We all practice self-censorship, of course. The stagers of "Idomeneo" in the "modern" form are not equal-opportunity offenders. This season it's the fashion to shock religious believers. But imagine the paintings and sculptures that would have to come down if every offended group threatened mayhem and death over what they don't like. Consider all the plays and ballets scuttled to avoid hurt feelings. Dare Othello, a black man, strangle the gentle Desdemona without calling up a stereotype? Dare the voluptuous Salome joyously receive the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter? Dare a producer depict David stealing Bathsheba and sending her husband to be killed in battle, thus upsetting religious Jews?
Art at its best (and sometimes its worst) is larger than life and creates its own rules to provoke us into thinking about right and wrong. The cancellation of Mozart's opera is another illustration of the importance of Pope Benedict XVI's call for a debate on faith and reason, to see how violence in God's name is a threat to us all. Thoughtful people, whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic or even atheist, can disagree on where they locate truth, but irrational violence on behalf of any religion or ideology must be condemned. This is the violence that the world confronts among the Islamic fascists today. The modern fascist threat is so real in the popular mind that jihadists didn't even have to make "official" threats; the Germans were more than ready to cancel Mozart's opera.
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 7th-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.