Opera has been in the news lately—in Paris and New York, that is.  And no, this doesn’t mean things are culturally looking up—to the contrary, I’m afraid.  Let’s start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs), waiting for the day they can sweep away the fuzz, burn down the cathedrals, and establish sharia.  Mind you, it’s an Islamic dream that won’t happen in my lifetime, but it might take place during the lives of some of you younger readers.  During a performance of La traviata at the Opera Bastille, the capital’s hulking modernist opera house, home of the Paris National Opera, a woman in the front row was asked by an attendant to remove the covering over her face.  The performers had spotted her and had warned the conductor before the second act that they would not sing if the woman kept her face concealed.  Score one for the singers.  The woman refused to uncover her face, and the camel slob from the Gulf who was her husband (a particularly ugly man) and she were shown the door, end of story.

But not quite.

The French law is clear: no wearing of clothes that conceal the face in public places.  Masks, balaclavas, niqabs—all are forbidden.  But since when did a European country’s law matter where Muslims are concerned?  The pig—and I apologize to our porcine friends for the comparison—who brought the woman to the opera is obviously a male chauvinist, who boozes and whores but is pious where women’s correct dress is concerned.  And the couple immediately found supporters among the bien-pensant—i.e., the politically correct.  It’s all the West’s fault, feminist mongrels.  “It’s vigilante justice,” screamed one Elsa Ray, spokeswoman for the Collective Against Islamophobia, whatever that means.  Yes, certain women in Europe like Arabs, because they pay well for services rendered, despite the fact that these oily Arabs are notoriously rough with the fairer sex because they possess very small willies.

Over on this side of the pond, opera hit the headlines in New York when the Metropolitan Opera House staged The Death of Klinghoffer, American composer John Adams’ treatment of the murder of an American Jew by Palestinian terrorists on board the Achille Lauro, a cruise ship seized by 14 hijackers in 1985.  The Palestinians demanded the freedom of Israeli-held prisoners in return.  Leon Klinghoffer was a crusty old man in a wheelchair who swore at the commandos, a brave but foolhardy act, and they shot him dead in his wheelchair and then threw him overboard.

Adams’ operas include Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic, poetic explorations of recent historical events.  He is no Palestinian apologist, but in Klinghoffer he attempts to understand the seemingly endless conflict between the dispossessed Palestinians and the Israeli conquerors.  This has made all hell break loose, with protesters threatening death to Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met and himself a Jew.  The opera, one I have not seen and do not plan to see, is in complete sympathy with the Klinghoffers, but this does not register with the protesters.  The fact that the Palestinians are allowed to sing their complaints about living under the Israeli yoke is enough for them to see it as sympathetic to the killers, while portraying the Jews as greedy.  The 1991 opera does nothing of the kind, according to my research.  It presents the argument of the bad guys, or freedom fighters, take your pick, and that’s simply not good enough for Noo Yawkers bent on an ever-expanding Israel.

Be that as it may, there were angry speeches outside the Met, major disruptions inside the hall, and headlines in all the newspapers and network news.  What struck me was the absolute conviction of the protesters that any word uttered that expresses the Palestinian point of view in New York means that one is giving the green light to storm troopers to go out and murder Jews.  Klinghoffer is more of an oratorio than an opera, with the chorus of exiled Palestinians and the chorus of exiled Jews.  However touchy the subject, it should not have received the opprobrium it did by some not very serious pundits.  Palestinians are shot and killed daily by the Israeli army, and I have yet to hear about any operas written about the stone-throwing victims.  Bobby Stethem was a Navy man who was murdered by Palestinian hijackers, but no opera was ever written about him.  Yet there have been three movies about the airline hijacking in Uganda and the death of Netanyahu’s brother while rescuing the Israeli hostages.  Movies, operas—surely, our Jewish cousins cannot complain, but they certainly do protest, a bit too much.