Editorial

Raise your voice in song and protest

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A little more than 25 years ago, Salman Rushdie decided to put his thumb in the eye of Islamist politicians like Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini by writing a provocative novel, “The Satanic Verses.”

It wasn’t the first time Mr. Rushdie had put blasphemous pen to paper, but the Ayatollah determined that it would be the last. He issued a fatwah offering $1 million to anyone who would kill the upstart author and later broadened the death sentence to include anyone who sold the book. 

Every major bookstore chain in America pulled the book from its shelves, but  Fern Jaffe, a courageous independent bookseller on Riverdale Avenue, refused to be cowed. When a Press editorial praised her defense of her customers’ First Amendment rights to read whatever they chose, its Broadway office was firebombed.

On Monday, the Metropolitan Opera decided to go through with a First Amendment exercise of its own, presenting Alice Goodman and John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

We should be proud that, despite the provocation, protestors led by Riverdale’s own Rabbi Avi Weiss used their own First Amendment rights to speak out against a message they view as heinous, teaching the world once again, that, as Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Sadly, though, others attempted to disrupt the performance and deny the singers their right to be heard. Also, there was little effort to discuss fallacies among the protestors, many of whom had never seen or read the text of what they were protesting against. 

As a lightning rod for discussion of terrorism and the interminable crisis in the Middle East, this opera has served a useful purpose. Rabbi Weiss deserves to be heard when he says, “It is dangerous, [it] legitimizes terror because it presents the terrorists... as heroes.”

But so does the operagoer who engaged fellow riders on the subway home, gesticulating with their playbills, and insisting that “I didn’t think it glorified terrorism or the Palestinians.”

Perhaps the Met’s most important contribution is simply keeping the memory of Leon Klinghoffer alive and giving us the chance to, once again, try to make sense of his death.

Editorial, The Death of Klinghoffer, Salman Rushdie, Avi Weiss, Metropolitan Opera

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