Attachments relate to Klinghoffer,

NY Daily News Article: Klinghoffer Opera "Scenes of the Crime"

Anti-Israel propaganda set to music. After the opening night of The Death of
Klinghoffer, Metropolitan Opera head Peter Gelb asserted that protests were driven by
propaganda, because many of his critics had never seen the work.

We had found Gelb guilty of staging a show whose anti-Israel prejudice bleeds into anti-
Semitism. Our judgment was based on reading the libretto and viewing videos. For fuller
perspective, we bought a ticket.

Review: Gelbs production was worse than we had imagined.

The sets and staging confirmed that composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman
and director Tom Morris had far more in mind than a meditation on the murder in 1985
of New Yorker Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro
cruise ship.
Following a stroke, the elderly Klinghoffer got around in a wheelchair. The terrorists
singled him out for being Jewish, shot him and dumped him overboard.

Rather than depict a clash of good and evil, the opera finds understanding for the killing
in Israels relationship with the Palestinians. It strives to explain the terrorists actions as
rooted in the Jewish states alleged sins, starting with the countrys establishment in
1948.

In the Mets showing, the creative team also perverted history in ways that only an
audience member can see.

The opening scene called The Chorus of Exiled Palestinians characterizes early Israelis
as brutally driving Palestinians from a land of sweetness and light. The events play out in
front of years projected onto a screen: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1985, 1992,
1995, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2014.

A Met spokesperson said the chronology showed significant dates in the history of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict chosen to represent the passage of years between 1948 and
2014.

While the first six mark Arab-Israeli wars, its unclear what the rest reflect. Left out were
1977 (Egyptian President Anwar Sadats visit to Jerusalem), 1979 (the Egypt-Israel peace
treaty), 1993 (the Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Oslo accords), 1994 (treaty
between Israel and Jordan), 2001 (start of Yasser Arafats Second Intifada whose suicide
bombers killed hundreds of Israelis), 2005 (Israels withdrawal from Gaza). And so on.

By bringing the cavalcade up to the moment covering the 29 years since Klinghoffers
murder the production places the onus on Israel for the Palestinians modern-day
terrorism.

Strengthening the grotesque accusation, the show dresses the Palestinians in black, has
the players wave green banners resembling the Hamas flag and places the cast in front
of a replica of the security barrier that Israel began erecting in 2002 in response to the
suicide bombings 17 years after Klinghoffers murder.

So, yes, Mr. Gelb, we saw The Death of Klinghoffer for the screed that it is. Outside,
looking back through the Mets tall windows, we saw a memorial to another Jew who
died in 1985, the great artist Marc Chagall, whose giant, exuberant murals face out on
the Lincoln Center plaza.

For shame, for shame, we thought.