Protesters descended on the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, hours before curtains rise on the controversial production “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
The protesters decried the Met’s decision to stage the opera, based on the 1985 murder of Leon Klinghoffer – an elderly Jewish American tourist killed by Palestinian terrorists and thrown overboard from the Achille Lauro cruise liner.
Rabbi Avi Weiss called the day-long protest a “learning vigil in the memory of Mr. Klinghoffer.” He called on Met GM Peter Gelb to cancel the production.
“I hope that Mr. Gelb is going to fess up and do what courageous people do and that is cancel the opera,” said Weiss, from the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in The Bronx.
“This is an opera that legitimizes terror because it presents the terrorists, the killers of Klinghoffer, as heros. We are just a few miles from Ground Zero. Are we going to see on this stage a justification of what al Qaeda did?”
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Gov. David Paterson and US Reps. Peter King and Jerrold Nadler are all slated to join the protests outside the Met on Monday afternoon and early evening.
Mayor de Blasio will not be among those protesting, and he urged restraint for those calling for the opera’s closure.
“I really think we have to be very careful, in a free society to respect that cultural institutions will portray works of art, will put on operas, plays , that there’ll be art exhibits in museums – and in a free society we respect that,” de Blasio said in the Rockaways on Monday, at a Superstorm Sandy recovery event.
“We don’t have to agree with what’s in the exhibit, we agree with the right of the artist and the cultural institution to put that forward to the public.”
Klinghoffer’s adult daughters live in New York but won’t attend the protests, a family rep said.
They’ve already penned a lengthy commentary decrying the musical. Their scathing essay will be included in programs that’ll be distributed to all attending “The Death of Klinghoffer.”
“Our father is also a universal symbol of the threat terrorism poses to our societies, our values and our lives,” Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer wrote.
“Terrorism cannot be rationalized. It cannot be understood. It can never be tolerated as a vehicle for political expression or grievance. Unfortunately, `The Death of Klinghoffer’ does all this, and sullies the memory of a fine, principled, sweet man in the process.”
Additional reporting by David K. Li and Kate Sheehy
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
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