Anti-Semitic, PLO terrorist play ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ coming to The Met
New York City’s Metropolitan Opera is staging a highly anti-Semitic, controversial opera composed by John Adams, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” based on the 1985 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro.
During the story, the terrorists shoot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound American Jew, before tossing him and his wheelchair overboard.
Smith is “appalled at how hot some of the response was” to the opera. He felt he was trying to show the humanity in the civilians and Jewish family on board as well as the terrorists and wasn’t picking sides.
“For all the brutality and moral wrong they [the terrorists] perpetrated in killing this man, they’re still human beings and have to have had reasons for doing so,” Adams claimed.
Richard Allen, founder of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) Watch, along with families and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Catholic League and numerous other Jewish organizations are, “outraged at how the opera is callously glorifying the terrorists,” despite the Met’s objections to the contrary.
Allen said that the music and staging of the opera clearly demonstrate that the idea of moral objectivity in telling the story from both sides is a fallacy. He said the music when the terrorists speak “is as if one is going to heaven and yet when the Jews are speaking the music is dark and ominous,” the narrative clearly sympathizing with the terrorists in an attempt to humanize them to the viewers while giving a “false history of grievances” against the Jews.
“How is that not anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist, especially being staged in New York City, home to 9/11?” He and the families of those lost in the 9/11 “know what terrorists are and you can’t humanize them to us.” They “Do not forgive and do not forget.”
“If this goes forward,” said Allen, “we will make sure the Met – a subsidiary of the city of New York – no longer receives funding at the city, state or federal level so that our tax dollars are not used to push the terrorist agenda.”