NEW YORK (AP) — Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani joined demonstrators outside the Metropolitan Opera on Monday for an emotional protest against a musical work about the death of a Jewish man they say glorifies his Palestinian killers. 
 
 People, some in wheelchairs, gather at Lincoln Center as they protest "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning rod since February,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 22, 2014, file photo, protestors attend the arrivals at the Metropolitan Opera 2014-15 Season Opening in New York to register their disapproval of the Met's decision to premiere... (Associated Press) 
 
 A long line of people in wheelchairs gather at Lincoln Center as they protest "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning rod since... (Associated Press) 
 
 People, some in wheelchairs, gather at Lincoln Center, with the Metropolitan Opera House in the background, as they protest "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer... (Associated Press) 
 
 A protest participant calls out near Lincoln Center as she and others protest the opera "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning... (Associated Press) 
 
 Beverly Wulliger, center, of New York, and her husband Rabbi Solomon Wulliger stand near Lincoln Center as they protest the opera "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer... (Associated Press) 
 
 People, some in wheelchairs, gather at Lincoln Center, with the Metropolitan Opera House in the background, as they protest "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer... (Associated Press) 
 
 People, some in wheelchairs, gather at Lincoln Center as they protest "Death of Klinghoffer" Monday, Oct 20, 2014, in New York. American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning rod since February,... (Associated Press) 
 
 About 400 people stood behind police barricades chanting "Shame on the Met!" and carrying signs saying "The Met glorifies terrorism" before the company's first performance of "The Death of Klinghoffer." 
 
 The opera is based on the 1985 killing of passenger Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship hijacked by four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. The 69-year-old was shot in his wheelchair and pushed overboard. 
 
 American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning rod since February, when it was scheduled for this season. The first large demonstration came on the Met's Sept. 22 season opening night, featuring a Mozart work, when protesters jeered at arriving spectators. 
 
 Standing across the street from Lincoln Center, Giuliani said he wanted to warn people that this opera "is a distorted work." 
 
 "If you listen, you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes the terrorists," he said. 
 
 But opera expert Fred Plotkin said Adams depicts the Klinghoffers as his work's moral spine. 
 
 "Does this opera present the killers in a favorable light? No," Plotkin said. "Are the Klinghoffers far and away the most sympathetic characters in the opera, the ones we care about most? I believe so." 
 
 Monday's performance went on with a few orchestrated disruptions: Boos were shouted from scattered seats, and a voice kept yelling from a balcony, "The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgotten!" The evening ended with a standing ovation that drowned out any heckling. 
 
 Earlier in the day, a rabbi led Jewish teens in a prayer vigil. Youths sat at their makeshift prayer spot opposite the Met, discussing Hebrew scriptures. 
 
 "We're here because the Met is glorifying the killing of a Jew, and we must speak out — we're the next generation," 15-year-old Shabbos Kestenbaum said. 
 
 Rabbi Avi Weiss said the opera's music "extols" the terrorists, beginning with the "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians," while the Klinghoffers come off as shallow, frivolous characters who enter after the lyrics, "I've got no money left. I gave all my money for the taxi." 
 
 "The language is explosive. It's radioactive. It's dangerous," the rabbi said. "It inspires violence." 
 
 In fact, it is exiled Jews arriving in Palestine who've spent their last savings to reach their new home in the desert. 
 
 The Met canceled the international movie theater and radio broadcasts in November amid pressure from Jewish groups, especially the New York-based Anti-Defamation League. Met general manager Peter Gelb, whose father was Jewish, said the decision was made "as a compromise gesture." 
 
 The Met issued a statement this week saying "the fact that 'Klinghoffer' grapples with the complexities of an unconscionable real-life act of violence does not mean it should not be performed. ... 'Klinghoffer' is neither anti-Semitic nor does it glorify terrorism." 
 
 The Klinghoffers' daughters, Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer, released comments through the ADL to be included in the Met program. They say they believe the arts "can play a critical role in examining and understanding significant world events. 'The Death of Klinghoffer' does no such thing. It presents false moral equivalencies without context, and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew." 
 
 Plotkin noted many "Klinghoffer" opponents, including Weiss, have never seen it performed live. Weiss said he has read the libretto. 
 
 Advertising for the opera comes with the slogan: "See it. Then decide." 
 
 "The Death of Klinghoffer" premiered in Brussels in 1991, with little controversy, then in various European cities and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was greeted with praise and anger. 
 
 Mayor Bill de Blasio, who hasn't seen the opera, said the rights of cultural institutions to put on works of art have to be respected. 
 
 "We don't have to agree with what's in the exhibit, but we agree with the right of the artist and the cultural institution to put that forward to the public," he said. 
 
 "The Death of Klinghoffer" runs through Nov. 15. ||||| Since its premiere in 1991, The Death of Klinghoffer has been decried as anti-Semitic and as Zionist propaganda. That makes sense—the opera, created by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, is based on the 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by the Palestinian Liberation Front and subsequent murder of 69-year-old wheelchair-bound American Jew Leon Klinghoffer. Tonight, New York City's Metropolitan Opera will mount a production that's already mired in controversy. "The really ironic and sad fact," Adams has said, "is that the content of this opera is more relevant in 2014 than it was even in 1991." 
 
 October 7, 1985 –Four men from the Palestinian Liberation Front hijack the MS Achille Lauro, an Italian liner, as it departs Egypt for Israel. They round up the passengers and crew and demand that the ship sail to Syria, ordering the release of 50 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. When denied, they kill retired, wheelchair-bound American Jew Leon Klinghoffer, 69, with shots to the chest and head. The ship's barber and waiter are made to throw him overboard. 
 
 April 29, 1990 –The three-hour made-for-TV movie Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair premieres, starring Burt Lancaster as Leon Klinghoffer. The previous year, Karl Malden played the same role in another TV movie, The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Both films were supervised by Klinghoffer's daughters and made little news. 
 
 March 19, 1991 –The Death of Klinghoffer premieres in Brussels. Originally scheduled for January, the Belgian interior minister asked that it be rescheduled until the end of the Gulf War. The opera garnered lots of attention prior to its debut, but ultimately reviews were lukewarm and focused more on problematic staging and diction than any incendiary messages. "People come expecting machine-gun fire and bodies being thrown overboard," said director Peter Sellars, "and what they get is a bunch of art." 
 
 September 5, 1991 –The Death of Klinghoffer makes its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Klinghoffer's daughters attend and later say "the juxtaposition of the plight of the Palestinian people with the cold-blooded murder of an innocent, disabled American Jew is both historically naive and appalling." (Critics from the New York Times and Newsday have a similar take.) Following protests from Jewish organizations and the Los Angeles Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, two of five companies that co-commissioned the show, decide not to perform the work as scheduled. 
 
 November 7, 1992 –Amid picketing by the Jewish Information League, the San Francisco opera runs six performances of Klinghoffer, the second-best-selling production of the season. 
 
 April 1996 –PLF leader Muhammed Zaidan accepts responsibility for Klinghoffer's death. The following year, the Palestinian Liberation Organization reaches a financial settlement with the Klinghoffer family. 
 
 November 4, 2001 –A month after the September 11 hijackings, the Boston Symphony Orchestra pulls performances of choruses from Klinghoffer. "It seems inappropriate to perform excerpts from an opera about a terrorist act right now," said conductor Robert Spano. One of the members of the BSO chorus had lost her husband on AA Flight 11, which crashed into the northern tower of the World Trade Center. Music professor Richard Taruskin applauds the decision in the New York Times, arguing that defeating terrorism means "no longer romanticizing terrorists as Robin Hoods." 
 
 January 18, 2002 –England's BBC Barbican retrospective on the works on John Adams opens with a concert performance of Klinghoffer. In contrast to the Boston decisions, no one considers canceling the piece while planning for the festival. "If anything," Adams said, "people were more committed." 
 
 May 13, 2003 –British filmmaker Penny Woolcock's film version of Klinghoffer premieres at Lincoln Center. It's later scheduled to be screened at the Ramallah International Film Festival but was banned because some members of the Palestinian Authority deemed it "too pro-Israeli." 
 
 June 17, 2011 –The Opera Theatre of St. Louis mounts the first new U.S. production of Klinghoffer since its 1991 premiere. A month in advance, it hosts an interfaith dialogue among local Jewish, Christian, and Islamic leaders. The response to the opera is overwhelmingly positive. 
 
 February 24, 2012 –In a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera performs a new production of Klinghoffer, under the direction of Tom Morris (Warhorse). After weeks of anticipated protests, only one picketer stands outside the theater. 
 
 June 17, 2014 –Under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, Met general manager Peter Gelb decides to cancel HD and radio simulcasts of Klinghoffer, insisting that "the opera is not anti-Semitic," but that the broadcast "would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism." Composer John Adams says the change "goes far beyond issues of "artistic freedom" and ends in promoting the same kind of intolerance that the opera's detractors claim to be preventing." 
 
 • • • 
 
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 The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s 1991 opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, has achieved a rare distinction in contemporary classical music: it’s considered so dangerous by its critics that they’d like to have it banned. For its opponents – the Klinghoffer family, Daniel Pearl’s father, conservative Jewish organisations, and now the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former New York governor George Pataki, who took part in a noisy demonstration outside the Met last night – Klinghoffer is no less a sacrilege than The Satanic Verses was to Khomeini and his followers. They haven’t issued a fatwa, but they have done their best to sabotage the production ever since the Met announced it. 
 
 Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, capitulated in the summer to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League (and, according to the New York Times, from ‘three or four’ major Jewish donors), cancelling a live broadcast to cinemas around the world. The rationale for the decision, made against the backdrop of the Gaza offensive, was that the opera might be exploited by anti-semites. How, they didn’t say. For some reason the opera’s enemies don’t seem concerned that its unflinching portrayal of the murder of an elderly Jew in a wheelchair might be ‘used’ to foment anti-Muslim sentiment. 
 
 The notion that Adams and his librettist, Alice Goodman, are justifying terrorism is absurd. The hijacking is depicted in all its horror, chaos and fear. The scene that raised accusations of anti-semitism, a dinner table conversation among ‘the Rumors’, an American-Jewish family, was excised from the libretto long ago. The Klinghoffers come off as typical American tourists, and are drawn with wry affection. In a particularly tense scene, Leon Klinghoffer baits his attackers, reciting a litany of attacks by Palestinian commandos. His version of Middle Eastern history could have been lifted from Leon Uris’s Exodus, but in the circumstances it’s a nervy speech: from his wheelchair, he isn’t afraid to confront the men who end up killing him. 
 
 Another complaint against Klinghoffer – one that Giuliani, the self-styled saviour of New York after 9/11, has predictably raised – is that it ‘humanises’ the hijackers. But the hijackers were human, and one of the opera’s chief strengths is its refusal to portray them as a collection of monsters. They are certainly not ‘glorified’ – another charge that’s been levelled at the opera. One is a brute who relishes the job, gleefully humiliating the passengers. But another takes pains to tell the ship’s captain about his family’s expulsion from Palestine. And then there is Omar, the reluctant hijacker who – as a British dancer on board describes in a hilarious aria – socialises with the passengers and always ‘kept us in ciggies’. Omar is given the task of killing Klinghoffer: part of the drama of the opera turns on his silent, anguished attempt to steel himself for this act. He dances, he writhes, he imagines himself lying in his mother’s arms, a Palestinian pietà, before finally pulling the trigger. In the words of the journalist Elizabeth Rubin, with whom I saw the dress rehearsal, he’s the Michael Corleone of the opera, who to prove himself in the eyes of tougher men has to transform himself into a ‘soldier’. 
 
 Still, you could make the case that if The Death of Klinghoffer caricatures anyone, it’s Palestinians, not Jews. The ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’ that opens the opera features a group in Afghan-style clothes, evoking the vanished paradise of pre-1948 Palestine and the Nakba that robbed them of their land and future. Dressed in black and virtually indistinguishable, they’re designated mourners of Palestine, an undifferentiated mass united in suffering and thirsty for revenge. The women are all covered in full abayas, which is unusual among Palestinian women today, and was even more unusual in 1985. The men wear Afghan-style beards that, outside the Gaza Strip, are rare in Palestine. They wave the green flag of Islam, not the Palestinian red green, white and black flag that even Hamas prefers. The effect of the set design is to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an episode in a larger clash of civilisations between Islam and the West. The libretto, too, accentuates the ‘civilisational’ dimensions of the conflict. With their incantatory talk about Islam and their love of martyrdom, the hijackers sound more like members of Hamas (which emerged only in 1988) than of Abu Abbas’s secular nationalist PLF. 
 
 The ‘Chorus of Exiled Jews’ which follows is a much sweeter, more intimate piece of music. Their suffering has not been poisoned by anger, but is suffused with sorrow and the hope of renewal. The Jews wear different kinds of clothing; one lyric refers to Hassidim protesting against a cinema opening in Israel, a reminder that Jews aren’t a monolith. Perhaps Goodman’s implication is that after 1948 – when, for those who follow the Zionist narrative, their ‘exile’ ended – Jews could be individuals rather than history’s victims; Palestinians, still under occupation or in exile, have no such luxury. Still, the collective depiction of Palestinians in the opera looks like a failure of imagination. 
 
 In 2001, Richard Taruskin accused The Death of Klinghoffer of ‘romantically idealising criminals’: the Palestinian hijackers, he said, are moved by higher ideals than their victims, ideas of collective struggle and sacrifice. It’s a fair description of the libretto, but it also misses the point: it’s precisely those noble ideals that lead the hijackers to murder an unarmed civilian. I suspect that what disturbs the opera’s critics is that Palestinian suffering is expressed with such eloquence and compassion, not only in the libretto but in the score. Taruskin and others have complained that some of the most stirring music occurs in the ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’. It’s a telling criticism, an example of what Talking Heads called the ‘fear of music’: the anxiety that musical beauty might act on its listeners in transgressive ways, and lead to forbidden forms of pleasure or sympathy. What appears to trouble Klinghoffer’s enemies most is that, through the force of his music, Adams has put Western listeners in the shoes of Israel’s victims. 
 
