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A portion of 'Samson and Delilah', by Anthony van Dyck.
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| By israelinsider staff April 10, 2007 |
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This April the Canadian Victoria Philharmonic Choir is performing Handel's Samson, but with a different spin, thanks to Artistic Director Simon Capet. The Irishman managed to transform the biblical story of the Samson into the story of a Jewish suicide bomber in pre-state Palestine.
According to the biblical story, Samson has superhuman strength, but fails to follow God's instructions. After being captured and blinded by his enemy, the Philistines, he prays and repents to God and is able to bring down a Philistine temple, thus killing everyone inside, including himself.
Musically, Capet left Handel's work unchanged. However, in the climactic scene in Capet's version, there is no trace of the Philistine temple. Instead, Samson's mother unbuttons her coat, removes the explosives belt she had concealed, and attaches it to Samson's beaten body. She then helps him put on a shirt and he is led offstage. Moments later there is the blast of an explosion and a burst of light offstage.
In Capet's production the costumes and stage props suggest Gaza in 1946 and instead of Philistine guards there are guards in British army uniforms. The destruction of the Philistine temple is likened to the Irgun's bombing of the British headquarters in at the King David Hotel in 1946.
In an interview on CBC Radio, Simon Capet said he was struck by the persistence of this type of violence throughout history, and said the Samson story was begging for an adaptation that would make it relevant to current events in the Middle East. However, for Capet this did not mean portraying Samson as a Palestinian suicide bomber, but as a Jewish one -- a phenomenon that has yet to occur.
Capet said, "Samson could be any 'freedom fighter,'" He added, "Some say I'm brave, some say I'm anti-Israel or whatever, but that is OK. The point is to get discussion going."
Capet grew up in Britain. Several of his friends were killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing attack in 1988, for which Libyan nationals were later blamed. He came to Vancouver in 1995.
The Artistic Director expressed his support for an approach to terrorism based on "empathy" and "understanding," for fear that other approaches would bar any chance "to reach across and make a conversation with these people." Perhaps if Israelis adapted his approach and simply started conversation with Palestinian suicide bombers, the terrorists would see the error of their ways and return home.
Capet summed up his views in an article for the Victoria Times-Colonist, in which he posed the question, "Is there any difference between pulling down a pillar or blowing a bomb?"
Two Jewish members of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir released a statement in support of Capet's production, saying, "every hero is someone's terrorist as well as someone's child."
Suddenly, The Victoria Philharmonic became the focus of newspaper articles and weblogs around the world. The choir's website was flooded with angry feedback on their "audience feedback" page, much of which has been removed.
One poster, who identified himself as Mike Villano, wrote,
"It's pretty nauseating when historically illiterate morally confused artsy types take on far more than they grasp.
"Stick with music Simon so you don't inadvertently offend those who defend themselves against the murderer intentions of others by blithely comparing the victims to those intent on murdering them.
"The combination of arrogance and ignorance of people like Simon makes me sick. You couldn't pay me to sit through this grade of revisionist trash."
The Canadian Jewish Congress was one of many organizations that criticized Capet's analogy. In a statement, the CJC said, "Artists have the right to their interpretations, and Mr. Capet is no exception. But using suicide bombings as the setting for his vision makes a mockery of the story of Samson by turning it on its head, and paints a picture of moral relativism that does much more harm than good."
Capet then released a statement expressing his shock at "the violence and hatred that runs so palpably strong" in some of the responses and complained that some people "simply cannot discuss this Handel production without resorting to revenge and hate-fueled language that in some cases has even counseled violence against us."
Mark Weintraub, the chair of the Canadian Jewish Congress' Pacific region, said he was most surprised by the analogy Capet attempts to draw between an ancient Hebrew bible- hero and the Zionists of the 1940s.
The Samson story is, after all, of minor importance in the bible and Jews do not view him as a hero to be emulated. Furthermore, the King David Hotel bombing was not a suicide bombing and while many innocent people died in the attack, the Irgun gave a number of warnings to evacuate the area before they blew it up. The attack was condemned by Jewish National Council, the main representative of the Jewish community in what was then Palestine.
Weintraub said, "There is a culture that embraces death as a glorious thing that has been imposed upon a section of the Arab population -- where is Capet's projection there?" he asked. "There is something very deadly, very treacherous about this."
He added, "Art, historically, has never been free of politics, and artists have to be prepared to defend the politics of their art and engage in a dialogue about the politics of their art."
In an interview with Terry Glavin, a writer for The Tyee, Capet said it had never even occurred to him to portray Samson as a member of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of the many other terrorist groups that have perpetrated attacks against Israel.
He told Glavin that it was the logical choice to depict Samson as a Zionist suicide bomber since Samson was an ancient Hebrew, the ancestors of modern-day Jews. |
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