Posts by Stephen Pollard

Prisoners voting: time to ask who governs Britain (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:06:53 +0100

My Express column on the ECHR is here: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/322045/Prisoners-voting-Time-to-ask-...

Opera: Falstaff is a Royal Opera House must-see

Stephen Pollard — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:20:07 +0100

If I could give this new production of Falstaff 50 stars, I would. Verdi’s last opera is as close to perfection as music gets, and Robert Carsen’s 1950s update does it justice. Carsen clearly loves Falstaff and wants only to share that love with the audience.

Ambrogio Maestri’s world-class Falstaff apart, the cast is not top notch. But it does not matter because as an ensemble they are glorious. And in the pit, Daniel Gatti lets the music breathe. A must-see. (020 7304 4000)

You work harder as civil servants take summer off (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:28:20 +0100

My Express column on the civil service's 7 week 'work from home' wheeze this summer is here.

Only a fantasist could believe in the euro now (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:10:00 +0100

My Express column on the euro, Hollande and Greece, is here.

The flying dutchman

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:32:47 +0100

There is one reason to see this new production of Flying Dutchman. And it is a compelling reason which makes me urge you to see it.

Edward Gardner, ENO's music director, conducts his first Wagner. And he does not just make a decent stab at it - he produces some of the greatest Wagner conducting you could ever hear.

The ENO orchestra - which plays as if the Berlin Philharmonic is just some hick regional band - is sensational. Gardner's interpretation is white hot from the start. There is a visceral thrill on the overture which does not let up for a second until the end of the opera - aided by the welcome decision to run the three acts together without an interval.

All I can really say is, wow!

As for the singing: Stuart Skelton's Erik is world-class, and Orla Boylan's Senta draws you in (despite being made to wear perversely drab clothes).

The production itself is interesting, with clever use of video to recreate the storm, and a disturbing party scene which is - properly - unsettling.

But there is a big hole dramatically, which is James Creswell's Dutchman. Every note is well pitched, but there is nothing there. He is more like a ledger clerk than an accursed sailor. Very forgettable.

But what is entirely memorable is Gardner's revelatory conducting. Go. (Tel: 0871 911 0200)

La BohÈme

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:32:47 +0100

John Copley's production of La bohème opened in 1974 and this is its 25th outing. But it can rarely have seemed fresher than with this excellent cast, and under the stunning baton of Semyon Bychkov.

From the very first note, Bychkov has the Royal Opera House orchestra on top form. And - all too rare with Puccini conducting - he clearly thinks that the opera is as much an orchestral as a vocal feast. He finds such detail and panache that the score sounds more like a tone poem than the usual vocal accompaniment. It is worth an evening of your time just for this.

But there is far more than that. Joseph Calleja is the pre-eminent Rodolfo of the moment. Often he sings beautifully but his acting leaves something to be desired. That is certainly not the case here; he was as passionate and moving a Rodolfo as you could wish for. And his voice is simply glorious.

His Mimi, the Italian Carmen Giannattasio, got better as the night wore on. Her voice is fine, without being anything to write home about.

There is an excellent house debut from Fabio Capitanucci as Marcello, and Nuccia Focile reprises her classic Musetta.

But the real honours go to Copley, who, with this revival of his 38-year-old production, celebrates 50 years at the Royal Opera. This is as good a Bohème as you will see. (Tel: 020 7304 4000)

Heroic acts of a favourite villain

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:05:42 +0100

There are certain sentences which just can't be uttered. You know the sort of thing. If a politician said that most voters are idiots, he'd quickly be an ex-politician; and a rabbi who said that his shul board should stick to selling shmutters would soon be looking for a new congregation.

A new sentiment has joined that list. It was always pretty outré. But recently it's become toxic. And I am the man to tell you just how toxic, because I've said it myself and am still being told what that makes me.

I'm going to say it again. Right here, right now. And I know exactly what's coming my way after you read the next sentence.

Rupert Murdoch is not all bad.

Say that in polite company and you can see the air freeze. I'm still getting angry emails from people who can't believe that they heard such words coming out of my mouth.

I've put it rather more strongly than that before. A few months ago, on BBC TV's Question Time, I was asked whether it was right to compare James Murdoch with the head of the mafia. My response (as well as the word "no") was to point out that Rupert Murdoch has done more to engender a broad, free and prosperous press than any other living human. He has poured hundreds of millions of pounds into subsidising The Times. And his battle with the unions at Wapping set free every other newspaper, saving the industry.

In gambling his entire company on BSkyB, when the sages thought satellite broadcasting was a failsafe way to lose a fortune, he introduced unprecedented choice and quality for viewers. In my view, I said, Rupert Murdoch is one of the great men of history.

The expression on the audience's collective face was a treat. Rupert Murdoch?!

So send me your brickbats, laugh, dismiss me as mad. But I am entirely serious.

Criminal acts have clearly taken place at News International. Those responsible must be punished by the courts. And News Corp is rightly paying a heavy price for the wrongdoing. My point, however, is that, despite all that, Britain is much better off for having had Rupert Murdoch's papers and investment.

I'd argue that with anyone. But it's an especially important point for our community to grasp.

Think about news coverage of Israel. Imagine that Sky News didn't exist. We are so used to it now that it's hard to remember it's been around only since 1989. It exists because of one man: Rupert Murdoch.

If we get angry at the BBC's coverage of Israel now, think how much worse things would be if there were no counterbalance - if the only 24-hour news broadcaster was the BBC, with its "condemn first, check later" attitude, and its correspondents' knee-jerk anti-Israel approach.

Instead, we have Sky News, with its brilliant and objective foreign editor, Tim Marshall (whose byline occasionally graces the JC's pages). Which of us does not turn to Sky News rather than the BBC for unbiased reporting of the Middle East?

Then there are his newspapers. Of course, The Times is sometimes critical of Israel. So is the JC. But its criticism, like ours, is always from the perspective of a friend and admirer. The Times loses tens of millions of pounds every year. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists - and, more importantly, is a beacon of quality - because Rupert Murdoch chooses to pay for it.

And yet the suggestion that Mr Murdoch's contribution to British public life is overwhelmingly positive is regarded, even within our community, as ridiculous.

Instead of lauding him for what he has done, we stand back and sneer.

It has always been fashionable to bash Rupert Murdoch. Now it has become almost obligatory. We should step back and think for a moment before joining the stampede.

The Guardian backs down

Stephen Pollard — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:19:54 +0100

I've just heard that the Guardian has agreed to post a correction to their diary story.

Having libelled me by implying that I lied to their reporter, they now accept they got it wrong and are about to post this:

"In a diary item about the presence of blogs by Carlos Cortiglia, the BNP's
mayoral candidate, on the Jewish Chronicle website we stated that the blogs were
still available on November 23. We went on to say that this "conflicts" with the
editor of the JC, Stephen Pollard's, account "that he became aware of
Cortiglia's blog and deleted all trace of it 'last September' ". To clarify: he
told the Guardian's reporter that "in September we were alerted to the fact that
Cortiglia had set up a user blog and the moment we were told, we blocked him and
changed [the] entire system". Mr Pollard has asked us to point out that this was
not meant to imply that all traces of the blogs had been deleted in September –
in fact the measure he took at that time was to block Cortiglia's access. He
ordered the blogs to be deleted more recently."

The Guardian's libel of me

Stephen Pollard — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:16:59 +0100

UPDATE:

I've just heard from the Guardian at last that they accept the need for a clarification and will be posting this:

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I've had a very instructive week, seeing at first hand how Israel's enemies will lie entirely brazenly in order to further their own ends.

The JC, as many of you will know, used to have an open access policy for its blog hosting. Anyone who wanted to could simply register and set up a blog. (The idea was quite trendy among media outlets when we started it, years ago). We had no involvement at all in the process - any more than, for instance, the Guardian does when people register with it in order to leave comments on its site.

Last autumn, we were alerted to the fact that a man with BNP affiliations had set up a blog. We immediately barred access to the site to prevent him posting.

That was the end of the matter until earlier this month, when someone searched our archives and found his 3 posts buried inside.

Gleefully, the antisemitic MPACUK site, along with Stephen Sizer (the vicar whose views we have covered in the paper) ran posts that we had a BNP blogger - without of course checking the context or mentioning the fact we banned him - the message was that we had invited him to blog.

This then went into the realms of total fantasy when a fanatically anti-Israel blogger called Richard Silverstein simply made up a story that we had announced the BNP man (who is now their candidate for Mayor of London) as our latest columnist.

See what I mean about lying for the furtherance of political ends? These people will do anything to smear the reputation those of us who support Israel's right to exist.

