Barenboim Event

Well, I'm back from the Daniel Barenboim Reith Lecture which was held at the YMCA (first time I've ever been in that hall, although I've had orange juice there previously).

First off, here's how the question was read out:

"Mr. Barenboim, you have been described as "A courageous idealist who believes that symphonic music can heal human conflict" and during a visit to Ramallah in August 2003, you said of the Arab-Israel conflict that "there is no military solution, either morally or strategically."

You have asserted further recently, and in your words just now that there is "a very major difference between power and strength…that if you attack a chord with more power than you are going to sustain it, it has no strength."

But is it not possible that you are simply fiddling away, to misappropriate a metaphor, extending succor to a terrorist entity now supported by a popular vote, while Israel's security is endangered by the sounds of Kassam rockets, this despite the withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the loud bangs of suicide bombers who continue to kill its citizens and tourists?

Perhaps it is the Arabs who are mistakenly using too much force?"

In his longwinded reply, he totally ignored the invitation implicit in my question to denounce and condemn terror.

So, when he beagn winding down, I still had the microphone next to me and I asked him "so, are we not to hear a condemnation of terror from you?" and that was when he made a few guttural noises that one could interpret as being against violence.

But later on, (the program started about 7:10 PM and finished 8:40 PM), he noted that Israeli politicians (referring to Ehud Barak) had said they would have joined up with Fatah had they been born Palestinian. He also completely skipped over the fact that there was Arab terror prioor to 1967 and insisted that it all started then.

He then made the astounding statement, as is usual with critics of the snotty post-Zionist, second-generation anti-Zionist gang, that Israel really doesn't belong in the Middle East as long as it keeps its European roots and that's why he's trying to adapt Arab music. That Israel is less than 50% Ashkenazi now and that Mizrachi music actually dominates the airwaves is not in his notebook.

He kept on repeating that he was not dealing in politics and who was historically right or wrong while intimating that he knew that the Arabs weren't lily-white but kept on concluding that it's all Israel's fault.

I guess it'll all come out in the transcript eventually.

Yehuda Litani, 30 years reporting on Yesha for Haaretz and Jerusalem Post, I have discovered, is tone-deaf. Why? Well, he got up to make a comment that went "the only music we hear in Jerusalem is the call of the muezzin in the morning and the birds and, in the evening, the call of the muezzin and the birds. Someone afterwards asked him rhetorically "what, that's the only sounds you hear?". What an idiot.

By the way, while this audience was a majority of the bleeding-heart liberal variety (even though I did earn some applause), there had been a Thursday night lecture at Notre Dame to which Palestinians had been invited, exclusively Barenboim had said.

Gee, who now is being politically correct and discriminatory?