Soft and Music

Daniel Barenboim, the "Israeli" orchestra conductor every Jew-hater loves, has sunk to a new low in his career. The Associated Press reports that next year he plans to bring his East-West Divan Orchestra, a mixed group of Israeli and Arab musicians from various countries in the region, to play in the Berlin stadium used in the 1936 Olympics to salute Hitler. According to Playbill, he is going to play the first act of Wagner's Die Walküre.

Said Barenboim to Die Zeit, a German newspaper, "Can you imagine that? The Waldbühne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves. With Wagner it is never about the politics or Wagner the person, but about his great music."

For decades Wagner, a favorite of Adolf Hitler's and himself a Jew-hater, was boycotted by Israeli musicians who refused to dirty their hands with the man's music. Barenboim broke that boycott himself in 2001. Leading a German orchestra, he first programmed Wagner's Die Walküre for performance at the Israel Festival that year. Under official pressure, he substituted Schumann's Symphony No. 4 and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Addressing the audience after the scheduled program, he asked if he could perform the Prelude from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. according to Playbill, many applauded, some called him a "fascist" and told him to "go home"; some 50 concert-goers walked out while 1000 stayed.

Barenboim has always allowed his politics to dictate his musical choices. According to this New York Times article in 2002, he said, ''Each one of us has a responsibility to do what is right, and not to wait for others to do it. My way is music. What I can do is play music, play music for you, and maybe this way, in a very small way for these few moments, we are able to build down the hatred that is so much in the region.''

This was said in Ramallah, where he played Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata for Arab schoolgirls, effectively breaking a ban on Israeli citizens entering Ramallah.

One year later, he again performed in Ramallah, according to Playbill, in a concert to honor his friend, the Arab scholar Edward Said, who had recently died. Said was exposed in 1999 as a liar in how he described his own youth by Justus Weiner, a writer from Jerusalem.

Barenboim is just the latest in a long line of Jews to imitate persecutors and imagine themselves ennobled because of their actions. The list includes Hassidim who dress up like their persecutors, 17th Century Polish landowners (wearing beaver fur hats and knickers), and than stand there thinking that they are the height of fashion; "intellectuals" in the 1920's who pushed for Jewish assimilation into European Christian society and wound up being killed either by the Nazis or Soviets; Eric Joffie, the head of the "reform" Jews in America, who would water down the faith to a comedy of itself; the Neturei Karta, who recently ran to the side of the newest would-be Hitler, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to support him; and finally, the State President of Israel, who authored The New Middle East and whose foreign policy of dismantling the his own country to please his foreign masters is now state policy here.

A fellow blogger who writes under the screen name Michelle_Nevada and who reported a news brief from Arutz Sheva on this upcoming planned event commented sadly,

No, Daniel Barenboim, Hitler and Wagner would not, as you say, “turn in their graves” to see you do this– they would applaud.

They would congratulate themselves that they were successful because, although they could not kill your body, they have succeeded in killing your soul.

I can’t be disgusted by this story or surprised. I see way too many Jews who have let Hitler win by abandoning the ways of their people, by siding with our enemies, by working to undermine Israel, and by thinking they are in some way too smart or too modern or too “enlightened” to follow the laws of Hashem.

It is not by the hands of our enemies that we suffer, but at the hands of those who should be our brothers and sisters.

Playbill did not report a planned date for this concert at the Waldbühne Stadium in Berlin next year.