NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld
June 20, 2014

This week, in response to public blowback about its plans to stage “The Death of Klinghoffer” this fall, the Metropolitan Opera offered what it seems to think is a significant concession — namely, that even as the opera goes ahead at Lincoln Center, it will not be simulcast in movie theaters around the world.

Interesting logic: Don’t broadcast this incendiary drama — about the coldblooded murder of a Jewish man by terrorists — across the globe, where violent anti-Semitism has spread, but continue to show it in New York, a place where people from the world over basically get along.

In other words, the Met seems to be saying, there’s already plenty of anti-Semitism in Europe, but maybe not quite enough here.

This is an indecent outcome, and one that should offend Jewish New Yorkers. I cannot imagine the Met treating any other ethnic group this way. But it’s sadly consistent with how the institution has approached its plans to stage a work of art many people, including myself, consider insensitive at best and anti-Semitic at worst.

…..Gelb excuses these and other utterances embedded in the opera by saying composer John Adams, “tries to understand the hijackers and their motivations and to look for humanity in the terrorists.” Humanity in the terrorists? There was no more humanity in the men who executed an elderly stroke victim with a shot to the head than there was in the mass murderers who attacked this country on 9/11. The Achille Lauro terrorists, in fact, were the precursors to the 9/11 killers.

READ MORE

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/met-senseless-klinghoffer-copout-article-1.1836781#ixzz35BeFkkIm