This Monday New York’s Metropolitan Opera will open its
season by presenting John Adams’ opera: “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
The opera dramatizes the conflict between Israel and
Palestinian terrorists by enacting a debate over whether or not the terrorists
should murder a Jewish American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer. In the end they did.
Much has been written about the Met’s decision. The opera
company is defending itself on the ground of free expression. Its’ detractors
are attacking it for choosing an opera that gives equal time and weight to the
views of Klinghoffer and the terrorists.
Today, famed constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams addresses
the issue in the Wall Street Journal.
He begins with the constitutional issue:
Mr.
Adams’s opera is protected by the First Amendment and so is the Metropolitan
Opera in its decision to offer it. It would be a gross and obvious
constitutional violation if government sought to bar the opera from being
publicly produced or imposed any punishment for doing so.
However, just because the First Amendment allows us to
present the opera does not mean that we should do so.
Abrams continues:
But the
controversy over the Adams opera cannot be dealt with by simple reference to
the First Amendment or artistic freedom. Those who direct the Metropolitan
Opera made a choice when they decided to offer Mr. Adams’s opera, and it is
altogether fitting that they be publicly judged by that choice.
You ought to
retain the right to make obnoxious and offensive remarks. The government ought
not to be making laws criminalizing such expressions. And yet, the public has
the right to judge your character when you do.
In order to expose the Met’s moral failure, Abrams offers a
few hypotheticals:
Suppose
the opera had been about a different murder and the Met offered an intense,
two-sided operatic discussion of the desirability of the murder of, say,
President Kennedy in a work called “The Death of JFK. ” Or a production about
the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which singers on the “side” of that
assassination offer racist views in support of the murder. Or how about one on
the death of one of the thousands of victims of the 9/11 attack that contained
an extended operatic debate between her killers and herself about whether her
death was justified.
Why would the Met choose to purvey terrorist propaganda in
the guise of art? Does it believe that it can thereby occupy the moral high ground, by legitimating the actions of those who would destroy Western civilization.
This coming Monday evening the scene at New York’s Lincoln Center
will surely be chaotic. Hopefully, those who find the choice of the John Adams
opera appalling will be heard. And hopefully those who believe that the death
of Klinghoffer is something that ought to be discussed and debated, rather than
condemned will be judged harshly.
As Abrams argues, debating certain actions legitimates them:
1 comment:
The truth of the Met's intent is concealed in its choice of “The Death of Klinghoffer” as the title.
It was, as Abrams repeatedly terms it, a MURDER.
I'm reminded of another New York travesty -- the deliberate use of the Ground Zero memorial to convert an attack on America into a tragedy. Attacks call on us to consider, as Abrams says, "how best to prevent future murderous acts".
Tragedies induce us to regret the loss of life, and to ask ourselves why our enemies hate us so much. Led astray by this peacenik slight-of-hand, our appropriate response thus becomes multicultural outreach, not war.
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