 Yet there’s also something unsettling about the chorus, something that causes us to stop short of identification. (The character it’s easiest to identify with is the reasonable and ineffectual ship’s captain, who is neither Jewish nor Palestinian.) The beauty of the Palestinian chorus is stark, brooding and threatening; in Klinghoffer, Palestinians appear condemned to inhabit a realm of perpetual struggle, where life is a battlefield and mundane pleasures are but a memory. And because life is a battlefield, the hijackers see themselves as ‘soldiers’, not terrorists, when they storm the ship – and when they execute Klinghoffer. The comparative superficiality of the passengers on the Achille Lauro – which, in the case of the Klinghoffers, has been misconstrued as anti-semitic caricature – is a mark of their innocence, their freedom and their privilege. Oblivious to the history that connects them to their tormentors, they naturally see the attack by these ‘meshugganah’ (as Marilyn Klinghoffer calls them) as an inexplicable accident: their reaction makes them more recognisable, and more believable. The contrast is perhaps too neatly drawn, but it captures a clash in perception that is arguably a strong feature of the encounter between kidnapper and captive. 
 
 Those who are afraid of The Death of Klinghoffer because Palestinians have been awarded some of its most beautiful music haven’t listened very carefully – or haven’t stayed in their seats until the end. The heartbreaking aria that closes the opera belongs to Marilyn Klinghoffer, mourning her husband with controlled anguish. The loss that The Death of Klinghoffer invites us to experience most acutely is personal, not political. ||||| Security was tight at the opera house, with many uniformed police in sight and all bags checked. Mr. Gelb, the Met’s general manager, addressed the performers and musicians at Friday’s final dress rehearsal to tell them about enhanced security measures. The large rally across from Lincoln Center drew some Jewish leaders, and current and former elected officials like former Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, and Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat, and Peter T. King, a Republican. 
 
 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended the opera, Met officials said. 
 
 Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, who was the rally’s master of ceremonies, said he did not expect protesters to react inappropriately. “But you can’t be responsible when the Metropolitan Opera advocates terrorism and incites violence — you can’t know what will happen,” he said. “And anything that happens, that has besmirched this Metropolitan Opera, and besmirched Lincoln Center, is to be laid at the foot of Peter Gelb.” 
 
 One protester at the rally, Hilary Barr, 55, a pediatric nurse from Westchester County, said she believed the opera made excuses for terrorism. “By putting this on a stage in the middle of Manhattan, the message is, ‘Go out, murder someone, be a terrorist and we’ll write a play about you,’ ” she said. 
 
 Some people held a counterdemonstration. James Saslow, 66, a professor of theater history at Queens College, had a sign: “A work of art about a subject is not a work in favor of that subject.” 
 
 The opera, and the Met, were also defended by some artistic figures. 
 
 “It is not only permissible for the Met to do this piece — it’s required for the Met to do the piece,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, said in an interview. “It is a powerful and important opera.” 
 
 The protests were initially led by several smaller Jewish groups and conservative religious organizations. The larger Anti-Defamation League brokered a compromise with the Met, which pleased few on either side, in which plans to show the opera to a wider audience in movie theaters were dropped, but the New York production would otherwise go on. Leaders in the more liberal Reform Judaism movement have condemned the opera, but did not call for its cancellation.
– Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joined hundreds of demonstrators last night to protest an opening-night opera performance at the Met, the New York Times reports. Protesters shouted "Shame on the Met!" and sported signs that read "The Met glorifies terrorism," and it's all thanks to The Death of Klinghoffer, the AP reports. The opera, penned by composer John Adams, focuses on the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jewish man in a wheelchair killed by the Palestine Liberation Front during the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship. Some believe the opera makes excuses for terrorism, is too sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, and "humanizes the hijackers," writes Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books. One man inside the theater yelled, "The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!" a few times before being removed, while a woman cursed loudly and walked out with an usher escort. Even NYC mayors past and present can't agree on whether the opera should be performed. Giuliani—known for previous attempts to shut down art installations he didn't like, according to the Times—told the paper that the opera gives "a distorted view of history," while current Mayor Bill de Blasio said, "I think the American way is to respect freedom of speech. Simple as that." One protester proclaimed, "Go out, murder someone, be a terrorist, and we'll write a play about you," while another person at a "counterdemonstration" held a sign that said, "A work of art about a subject is not a work in favor of that subject." Meanwhile, composer Adams says, "The really ironic and sad fact is that the content of this opera is more relevant in 2014 than it was even in 1991," per Details.