanitised as art in a Margate gallery…all because of a war in the Middle East. And these people use Collings’ conspiracy theory nonsense as a means of legitimising their attack on Schama. Have you joined the dots yet?

‘Art’, like the racist scribblings we see exhibited at a Margate gallery in the ‘Drawings Against Genocide’ exhibition, amplified by the local council, is emboldening people to openly attack Jews - on social media and in person. Political art has always existed, but it was hitherto a niche interest, and racism was rarely, if ever, tolerated. Now, it has become mainstream. The arts should never have become a platform predominantly for social justice, and antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionist should absolutely not be amplified by elected councils. In fact, it should be shut down and prosecuted. There is a line where free speech crosses over into illegal racial discrimination, and it is up to galleries, councils and the police to hold this line. This hard-Left activist extremism is poisoning our arts and our society, and it MUST STOP.