Sunday, June 22, 2014

The Chick Who Wrote the Words for the Klinghoffer Opera Is Outraged That the Met Has Cancelled Its Simulcast

Alice Goodman, who sounds like she could be Jewish but who's actually "a poet from Minnesota who now works as a Church of England rector," is irate re the cancellation of the broadcast (even though the production itself is going ahead as planned). Goodman pooh-pooh's the fear that the simulcast would have fanned the flames of Jew-hate, labelling it (the fear, not the Jew-hate) “offensive, ludicrous, laughable and simply not true.” Furthermore, huffs the hyperventilated Rev,
“I think it’s a very bad decision, and the reasons given for it are deeply confused and insulting and disingenuous,” she said by phone from the Cambridgeshire home she shares with her husband, Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry, Sir Geoffrey Hill.  
“The opera is not anti-Semitic – far from it. But it tries to understand the people who become terrorists. If you want to prevent something, you have to understand it.”
Maybe so. But Goodman doesn't understand it. And because her understanding is faulty, predicated as it is on a moral equivalence which simply isn't there, she has ended up justifying the terrorism.

Now here's the part where her animus becomes crystal clear:
Rev Goodman, 56, also suggested the Met had come under pressure from some of its donors, although Mr Gelb has denied that is the case.
Oh, those Jooooos! They're behind everything, aren't they?

Update: Here's a taste of how librettist Goodman "understands" things:

CHORUS OF EXILED PALESTINIANS
My father’s house was razed
In nineteen forty-eight

When the Israelis passed
Over our street.

The house was built of stone
With a courtyard inside
Where, on a hot day,
one Could sit in shade

Under a tree, and have

A glass of something cool.
Coolness rose like a wave
From our pure well.

No one was turned away.

The doorstep had worn down:
I see in my mind’s eye

A crescent moon.

Of that house, not a wall
In which a bird might nest
Was left to stand.
Israel Laid all to waste.

Though we have paid to drink
Our water, and our wood

Is sold to us, we thank

The only God.

Let the supplanter look

Upon his work. Our faith

Will take the stones he broke
And break his teeth.

"The supplanter," eh? Oy vey!

Rev Goodman's protests to the contrary, these words are the very definition of Zionhass, the Jew-hate of our time.

No comments: