Moral midgets

During the trip to Austin I read the book Hallelujah Junction; Composing an American Life, the autobiography of modern music maker John Adams (not a descendant of the early American president). It was published in 2008. I got the book because I like much of what Adams has written so far (you can find recording of Harmonium and Harmonilehre as well as Hallelujah Junction on YouTube). It was fascinating to hear the stories behind many of his compositions (a few of which I hadn't known about yet).

Adams is known for writing operas about unusual topics. His first was Nixon in China and the third was Dr. Atomic about Robert Oppenheimer and the test of the first nuclear bomb. I found his comments about the second opera to be most interesting.

That second opera is The Death of Klinghoffer in which Palestinian terrorists hijack a boat and end up killing only one person, Leon Klinghoffer, who was confined to a wheelchair. This opera, completed in early 1991, gave Adams a chance to tell both the Palestinian and Israeli stories. During research for the opera he found lots of resistance. He wrote:

… I would soon learn that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was the most carefully controlled and fastidiously managed debate in American political life. Organizational watchdogs and lobbies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, although they preached tolerance in the public dialog, monitored the dissemination and information and opinion about Arab-Israeli affairs, and their considerable clout in Washington often smothered attempts from the other side to gain a hearing on American television and other media.

And later:

One might ask why I, and American non-Jew living in California, far from the Middle East, would be concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian issue… The answer is that for American goyim the Jewish experience, the Holocaust, and the founding of Israel have become a tale of exemplary moral history, one of suffering, heroism, and redemption. Through constant exposure by means of films, books, plays, music, and mass media, Jewish culture and Jewish history have gained a position of special meaning, even special privilege, in American life. Their suffering and courage have granted the Jews a unique moral status. But with this special status comes a problem: Israeli behavior on the world state is off limits to criticism, at least in the United States. No American politician can hope to win a campaign if he or she does not speak the received wisdom about Palestinian "terrorism" versus Israeli "security." For all the public hand-wringing over the Middle East crisis, the major U.S. Media barely ever acknowledges the lamentable fact that Israel has pushed the Palestinians into the most arid and least productive corners of the land. No one can acknowledge without being labeled anti-Semitic that, as members of a democracy, Israelis nevertheless live according to a constitution that gives special status to one religious and ethnic group at the expense of another. The unspoken rules of the public dialogue forbid us to acknowledge the fact that terrorism as practiced by the Palestinians is, as the historian Stanley Hoffman describes it, "The weapon of the weak in a classic conflict among states or within a state."

I was puzzled and eventually infuriated by how the Middle East was presented to the average American who reads a newspaper or watches television. As the world's most flagrant energy consumers, the United States continued to suck the teat of the oil-rich nations, cynically indifferent to who exactly was accepting our cash so long as the barrels kept rolling and the oil kept flowing. … If either Iran or Iraq had ambitions to develop nuclear capacity we'd roundly condemn them and threaten them with embargos, or, failing that, a military invasion. But we could never seem to answer them truthfully when they asked why they were forbidden a nuclear arsenal while Israel could maintain one. No wonder we appeared to the average Muslim as irrational and capricious and thoroughly dishonest. I felt that journalists, lobbyists, and many intellectuals in the United States were too ready to invoke the Holocaust and charges of anti-Semitism to short-circuit the debate about the Palestinian question. The pro-Israeli lobbies like AIPAC had a huge influence on members of Congress and were heavily funded while Palestinians, vastly underrepresented in the United States, were forever scolded or ridiculed for their violence and self-defeating refusal to accept what Israel deemed right to offer. I thought it was a noble thing for Americans to show solidarity with the Jews of the world, but Israel's behavior, its appropriation of the choicest land and water rights, its discrimination against non-Jews within its borders, and its deeply provocative settlements in Gaza and the West Bank all struck me as arrogant and ultimately destructive to the cause of peace.

Jewish groups roundly condemned the opera. Too much time (as in more than none) was spent portraying the Palestinian side of the issue. A rabbi of the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned a performance at the Edinburgh Festival, saying:

I would hope the people of Edinburgh would respond appropriately by allowing these moral midgets to do their opera to an empty house.

Between Adams and that rabbi I trust you can figure out which one I consider the moral midget.