RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Monday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera. I went for two reasons: to see and hear John Adams’ controversial opera, The Death of Klinghoffer; and to see and hear what those protesting the Met’s judgment in presenting the opera had to say. Peter Gelb, the head of the Met Opera, had advised people to see it for themselves and then decide.

That’s what I planned to do. Even though I had written critically of the opera—based on reading the libretto and listening to a recording—I was also critical of those who wanted to ban or censor it. I wanted personally to experience all sides of the controversy and then “decide.”

Lincoln Center made that difficult. After I bought my ticket, I decided to stand in the Plaza of Lincoln Center, across the street and in front of the protestors, so I could hear what they were saying and read what was on their signs. But Lincoln Center security refused to allow me to stand anywhere in the large plaza. They pushed me to the side and to the back, where I could barely make out the content of the protests. “Either go into the opera if you have a ticket or leave. No standing.” When I asked why I couldn’t remain in the large, open area between the protestors across the street and the opera house behind me, all I got were terse replies: “security,” “Lincoln Center orders.”

The end result was that the protestors were talking to and facing an empty plaza. It would be as if the Metropolitan Opera had agreed to produce The Death of Klinghoffer, but refused to allow anyone to sit in the orchestra, the boxes or the grand tier. “Family circle, upstairs, side views only.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday criticized his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani for objecting to the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of The Death of Klinghoffer and defended the Met’s right to stage the controversial performance that has been labeled anti-Semitic, the New York Daily News reported on Monday, hours before the play was set to open.

“The former mayor had a history of challenging cultural institutions when he disagreed with their content. I don’t think that’s the American way. The American way is to respect freedom of speech. Simple as that,” de Blasio said at an unrelated press conference.

Giuliani plans to lead the latest protest against the opera outside the Met on Monday, as the show opens.

Critics have labeled the performance anti-Semitic for glorifying the murder of Jewish-American cruise ship passenger Leon Klinghoffer, 69. Wheel chair-bound, Klinghoffer was shot in the head by Palestinian hijackers on the Achille Lauro cruise ship 29 years ago. The terrorists threw his body, along with his wheelchair, overboard into the Mediterranean Sea and his corpse washed up on the Syrian shoreline a few days later.

“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 museums,” de Blasio said. “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.”

Two dramatic presentations being staged this week will be delivering a powerful message with serious negative implications for the Jewish people.

Two dramatic presentations being staged this week, in venues thousands of miles apart on two different continents, will be delivering a powerful message with serious negative implications for the Jewish people. One is the opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which will make its New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, October 20, and the second is the musical Cukurs.

Herberts Cukurs, currently on a nationwide tour in Latvia.

On the surface, there does not appear to be any ostensible connection between an opera about the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and a musical about the life of aviator Herberts Cukurs, a national hero in the 1930s in his native Latvia, but a closer look at the presentations clearly indicates their highly problematic content.

In the case of The Death of Klinghoffer, the main issue is its portrayal of the Palestinian Liberation Front terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a handicapped American Jewish tourist who was a passenger on the boat, and then threw his body and wheelchair overboard. In the words of the victim’s daughters Lisa and Ilsa, the opera “rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father.”

EU’s 40% carbon emissions plan to be vetoed, threatening global domino effect

Climate change scepticism is on the rise in Europe. Governments are not going to back a planned 40 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030 at a time when the EU is on its knees economically. Poland has promised a veto, threatening a global domino effect

European Union member Poland has come out and said in public what many other governments in Europe are saying privately: The EU’s proposal next week to cut carbon emissions to 40 percent of the 1990 level by by 2030 would be disastrous for industry and cannot be allowed to go through.

Citing Polish Radio, Britain’s Global Warming Policy Forum said in a press release that Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Janusz Piechociński believed the plan was suicidal.

“If this initial proposal will look as it does now, then Poland will have no choice but to veto it… For the Polish economy minister and the majority of EU economy ministers the 40-percent option, which destroys half of Europe’s industry, is unacceptable,” he said.

The plan is due to be discussed at an EU climate summit in Brussels.

If it is vetoed or amended beyond recognition, analysts say this will have a major impact on climate change policies around the world. Taken collectively, the EU is the world’s largest economic bloc.

