Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.

Denmark’s iconic Little Mermaid statue, draped in a hijab (background is here via Al Arabiya)

The New York Metropolitan Opera, in a co-production with the English National Opera, began a run of John Adams’ 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer last night in Manhattan with a standing ovation and mixed reviews. Death is an artistic interpretation of the actual murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly Jew confined to a wheelchair, who took a cruise with his wife in 1985 on the Achille Lauro in celebration of their wedding anniversary. Armed Palestinian Arab terrorists in the service of the Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked the ship as it sailed between Alexandria and Port Said, Egypt. In pursuit of their Palestinian liberation, the Arabs shot the disabled Jew at point blank range in the forehead and in the chest. Then they hurled the body, along with the wheelchair, into the Mediterranean. Wikipedia provides a useful summary of the opera’s culturally-uplifting contents, its entertaining narrative and its so-delightful musical innovations.

Five years after Klinghoffer’s murder, Mahmoud Abbas who succeeded Yasser Arafat as head of the PLO, explained that

the seizing of the cruise ship in 1985 was a mistake, and apologized for the killing of disabled U.S. passenger Klinghoffer. [CNN, April 24, 1996]

The US State Department immediately rejected the Abbas statement. The creators of the opera on the other hand neither apologized nor ever seemed to quite understand why so many people told them their theatrical event was a mistake.

An angry crowd, mainly of Jews, assembled outside the performance’s opening last night at the Lincoln Center in New York City, holding placards and chanting messages reflecting fury at the glorification of terrorists and the trivialization of the murder of a helpless man. The late Mr Klinghoffer’s children joined their voices to those of the protesters decrying the cruel and cynical exploitation of their father’s murder.

The cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1987 [Image Source]

This surprised the man who wrote it who offered this rather disingenuous comment to an interviewer:

“I expected there would be some pushback,” Mr. Adams said by phone recently. “But to see posters saying the opera is pro-terrorist, it’s really kind of shocking.” [“An Opera Under Fire“, New York Times, October 16, 2014]

READ MORE: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/21-oct-14-trivialization-pursuits.html