Thursday, October 23, 2014

Comment trail:

A Sane Face on an Old Insanity

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    "Justice [Aristotle] said, consists in treating equals equally and unequals unequally, but in proportion to their relevant differences. This involves, first, the idea of impartiality ... Impartiality implies a kind of equality - not that all cases should be treated alike but that the onus rests on whoever would treat them differently to distinguish them in relevant ways .... That is what is really meant by the right to equal consideration-to be treated alike unless relevant differences have been proved." (Stanley Benn, Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

    Cannot help but note how the ferocious boycotters in the comments pounce on the author for laying out with simple, rational arguments the black hole at the centre of their supposedly 'pro-Palestinian' advocacy. There is no light to be had from them. They will never understand why something that feels so intuitively just to them is actually another dot in a long tradition of Jew-loathing (there, I said it!)

    The principle to be extracted from the quote about justice, equality and onus, is very simple: If you single out Israel for special treatment (BDS) you need to be able to explain in simple, rational arguments why. Why Israel, only Israel and none but Israel, deserves to have a world-wide movement of millions (billions, actually, if you consider the entire Muslim world is automatically in boycott of the Jewish state) people who feel it is necessary to boycott and suffocate it. There must be furnished one cogent argument as to why only Israel is boycotted. The fact that it feels right to the variegated boycotter does not meet the threshold of reason,



    Klinghoffer: A Night At The Opera


    "the opera may portray the murderers in a more sympathetic light than many might prefer,"

    "when it comes to Kissinger, Adams and Goodman turn him into a clownish villain."
    In an interview for the Guardian, Goodman says:

    "This, she argues, was her mistake: to depict terrorists as human beings and their victims as flawed. In one particularly caustic attack in the New York Times in 2001, Richard Taruskin denounced the opera for "romanticising terrorists". Taruskin noted that Adams had said the opera owed its structure to Bach's Passions.But in Bach's Passions, argued Taruskin, every time Jesus is heard, an aureole of violins and violas gives Christ the musical equivalent of
    a halo. Klinghoffer has no such halo, while the Palestinian choruses are accompanied by the most beautiful music in the opera.


    What upset Taruskin was giving beautiful music to terrorists," snaps Goodman. "They have to sing ugly music"

    So these two librettos sprang from the same mind and the flaws you have noted (in the quotes I provided) are also not unconnected. The same mind that decided to clownize Kissinger, a Jew with a German name, lionized Palestinian terrorists who killed a Jew with a German name.
    This cannot be a coincidence.


1 Comments:

At 6:07 PM EDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello. Just came back to recommend you go back to this post to read WigWag's comments - Ww was in the protest, and also adds more about Goodman, the librettist.

And, Ww always posts most insightful comments.

I add the Met's motive in staging this has something to do to the Met's geographical proximity to Lincoln Square Synagogue:
The Met's proxy war with the 'settlers', although LSS has been there longer :)

K2K


 

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