The second in a series of blockbuster protests against the Metropolitan Opera will take place Monday evening, Oct. 20.
The Met is being protested for staging an opera which seeks to humanize the Palestinian Arab terrorist thugs who hijacked an Italian cruise liner and singled out an elderly disabled Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, whom they shot and threw overboard to drown. The name of the opera is ‘The Death of Klinghoffer.’
Before the protest on Monday there will be a press conference, starting at 5:00 p.m., at which former New York City Mayor Rudy Guliani will be the keynote speaker.
Giuliani, of course, is the American official who has twice stared down evil and refused to sacrifice his principles to political correctness or even the dangling of millions of dollars.
In 1995 Giuliani expelled Yasir Arafat from a concert for world leaders at Lincoln Center in 1995, saying he could never forgive Arafat’s acts of terror.
“I would not invite Yasir Arafat to anything, anywhere, anytime, anyplace,” Giuliani said at the time. “The U.N. is one thing, the peace process is another thing. When we’re having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who had been implicated in the murder of Americans.”
In the wake of the Islamist terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001, Giuliani rebuffed Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal who suggested that the attacks were caused by U.S. policies in the Middle East, and that the U.S. should “adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” The prince offered $10 million towards disaster relief in the aftermath of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers.
Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, responded to the Saudi prince:
There is no moral equivalent for this act. There is no justification for it,” Guliani responded, “And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism. So I think not only are those statements wrong, they’re part of the problem.
And with that, Giuliani refused the offer of the Saudi prince’s $10 million.
That is the stuff of which the Stop the Terror Opera coalition is made.
In addition to Giuliani, former New York State Governor David Paterson (D), New York Congressman Peter King (R)(NY-2), criminal defense attorney Ben Brafman, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz (D), Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, Jewish war veterans and terror victims will lend their presence and support to the press conference and protest.
Prior to the press conference and protest, Rabbi Avi Weiss and a group of rabbinical leaders will hold a prayer vigil, beginning at 12:00 noon, at Lincoln Center Plaza at Broadway and 65th Street in memory of Leon Klinghoffer’s soul. It is an effort to assuage the pain and tribulation to Klinghoffer’s soul and his memory caused by the glorification of his terrorist murderers in the Klinghoffer opera.
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In the run-up to this latest protest which will be held on the evening the Klinghoffer opera opens at the Metropolitan Opera, an interesting glimpse into the dark soul of the opera’s librettist, Alice Goodman, was provided by a remark she made on social media.
JCCWatch, a small activist organization based in New York and run by New York businessman Richard Allen tweeted out a provocative message to Goodman, asking her, “an apostate” (Goodman was born a Jew but converted to Christianity and is now an Anglican chaplain) why she thinks a dead Jew is art.
Goodman responded, revealing her conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and wrapping it in a Jewish conspiracy, all in fewer than 140 characters!
She claimed that JCCWatch is an entity controlled by Israel to police people’s views and to attack any who do not conform to the Jewish State’s positions. It appears Goodman confuses Israel with ISIS. Maybe confirmation of that will be found in the next libretto she writes when she teams up again with her fellow Klinghoffer desecrators John Adams and Peter Gelb.