Heads and tales

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Mozart was used to rows over his operas, but not ones like this. The German opera company, Deutsche Oper, looked like abandoning its production of Mozart's Idomeneo because it contained a scene depicting the severed heads of, among others, Jesus and the prophet Mohammed. The company were advised by police that this might lead to demonstrations of the sort seen round the Danish cartoons or, more recently, the Pope's pronouncements on Islam and violence.

There doesn't seem to have been any evidence that this was likely to have happened. But clearly now Muslims are fair game for being accused of supposedly irrational or violent behaviour. Nor was there any alleged threat from irate Christians protesting at Jesus being shown in this way (even though there must have been far Christian protests outside theatre and cinemas than Muslim ones _ remember The Last Temptation of Christ and Jerry Springer the Opera).

In fact there was no threat from anyone at all. The sensible course of action should have been for the show to go on, with those offended by it being able to react in one of two ways: not going to see it (still the most popular form of protest against art), or organising peaceful protests outside it to make a point.

That is now what is happening, but not before the damaging intervention of the German government in the form of its Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel, who heads up a grand coalition of right and left, is desperate to make her mark on the world stage and is trying to join the so far exclusively boys' club of warmongers. Her foreign policy is increasingly lining up Germany with Bush and Blair.

Merkel has stepped in to denounce 'self censorship', claiming that it plays into the hands of terrorists and extremists. Except this wasn't self censorship, nor was the opera threatened, even in the wildest dreams of the Berlin police, by terrorists. But Muslim bashing, in a country where there are 2.6 million of them, and where the far right made gains only last week in Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern on an anti immigrant platform,is just too tempting for any of that to matter.

Which brings me to our own dear leader, who can make a better speech than Gordon Brown. Not difficult. He told us on Tuesday that the war on terror will last a generation. It won't be his grandchildren who are dying if that is the case.

There must have been hollow laughs around the Middle East when he announced that he wanted to achieve peace there by next May. There is the small question of his bloody record, but a man of Blair's ignorance shouldn't be allowed anywhere. He stated once again that 9/11 predated the Iraq war, so underlining the supposedly irrational and crazed nature of Islamic terrorism. Except bin Laden made clear after 9/11 he was reflecting three widely held grievances: the injustice to Palestinians, sanctions and bombing of Iraq, and the presence of foreign (US) troops on Saudi soil.

There are foreign troops now in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon _and across the region,we have occupied Iraq, and the Palestinians are worse off now than then. That's why 50,000 of us marched at the start of Labour's conference in Mancehser _even the police have upgraded their figure to 30,000.

That protest more accurately reflected opinion than the unthinking hysteria inside the hall on Tuesday. Don't they know there's a war on? But then, denial always works until you can't deny it any more. They all leave their parallel universe today to find a reality where 16 US agencies say Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism and where the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq deteriorates by the day.

That's the real future facing Tony Blair.

9/28/2006 11:11:00 AM | Permalink