All sorts of rumours went round the blogosphere and Twitter. And they led a Guardian journalist (Andrew Brown) to get in touch to - perfectly reasonably - ask me if it was true. I told him exactly what I've written above.

On Friday, the Guardian published a diary story under the byline of Hugh Muir which, in its own way, defamed me and the JC even more than anyone before. It said I had told them that we had removed all trace of the BNP blogs in September - and then said that because they had seen screen shots of the blog earlier this month, I had lied about this.

That is itself a lie. At no point did I ever say we had deleted all trace of him then. Patently, we didn't - the story only broke because someone saw the archive posts of his in April.

I pointed this out to the Guardian on Friday, and how defamatory it was to suggest I had lied. Their response so far has been to do precisely nothing. I have been told that the 'readers editor' will investigate. I am still waiting for the results of that investigation.

In the meanwhile, that diary post, effectively accusing me of lying, has gone viral - and because it is in the Guardian, some people assume it must be true.

It isn't. The Guardian has published a libel of me and - so far - refused to do anything about it, despite being given the full version of the facts.

Two explanations are possible. First, that somewhere in the passing on of the story from Andrew Brown to Hugh Muir, words were garbled and they made a mistake. Most of us accept that errors happen - and when pointed out, we correct and apologise.

That they have so far refused to make any correction or apology makes me wonder if the second possible explanation may be more accurate - that they know exactly what they are doing and have deliberately chosen to libel me.

I'll update this if and when they do the right thing.

Put Abu Qatada on a plane and quit the ECHR (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:28:18 +0100

My Express column on the latest Abu Qatada developments is here.

North Korean tyrants spend on rockets as their people starve (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 09:43:07 +0100

My Express column on North Korea is here.

Despair is sometimes the only possible response

Stephen Pollard — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:10:40 +0100

There are times when the only appropriate response to events is despair.

Yes, this week the European Court of Human Rights approved the extradition to the US of five terrorist suspects. But it's mystifying how anyone can take cheer.

The idea that as a free country we should have such decisions placed in the hands of foreign judges who make their rulings on the basis of a fundamentally flawed convention is so patently unsatisfactory that I cannot, I'm afraid, bring myself to react with anything other than anger to the whole farce.

This is the same court, of course, which has also ruled that Abu Qatada cannot be deported to Jordan. So when it comes to praise for the ECHR's judgment over Abu Hamza and his colleagues, I say "thanks but no thanks".

Indeed, any smidgeon of relief brought on by this week's ECHR ruling is dwarfed by the immigration court victory of Raed Salah. Or, to be more precise, by the reasoning of the judge responsible for Salah's win, Mr Justice Ockelton, and the outpouring of bile that followed the decision.

Central to Sheikh Salah's case has been his outright denial that his words in a 2007 sermon about children's blood being used to bake "holy bread" was a reference to the blood libel. The judge found that Salah's claims were "wholly unpersuasive". As the judgment put it "We do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews."

And yet in the judge's reasoning, this mattered not a jot. Salah is a welcome visitor to the country.

Decadent doesn't even come close to describing a state of affairs in which an Islamic preacher can make reference to the blood libel but the judiciary tells him that such remarks are irrelevant to his fitness to be granted entry.

According to the judgment, such views are "not at the heart of the appellant's message" and "it is not easy to see that any reasonable observer would associate the appellant with them in any general sense". Clearly in Mr Justice Ockelton's mind it's unreasonable to associate a man who preaches a sermon based on the blood libel with, er, the blood libel. Go figure.

In the end, Salah himself is an irrelevance. Rabble rousers like him are ten a penny. The importance of his case is symbolic, because it is of a piece with so much else.

When the hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi was invited to City Hall by Ken Livingstone, what was his party's response? To reselect him as its mayoral candidate.

When anti-Israel campaigners went on the rampage, destroying the property of a company they claimed has ties to Israel, what was the response of the criminal justice system? Judge Bathurst-Norman did not merely acquit but praised the men.

And when Michael Gove earmarked extra funds to protect Jewish children from violent racist attacks, how did a supposedly progressive newspaper - the Guardian - react? By attacking, on entirely fabricated sleaze charges, the role of the Community Security Trust, the organisation responsible for protecting Jews.

As if in an unbroken thread, the CST is under fire again, this time on the back of the Salah appeal judgment, with Mr Justice Ockelton saying that the Home Secretary was misled.

