If you'd known nothing previously about it and read this report of the incident in today's Guardian, what would you know? You'd know that pro-Palestinian protesters had disrupted a performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, leading the BBC to take their live broadcast off the air, and that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign had earlier called for cancellation of the concert, alleging the complicity of the orchestra in whitewashing 'violations of international law and human rights'.
If you were to look at some other reports, you might learn of other aspects of the evening. From this one you'd learn that people who'd come to hear Zubin Mehta and the IPO were 'deeply disappointed'; and from this that 'concert-goers [were] angry at the disruption to their evening'. This report, the longest - from the Daily Telegraph - makes it clear that a small number of people provoked, by their protest, general hostility from the audience. The same thing here, in the Jewish Chronicle.
So facts may be sacred, but there are different ways of presenting them. And, while I'm on that subject, I'd like to ask when the musicians of any other country accused of committing 'violations of international law and human rights' were subjected to this kind of protest. If it's about Israel and not about Jews (as the partisans of these poisonous initiatives always claim), there are sure to have been some recent occasions when the performances of Russian and Chinese, and (while I'm about it) American and British, musicians have been targeted in a similar way; so I'm surprised I haven't heard about that. I'd also like to comment on the idea that these were 'protesters'. Somehow it doesn't do them full justice. A protest can be staged without behaving like hoodlums and barbarians.
Let the symbolism of their action be digested: into one of the concert halls of England's great international city a bunch of morons last night introduced the atmosphere of a riot. They did it because the musicians playing were mostly citizens of the Jewish state.
[Amended at 2.40 p.m.]