Let’s begin by making it clear at the outset, as Floyd Abrams did in his piece in The Wall Street Journal, that the First Amendment here operates to protect both parties to the dispute over the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of The Death of Klinghoffer.
The Met has the First Amendment right to present this opera, and people certainly have a similar right to attend. It is their choice.
Equally, all of us have as strong a First Amendment right to make our position clear and warn people that this work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law.
This is a complex issue for me.
