“At this point, it seems, terrorists don’t even need to issue a specific threat in order to intimidate us.” From Henryk M. Broder in Spiegel (thanks to HF):
One of Mozart’s operas been taken off the playlist at Berlin’s State Opera for fear of a terrorist attack. It’s a shocking example of pre-emptive surrender: At this point, it seems, terrorists don’t even need to issue a specific threat in order to intimidate us.
It took the Catholic Church 359 years to revoke its condemnation of Galileo, but the current Pope needed only two days to distance himself from his quotation of a statement that remains topical despite being uttered 500 years ago. Piet Hein Donner, the former Dutch Minister of Justice, who has just resigned from her position, believes Islamic Shariah law could be legally introduced in Holland if two thirds of the Dutch population were to one day approve it. The London police has announced it will inform and consult with a board of Muslim community leaders the next time it plans an anti-terrorism operation that affects Muslims.
And now the Deutsche Oper in Berlin has taken Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” off its schedule after a “risk analysis” produced by Germany’s Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) concluded that “the possibility of performances being disrupted cannot be ruled out.” The opera is more than 200 years old. This performance was to be directed by Hans Neuenfels, and it featured Idomeneo, the King of Crete, stepping onto the stage with a bloody sack containing the severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad. In Neuenfels’s production, Idomeneo produces the severed heads from the sack and holds them into the air triumphantly.
And voilà , yours truly — a secular, atheist Jew — feels insulted. I feel offended, a victim of discrimination and marginalization. Why is Moses’s head not in the sack? Whence this refusal to acknowledge the existence of one of the world’s major religions?
What am I to do? Run amok and set the opera on fire? Or is it enough for me to throw up in the foyer and express my discontent that way? Which brings us right to the issue at stake. We don’t know who ordered, requested or initiated this “risk analysis.” We don’t know whether the LKA went into action on its own initiative or whether it was responding to a discrete warning. All that is certain is that there would have been no “risk analysis” if Idomeneo had chosen to slaughter only Poseidon, Buddha and Jesus — leaving out Muhammad.
Read it all.