NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
by Alan Dershowitz
September 24, 2014

‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ controversy is not about artistic freedom

On Monday night, I stood in front of the Metropolitan Opera listening to hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish protesters who were aggrieved by the decision of the Metropolitan Opera to produce a work called “The Death of Klinghoffer” by John Adams.

The plot of the opera centers on the cold-blooded murder of an elderly, wheelchair-bound, Jewish-American man, who had taken a cruise with his dying wife to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary. Palestinian terrorists selected him for execution because he was Jewish, shot him and dumped his body into the sea.

It was not the televised beheading of a journalist or an aid worker who had volunteered to perform an important function in a dangerous area. But it was at least as brutal and unjustified, precisely because Leon Klinghoffer was an ordinary tourist who simply happened to be Jewish. The opera shows its bias toward the terrorists immediately in the opera’s title: it is not “The Murder of Leon Klinghoffer”; it is the far more neutral and dehumanizing title, “The Death of Klinghoffer.”…..

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The Death of Klinghoffer: Mrs Klinghoffer’s First Song [CLICK FOR VIDEO]. An excerpt from John Adams’ 1995 opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” based on the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985. The libretto is by Alice Goodman, and this 2003 film version was written and directed by Penny Woolcock. In this scene, Mrs. Klinghoffer sits on deck with the other hostages, unaware that her husband is to be murdered at three o’clock if the hijackers’ demands aren’t met. [I’m no music critic, but judging from this early video of  the opera, it’s unwatchable. Not only is the material highly offensive, but subjecting opera fans to it is cruel and inhuman. Though the argument could be made that the Met patrons who choose to attend this production—knowing what they surely know— get what they deserve]