His words have given free rein to a barrage of conspiracists, who are not merely implying but trumpeting the idea that CST - in other words, the Jews - pushed a deceitful agenda to get a perfectly upstanding citizen removed from the UK because he dared to criticise Israel.

Yet it wasn't the CST that pushed the Home Office into anything. It was the Home Office that asked CST for information about Salah. And it was CST who provided the Home Office with the original copy of the disputed 2002 poem in Arabic and English translation. As CST says: "Nobody else provided this information either to the government or to the immigration tribunal, despite the fact that we obtained it all from public sources."

But this is Jews we are talking about, so the default reaction of so many is to push the idea of a conspiracy, whatever the facts.

Despair is, initially at least, an impotent reaction. It doesn't offer a plan of action. It doesn't change anything. But until we react appropriately to what is going on around us, we don't have a chance of changing anything.

And I challenge anyone not to despair about the events of this week.

Rigoletto

Stephen Pollard — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:11:58 +0100

There is one compelling reason to see this revival of David McVicar's 11-year-old production of Rigoletto. He is called Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Gardiner's conducting is not merely thrilling - he strips the score of the accretions of tradition (which Toscanini cuttingly described as a fool's memory of the last bad performance), allowing every line to breathe and Verdi's orchestration, so often taken for granted, to emerge in its glory. An electric current runs through every bar.

Ekaterina Siurina's Gilda is beautifully sung, but the vocal star is Greek baritone Dimitri Platanias in the title role. If anything, his voice is too beautiful, leading to an under-characterised first act. But in the second and third acts he claims the role as his own. As for Vittorio Grigolo's Duke: ham acting and preening vocal tricks combine into a performance of utter vulgarity. He once seemed so promising. But his good looks and beautiful top register appear to have been squandered.

McVicar's production, which was once mildly shocking, now seems tired. But this is Gardiner's show. (Tel: 020 7304 4000)

We must reject state funding of political parties (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:12:11 +0100

My column on the Tory donor scandal is here.

Theatre of rudeness (Spectator)

Stephen Pollard — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:02:42 +0000

I've just realised that my Spectator piece about BO - yes, indeed - is now out from behind the paywall. It's here.

Toulouse horror is the latest spawn of radical Islam

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:00:04 +0000

The familiar headlong rush with which the culprits of a terrorist attack are pronounced with certainty barely minutes after it happens has rarely been more decisively skewered than on Wednesday morning.

France woke up to the news that it was not, as the media had spent two days insisting, a crazed fascist who had murdered three North Africans and four Jews in two separate attacks. It was a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist.

So the parallel was not with Oklahoma City, where the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh killed 76 people in 1995. Rather, the Toulouse murders were France's 7/7. The numbers who died may not compare, but as an act of home-grown Islamist terror, the murders are just as shocking.

The most significant category error was made by those who immediately asserted that, because the murderer had killed North Africans and Jews and so had to be an all-purpose racist who hated Muslims as much as Jews, he had to have been a product of the anti-immigrant climate in France.

But that is to ignore one of the most fundamental points about radical Islamist ideology. As Ed Husain points out overleaf, al-Qaeda has murdered more Muslims than non-Muslims.

Others have written about the long history of French antisemitism. That is of course a cancer which still remains, and which requires constant vigilance. But in the context of these murders, it is entirely irrelevant. The terrorism behind such attacks is a very different phenomenon which, even after 9/11, the Madrid bombings, 7/7 and the many other radical Islamist attacks, is still dismissed by some as simply a contemporary equivalent of groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades and the IRA.

The threat posed by radical Islam is far deeper than this. It endangers the very fabric of Western civilisation.

And yet, astoundingly, there are those in our community, and elsewhere, who continue to treat with its allies.

What's the BBC for, if not the Grand National? (Telegraph)

Stephen Pollard — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:41:56 +0000

My Telegraph piece on the BBC and sport is here.

Opera: Miss Fortune

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:55:28 +0000

I cannot recall a new opera being more comprehensively trashed by critics than Judith Weir's Miss Fortune.

It stands accused of almost every flaw an opera can have: a feeble plot, derivative music, a static production, badly drawn characters and a banal libretto.

Yet the reaction from the first-night audience was very warm, with full-throated bravos and cheers. That was my reaction, too - what a pleasure to have a new opera that has something to say, is not an aural assault (it actually has some memorable vocal lines), and does not see the sole purpose of modern opera as some form of left-wing agitprop.

