In Belgium, Samson Gets a Makeover

NYT ^ | 05/06/09 | MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

[Borges]

ANTWERP, Belgium — From where I stood it seemed touch and go whether the Jewish businessman was actually going to slug the chief of the Flanders Opera, Aviel Cahn, a young Swiss-born Jew (a glass-jawed bantamweight, by the looks of him) in an ascot and important glasses.

The face-off started after a public round table at the opera house the other night about politics and art. Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” directed by an Israeli, Omri Nitzan, and a Palestinian, Amir Nizar Zuabi, was to have its premiere the next evening.

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Finding parables for today’s Middle East doesn’t take much imagination. Savvy directors don’t belabor the point. Mr. Nitzan and Mr. Zuabi, however, turn the Hebrews into Palestinians, the Philistines into Israelis, and Samson into a suicide bomber, donning a dynamite-loaded vest when the curtain falls.

[Borges]

Classical Music Ping

[happygrl]

Classical Music Ping

How about "Orwellian Revisionism ping"?

[happygrl]

These people are too clever by half.

What they are too stupid to understand is that it will be a Muslim Samson that pulls down the pillars of their culture and country and they will die just as the Jews in their "politically correct" opera.

[Borges]

You might get a kick out of this.

[keepitreal]

But political partisanship is in any case fine. Rage is a perfectly sane response to the Israeli occupation. And all art is political in the end.

I disagree. Certain art is political, but much is not. I doubt that Schubert was pondering politics when he was composing his art songs, or that politics was a concern when Poulenc composed his magnificent Four Motets for the Season of Lent, or that anything Bach composed was political. Unfortunately, the modern art critic, producer and performer has turned art into a political statement. And usually when they do, they decrease the value of the art substantially.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Mr. Nitzan and Mr. Zuabi, however, turn the Hebrews into Palestinians, the Philistines into Israelis, and Samson into a suicide bomber, donning a dynamite-loaded vest when the curtain falls.

Par for the course. The "true successors" to the Biblical Hebrews are always chr*stians, moslems, the PLO, . . . anyone other than modern Jews.

D--- that Nobel Physics Prize! It's done nothing but cloud the waters.

[SunkenCiv]

Belgian opera shows Jew raping woman in anti-Israel piece
Ha’aretz | Friday, May 1, 2009 | Cnaan Liphshiz
Posted on 05/01/2009 6:24:03 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2242484/posts

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

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Sampson killed 3,000 Phillistines in Gaza. True, they're not related to palestinians who were invented in my lifetime, but still, Spain should charge Sampson with war crimes, in absentia.

[SJackson]

And apologies for my last post, I didn’t mean to imply there were ever Jews in Gaza.