MOZART SILENCED ON BEHALF OF ALLAH

A sacrifice to Allah
By Suzanne Fields

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart created some of the sweetest music ever to fall on the human ear, but he's nevertheless the latest sacrifice on the altar of Islamic suppression of creative expression. "Idomeneo," scheduled for one of Berlin's famous opera houses this season, was called off because the security people determined there was an unacceptable risk of Islamist violence. The opera would exhibit the severed head of Mohammed.

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The controversy is not about aesthetics. It's about blackmail, another instance of Western weakness to stand up to Islamist bullies. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble spoke up for angry artists, politicians and opera lovers to call cowardice by its rightful name. "This is crazy," he told reporters last week in Washington. "This is unacceptable." Chancellor Angela Merkel called it dangerous "self-censorship." But the leader of Germany's Islamic council approved the cancellation.

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George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think-tank that looks closely at how ethical issues impinge on public policy, gets to the crux of the pope's message. "If adherents of certain currents of thought in contemporary Islam," he says, "insist that the suicide bombing of innocents is an act pleasing to God, then they must be told that they are mistaken: about God, about God's purposes and about the nature of moral obligation." Islamic violence against Jews is widely thought to be provoked first by modern politics in the Middle East. Not so. Historians trace its origins to Mohammed's seventh-century attack on the Jews of Medina, whom he massacred when they rejected his message. He set upon them, even as he adopted certain of their practices, because they would not accept Allah as God.

We know that followers of Islam, like certain Christians in the past, used violence to compel converts, but these Christians of the Roman Catholic Church have repented in the name of their faith, and condemned such violence. Can reformers of Islam do that as well? At the moment they have fallen as silent as the chorus of a Mozart opera.


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