EDWARD CLINE: THE METROPOLITAN OPERA JOINS THE JIHADISTS
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/metropolitan-opera-joins-the-jihadists
It’s a sign of how far America has been corrupted by political correctness, subjectivism in ethics, and relativism in the arts that a shoddy opera that romanticizes murdering terrorists can be put on by a major cultural institution, the Metropolitan Opera of New York City.
I am not an aficionado of heavy weight opera. I won’t go into my esthetic tastes here, because those are irrelevant. What is relevant is the obscenity of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera last night (October 20th), whose libretto is a long-winded, atonal propaganda piece for the Islamic jihadists who hijacked a cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger because he was a Jew. Listen to the sing-song screeching here and also a trailer.
But even the discordant singing and jumbled orchestral score are irrelevant. Even had Adams’s opus been written in the disciplined and original style of Georges Bizet or Giacomo Puccini or Giuseppe Verdi, Klinghoffer remains a sucker punch to all standards of moral decency and civilized taste.
More importantly, staging The Death of Klinghoffer is in conformance to the prescriptive steps for “cultural jihad” promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood in its 1991 memorandum for “transforming” America from a free republic into a bastion of totalitarian Islam. The Brotherhood’s “master plan” calls for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, composer John Adams, and director Tom Morris I guess don’t mind lending their hands to the PLO, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic gangs.
The Death of Klinghoffer is fundamentally a U.S. State Department and New York taxpayer-funded exercise in malodorous agitprop for anti-Semitism and Islam. John Adams and the Met may as well have staged an adaptation of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as a musical with dialogue. Better yet, he could have turned “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers into a serious, Wagnerian style opera, with no dancing and no plumbing for laughs. Why not?
If you’re going to shill for Islam and its core Jew-hatred and its unapologetic ugliness, why not go whole hog? I’m sure the cost of producing a musical Triumph of the Will can be recouped in the usual ticket prices, which for Klinghoffer are going from $35 to $145 a seat. I’m sure the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, could offer special discounted prices to Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, and to the whole staff of the Council on American-Islam Relations. Perhaps even offer private showings for the staffs of every Islamic front group in the country. Full houses guaranteed.
The Death of Klinghoffer is being vigorously protested, and the Met’s Peter Gelb has been hard-pressed to cancel its debut and subsequent showings.
Yet, the opera has its defenders. New York’s Communist mayor, Bill de Blasio, for example, according to a New York Daily News article of October 20th, said:
Mayor de Blasio defended the Metropolitan Opera’s right to show “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and criticized predecessor Rudy Giuliani’s protest against the controversial work.
“I really think we have to be very careful in a free society to respect that cultural institutions will portray works of art, put on operas, plays, that there will be art exhibits in museum,” de Blasio said Monday at an unrelated press conference.
“And in a free society we respect that. We don’t have to agree with what’s in the exhibit but we agree with the right of the artist and the cultural institution to put that forward to the public.”…
“I think there is a serious problem today in the world that has nothing to do with this opera,” the mayor said.
“There’s an anti-Semitism problem in this world today, particularly in Western Europe, that worries me greatly. That’s where my focus is. I don’t think an opera is what the focal point should be right now.”
“The only thing I know about the opera is that the Metropolitan Opera has a right to show it,” he said.
That’s rich, coming from a politician who hankers after the power to squelch freedom of speech, and who really isn’t for a “free society” at all. And it’s evidence of his cluelessness, one shared with countless others about government-subsidized “art,” that he can claim that the Met has a “right” to force taxpayers to fund any kind of propaganda, which is what Klinghoffer is.
Excuse me, Bill, but the Met would have a “right” to show Klinghoffer if it were completely privately funded, and even then it would raise issues. But it isn’t completely privately funded by donors; it’s funded in large part by government money, that is, taxpayer money. Institutions that receive a single cent from the government to push rubbish like Klinghoffer to the forefront of “culture” do not have “freedom of speech” rights. Taxpayers, who had no choice in the matter, however, do have a right to protest such “art” and to gag its shills and promoters.
Further, Klinghoffer is implicitly about Islam. The terrorist protagonists are Muslims. Islam also believes in “freedom of speech,” that is, the freedom to censor any critics of Islam – or behead them, shoot them, hang them, rape them, stone them to death. Islam believes in free speech, and will tolerate you as long as you don’t talk back.
Daniel Greenfield, in his FrontPage article of June 3rd, “Should New York Taxpayers Fund Pro-Terrorism and Anti-Semitism at the The Metropolitan Opera?”, revealed some interesting facts about the Met:
The Metropolitan Opera has been having serious financial problems. Its programs regularly mention support from public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Its 2012 report mentions $500,000 in support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The year before that it was $100.000.
The Arts website shows six figure funding going to the Metropolitan Opera every year under General Opera Support. There are also other grants. That means that when a terrorist screams about the Jews on stage, he’ll be doing it with funding from New York taxpayers.
Maybe it’s time to put a stop to that.
If the Met wants to promote the murder of 9 percent of the population of New York City, New Yorkers shouldn’t have to pay for it.
That means eliminating all city and state funding for the Metropolitan Opera. The most obvious place to start is by killing the annual six-figure New York State Council on the Arts giveaway.
It’s something that a New York State Senator or Assemblyman can do.
At the Federal level, the Met receives funding from a variety of agencies, including $1 million from the State Department and from the usual suspects such as the Department of Education.
Need I say more?
Staging the anti-Semitic The Death of Klinghoffer in the face rising anti-Semitism around the world is not about “freedom of speech.” It is about the power to defy all standards of rationality and morality because of political correctness and an amoral indifference in the ugly, sorry souls of Peter Gelb, the director, and the whole cast.
It isn’t only Leon Klinghoffer who has been shot in the head and tossed overboard. It is the American public and in particular, New Yorkers.
Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.
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