If European nations block the plan, say the analysts, there will be little incentive for countries from the United States to China to make further efforts to cut emissions, and the move could act as an incentive for them to back-track on previous commitments.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-european-slide-to-anti-zionism?f=puball

Although it isn’t binding, the British parliament voted in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state. British MPs voted 274 to 12 for a non-binding motion to “recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution to securing a negotiated two state solution.” The remainder of the parliament’s 650 MPs abstained.

Whatever one thinks of this vote, it is a sign of shifting public opinion in the United Kingdom and beyond. The debate in the House of Commons came after the Swedish government announced it would recognize a Palestinian state – the first European Union member in Western Europe to do so. Many contend that the war in Gaza influenced British public opinion against Israel. While others maintain the vote was merely the evolution of attitudes promoted by home grown Muslims.

Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, said even though the vote isn’t binding on the British government, it is “significant.” Alas, it is. The resolution was welcomed by Palestinians and criticized by Israel.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry argues that the “premature international recognition sends a troubling message to the Palestinian leadership that they can evade the tough choices that both sides have to make and actually undermines the chances to reach a real peace.” It is logical to ask why the Palestinians should negotiate at all when the end game has been established.

For years a two state solution has been bandied about, but arriving at an understanding about the boundaries and security remain in limbo. Suppose there is a sovereign Palestinian state with rockets that can paralyze Ben Gurion airport and reach every Israeli population center, is that a state Israel can countenance?

New media accounts – including coverage by NRO’s Patrick Brennan – confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism.

As I explained on July 17, 2006:

While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses.

“Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” states a June 21 declassified summary of a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center. “Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”

It turns out that – based on open sources – I vastly underestimated the size of Hussein’s stockpiles of deadly devices.

In this story’s first outrage, it now transpires that Hussein had some 5,000 tank shells filled with sarin nerve gas, mustard gas, and other lethal agents. This is roughly ten times the arsenal that I reported that he possessed. Had I access to more accurate information back then, my pieces would have reflected the depth of Hussein’s supplies of these munitions.

The Left would rather forget its old slogan, “Bush lied, thousands died.”

The very mention of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Iraq was toxic for Republicans by 2005. They wanted to forget about the supposed absence of recently manufactured WMD in great quantities in Iraq; Democrats saw Republican defensiveness as key to their recovery in 2006. By the time Obama was elected, the issue had been demagogued to death, was no longer of any political utility, and so vanished.

So why all of a sudden is the New York Times strangely focused on old WMD stockpiles showing up in Iraq? Is the subtext perhaps that the rise of ISIS poses an existential threat in such a dangerous landscape (and by extension offers an explanation for the current bombing)? Or are we to be reminded that Bush stirred up a WMD hornets’ nest that Obama was forced to deal with? Or is the sudden interest intended to preempt the story now before we learn that ISIS routinely employs WMD against the Kurds? How strange that Iraq, WMD, bombing, and preemption reappear in the news, but now without the hysteria of the Bush era.

Indeed, for the last two years, reports of WMD of some sort have popped up weekly in Syria and Iraq. Bashar Assad has used them, apparently with strategic profit, both in deterring his enemies and in embarrassing the red lines of Barack Obama, who had threatened to bomb him if he dared use them.

ISIS is rumored to have attempted to use mustard gas against the Kurds. Iraqi depots are periodically found, even as they are often dismissed as ossified beyond the point of easy use, or as already calibrated and rendered inert by either U.N. inspectors or U.S. occupation forces. But where did all the WMD come from, and why the sudden fright now about these stockpiles’ being deployed?

Recently, Australian policed uncovered a jihadist plot to kidnap regular citizens on the streets of Sydney, behead them, and send the gruesome and terrifying videos over the internet. The aim of the terrorists was to bring Australia to its knees and bend it to Islamic demands.

Unknown to most, we in America were not as fortunate as the Aussies. Something similar to what happened in Australia took place here, but the mainstream media is keeping it quiet. In West Orange, New Jersey, a lovely middle-class suburb, an American jihadist, Ali Mohamed Brown, shot and killed a promising 19-year-old right on the street corner because, as he boasted to police, he was “looking to find an American to kill in retaliation for Moslem deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan”. The killing took place this past June 25.

