Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Soprano Anna Netrebko withdrew from her future engagements at the Metropolitan Opera, costing the company one of its top singers and best box-office draws. “It is a great artistic loss for the Met and for opera,” Met General Manager Peter Gelb said in a statement Thursday. “Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward.”

In this so-called ‘post-racial’ era, Halloween has become a new forum to push the envelope matters pertaining to race, free speech, and being funny, or what we think is funny. We’ve seen the images of the Ray Rice costume – complete with black face and a jersey dragging around a black female doll made to resemble his wife Janay. We’ve seen the image of someone dressed as a bullet ridden Trayvon Martin. We’ve seen the Halloween front yard featuring trees with lynched effigys. I’m pretty sure that an image of a Michael Brown, Darren Wilson or Eric ray riceGarner...

Tuesday, October 28, 2014 The Fat Terrorist Will Sing Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The protest has been held and the Death of Klinghoffer will go on. The fat terrorist will sing, the media will chant his praises and the old sad story of failed Jewish activism in America will go on. After the behind-the-scenes lobbying and the ignored letters to the editor, a protest rally fronted by two out of work Republican politicians brought more attention to the Met's pro-terrorist opera without doing anything to actually stop it from going forward. Rudy Giuliani, the protest's...

Phyllis Chesler saw part of 'The Death of Klinghoffer' and reports there were shouts of protest from the audience There was such a large police presence and so many police barricades that anyone passing by would think that terrorists were at large. There were no terrorists on Broadway—although terrorists would soon be mounting the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. The police were protecting the right of the Opera House to present the Palestine Liberation Organization and their cause as mythically majestic and eternally just. Here’s what was also extraordinary: “The Suits”—men and women in positions of power, both politically, legally,...

At the Metropolitan Opera’s first performance of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” on Monday night, men and women in evening attire walked through a maze of police barricades, while protesters shouted “Shame!” and “Terror is not art!” One demonstrator held aloft a white handkerchief splattered with red. Others, in wheelchairs set up for the occasion, lined Columbus Avenue. Political figures, including former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, joined a rally, several hundred strong at Lincoln Center, to denounce an opera that has become the object of a charged debate about art, anti-Semitism and politics. But after months of escalating protests,...