Mohammed retrieves the dead Leila's poetry as a completed libretto, which he brings back to Daniel to set to music (effecting a symbolic reconciliation between Jewish and Palestinian cultures).
However, their attempts to achieve a more peaceful resolution to their lives (in the face of a brutal and cynical war campaign involving the President of the United States of America and her Director of CIA) result in them becoming further, and fatally, entangled in the conflict when Mohammed takes the fatal step of "saving" Leila by turning her over to American forces, leading to her internment and subsequent death in Camp X-Ray. Leila and Mohammed subsequently undergo a profound change of heart, renouncing violence and rejecting their own bombs.
Set in the present day or "near-future", the complex plot centres on a harrowing journey through the War on Terror by the Palestinian poet Leila who, along with her friend Mohammed, is radicalised and drawn into a suicide bomber cell, leaving her lover (the Jewish composer Daniel) in a state of hysterical blindness due to his despair at her loss and at the state of the world. To date, the opera has been staged once, at the King's Head Theatre in London in September 2011. The action takes place variously in London, Palestine, Afghanistan, the White House in Washington, D.C., and Camp X-Ray (Guantanamo), and contains both realistic and metaphysical content. At one time potential suicide bombers, Leila and Mohammed renounce violence and attempt to resolve their lives and grievances in a more peaceful manner, but are caught up in the brutal realpolitik of war and the imperial machinations of the American state. Set in the present day or "near-future", the complex plot centres on a harrowing journey through the War on Terror by the Palestinian political activists Leila and Mohammed and Leila's lover Daniel (a Jewish composer). It is a revision of Burstein and Edwards' previous 2003 opera Manifest Destiny and maintains its predecessor's subject matter of Islamic suicide bombers, the ramifications of both the Middle Eastern conflict and the War on Terror. Manifest Destiny 2011 is a British opera composed by Keith Burstein with a libretto by Burstein and Dic Edwards.
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