Young Brendan Tevlin, beloved in his Irish-Catholic community, was murdered precisely because he was American, by a jihadist roaming our suburban streets hunting down Americans. Mohamed called it a “just killing”. Identifying as a Moslem and not as an American, he took “revenge” against his fellow countrymen.

The media hasn’t covered the story, just as they never mentioned the jihadi motives behind the Muhammad/Malvo “Beltway” shooting spree at cars on I-95 a few years ago, or the shooting by a jihadist at a Little Rock army recruitment center, or in Seattle, or at LAX, or years ago atop the Empire State Building.

Why the media silence? Contrast this to the recent wall-to-wall Ferguson, Missouri coverage, and the relentless conclusions of “racism” heaped on a situation many believe was simply self-defense by a police officer. Yet, we hear nothing from the mainstreamers when it comes to home-grown Islamic killings of Americans, carried out in the name of Islam.

The Black Flag of ISIS is not new. It has been seen in the West before. The strategy of those who fight under that flag is not new, either. The strategy is world domination under the rule of Islam.

The general Muslim strategy followed by ISIS is explained clearly by Raymond Ibrahim. He writes, “…The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general. Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam…”

What about the military tactics used by ISIS? Are they new to Islam? Will coalition bombing be enough to force ISIS to surrender? At this time, the answer to this question looks to be no. As many ground troops have seen (and some Air Force generals admit), no one has ever surrendered to an airplane.

In her article on the Black Flag, Nina Porzucki writes,

“The flag is often called the Black Standard or the Black Banner. ‘The black banner of Islam as a symbol goes back to the 8th century, when the Second Dynasty of Islam came to power with black banners,’ says Jonathan Bloom, a professor of Islamic Art at Boston College.”

“The white writing that you see at the top of the flag is the first half of an Islamic phrase called the shahada, or declaration of faith, which reads: “There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.’”

“Another appropriated symbol on the flag is the white circle at its center, which contains the second part of the shahada: “Muhammad is the Messenger of God … The two Arabic phrases, the black color of the flag and even the ancient looking font of the Arabic all work to evoke an image of the historical Islamic caliphate, the massive state that ISIS claims to have resurrected.

f you ever doubted that warmism endorses a preening, totalitarian disdain for the lives and rights of others, take up a copy of “Climate Change” by graphic novelist Philippe Squarzoni, who imagines how virtuous it would be to go berserk with an assault rifle in a shopping mall. And yes, he’s not joking

A top scientist of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Jean Jouzel, is lauding a comic publication which has the heroine gunning down three Santa Clauses in a supermarket with a military assault rifle. The realistically-drawn massacre in Climate Changed by Philippe Squarzoni (Abrams, New York 2014) is meant to symbolise the need to reduce consumerism and CO2 emissions.

The book was written a year before the Nairobi Westgate shopping mall massacre in September, 2013, in which gunmen killed or wounded 240 people in the name of Islam. But the fictional massacre in the cause of reducing CO2 emissions is retained in this year’s English translation.

The book, 480 pages and 1.2kg, is in the ‘graphic novel’ genre, now a serious literary form. The book won the Jury Prize at the Lyon Graphic Novel Festival in 2012. (A graphic novel, Maus, by New Yorker cartoonist Art Spigelman, won a Pulitzer in 1992).

In the massacre sequence, Camille, the beautiful partner of the comic’s hero, Squarzoni himself, arrives at the “Nuclear Power Christmas Market” with what looks like a Belgian FN assault rifle slung over her shoulder.

The next frame (below) shows her in the supermarket aisle amid shopping trolleys, lifting the sights to her face.

The caption reads: “Today, choice about energy issues has been stolen from the people. The decisions are all in the hands of politicians or big multinationals. Economic motivations prevail over environmental needs.”

Frame three (below) shows she is sighting on three men in Santa costumes, one holding bottles of Coca-Cola, and another taking a gift-wrapped parcel from a shelf. The caption: “We produce more so we can consume more.”