Are we to dismiss the worth of La Bohème or Falstaff because their plots could be readily understood by a four-year-old? The plot of Miss Fortune is not feeble, merely simple. A woman loses her fortune, is dogged by Fate (a character), and sees everything she tries turn to disaster. She confronts Fate and then reaches peace.

The real agenda of the antagonism directed towards Miss Fortune appears to be hidden beneath the insults. The opera, apparently, is "warm and fuzzy where it should be hard and edgy". That is its real crime. It does not play to the political prejudices of the critics.

Ignore that. Miss Fortune is a good evening out. It will not stir you like The Ring. But it is a diverting and entertaining opera, beautifully performed by singers of the calibre of Emma Bell, Andrew Watts and Jacques Imbrailo. And the sets are a treat to look at, too.

The Americans do not regard us as special any more (Express)

Stephen Pollard — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:18:58 +0000

My latest Express column, on the Prime Minister's US visit. It's here.

Review: The Death of Klinghoffer

Stephen Pollard — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:54:04 +0000

John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer trails controversy in its wake. The eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin has called it antisemitic. Leon Klinghoffer's daughters described it in the JC last month as "disingenuous and appalling", saying that it "perverts the terrorist murder of our father and attempts to rationalise, legitimise, and explain it".

The English National Opera production has certainly not been short of publicity - just the sort that promoters love, driving the curious to see what the fuss is all about.

But this time that does not seem to have helped ticket sales. There were many empty seats.

I wish mine had been one of them. My main reaction at the end was that three hours of my life had been wasted on a pile of tosh. Because whatever else The Death of Klinghoffer may be, it is deeply, yawn-inducingly boring.

I cannot think how anyone - from any perspective on the Middle East - could gain anything from seeing it. The characters, when they are given a personality, are as one-dimensional as the "Israel bad, Palestinians noble" politics. The drama (it is really not an opera but an oratorio) is entirely non-existent. And the production is at best banal, at worst tendentious and misleading.

Musically, I was reminded of Rossini's comment that "Mr Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour". Adams's quarters of an hour drag interminably. Indeed, what Adams and his librettist Alice Goodman have to say could easily be expressed in a couple of minutes: Palestinians are the blameless victims of beastly Israelis.

That leads to the most important accusation, of antisemitism. Clearly, if you take the view that criticism of Israel is always antisemitic then you will agree with Taruskin's view of the piece.

But do you? Do you know anyone who takes that view? That is the line put forward by Israel's enemies - that the country's defenders attempt to silence critics by labelling them as antisemites. And it is a big fat lie.

The supposed antisemitism of The Death of Klinghoffer is a red herring. We can all distinguish between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, and the opera is no more than another dreary, predictable piece of unthinking Israel-bashing.

You know where you are heading with the very first lines of the opera, sung by the Chorus of Palestinian Exiles:

"My father's house was razed

In 1948

When the Israelis

Passed over our street".

Then we are told - four times, just to be sure we get it - that "Israel laid all to waste".

The Palestinians' pity is paraded before us, driven to terrorism as the inevitable and unavoidable consequence of having had their land stolen by the Israelis.

The hijackers of the Achille Lauro are given back-stories, each representing an archetype. One is a poet, his flowery words presumably meant to show us the romantic heart that beats inside him, suppressed by the brutal Israelis. Another wears a suit. One is, yes, a thug.

And the Palestinian who shoots Klinghoffer is, it emerges, not even responsible for his behaviour. The opera flashes back to his mother brainwashing him into becoming a martyr for his people's cause. You see, he had no choice but to murder a Jew in cold blood. It was his mother's fault.

Other than Mr and Mrs Klinghoffer, none of the Jewish captives are given any personality. They move around the stage in a block, interchangeable. They are simply representatives of the oppressors.

As for Leon Klinghoffer: he expresses his anger at the Palestinians and calls them "shits". And that is about as far as his character is drawn.

Tom Morris's production simply adds to the one-dimensional mindset behind the opera. The set is built around a representation of the West Bank security wall (which did not even exist when Klinghoffer was murdered). In case you do not dig what the composer and librettist are saying, then you will get it visually. It is all about Israeli oppression, see.

It seems to me that Adams's real intent is revealed at the end. The ship's Captain is berating the terrorists' leader. You had done such a good job, the Captain says. You stirred the conscience of a sleepy world. And then you went and ruined it by killing Klinghoffer.

That, surely, is the voice of Adams and Goodman.