The last time German opera producers wished to be “provocative,” radical Islamists simply shut down their fun with an ultimatum—stop or else. And the home of 80 million and the world’s third largest economy of course caved. But this time they got smarter and are now staging Verdi’s A Masked Ball on a set of the World Trade Center ruins, with insulting anti-American characters. Two queries: why do they assume that a few death threats from their beheading jihadist enemies are far more worrisome than losing the good will of millions of their tolerant American allies?; and, two, why do German leftists always put Hitler moustaches on those who saved them from their own home-grown Hitler?
Is it that they wish to project their own guilt onto others? Or regret that they lost the war after a leader had finally made them “proud” again? Or want to revive the animosity of WWII—apparently unaware of the 60-year stigma in America about the old Axis that is only now starting to fade? Or wish to end the Atlantic/American alliance?