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Don’t Fall for Daniel Barenboim’s Latest Provocations

Sept. 1 2015

The conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim—an Israeli citizen who lives and works in Germany—has a history of instigating controversy, whether by co-authoring a book about Israel with Edward Said or performing Wagner in Jerusalem. Ruthie Blum cautions against making too much of his most recent leftish stunt: trying to arrange for the Berlin State Opera, or at least its orchestra, to perform in Iran. She writes:

[I]t is pointless for the Israeli culture minister, Miri Regev, to make a stink about [Barenboim’s] latest maneuver, as she has been doing. In the first place, Barenboim is not the only one desiring entry into Iran right now. A German delegation has already graced the place; the UK has reopened its embassy in Tehran; and businessmen and “rapprochement” fantasists alike have been flocking in droves for a foothold there.

And Barenboim’s overall ideology makes him an obvious member of the lunatic left, which ostensibly champions human rights while apologizing for the greatest abusers of it.

Furthermore, in light of repeated statements from Iranian officials reiterating the regime’s intention to destroy Israel and [its] view of America as the “Great Satan”—an enemy with which it signed a pact enabling it to proceed with its nuclear-weapons program—Barenboim’s advances could well be rejected. He is a Jew with Israeli citizenship.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Arts & Culture, Classical music, Germany, Iran, Israel, Opera

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic