Spielberg's Munich Pact
By Debbie Schlussel
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID06
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 22, 2005
 

When Steven Spielberg began filming Munich in June 2004, he set the tone for
his fictional movie about Israeli agents who hunted down the Palestinian
terrorists responsible for the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972
Munich Olympics.

Spielberg abruptly stopped filming and closed up shop. Why? Because the 2004
Summer Games were happening in August, and Steven Spielberg didn't want to
upset the terrorists.

That's what Munich is about: not upsetting the terrorists. And rolling over
while they attack and kill us. In Steven Spielberg's world, not going after
terrorists brings peace. In the real world, not going after terrorists
brings more bloodshed.

When Spielberg began filming in 2004, it was well known that his film was
based on George Jonas' Vengeance - a book discredited as bunk by both
Israeli Mossad agents and Palestinians with actual knowledge of the events
depicted. So Spielberg claimed the movie was not based on Vengeance. If it's
not based on the book, then why do the credits of this film say it is?

Spielberg lied.

But not as much as he and admittedly anti-Israel scriptwriter Tony Kushner
lied in this two-and-a-half-hour-plus celluloid fairy tale. Like the book on
which it's based, Munich is long, boring, and filled with fakery.

Spielberg's Golda Meir is unsure about going after the Munich terrorists.
She wavers and constantly seeks reassurance that this is the right thing.
But the real-life Golda Meir could not have been more certain and intent on
killing these terrorists.

Spielberg's "Black September" terrorist group is named after the Munich
terrorists, who murdered the Israeli athletes in September. The real-life
"Black September" is so named after Jordan's massacre of 10,000 Palestinians
in September 1970 -- causing many Jordanian Palestinians to flee for safety
in the West Bank and Israel.

Spielberg's Palestinian terrorists have deals with CIA officials in which
they are paid not to harm American diplomats. Real-life Palestinians in 1973
beat to death U.S. diplomats, like Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore in the
Sudan, with Yasser Arafat personally giving the orders. (They were tortured
to death and beaten so badly, authorities could not tell which of the two
was black and which was white.)

Spielberg's Palestinian terrorists have cute, young, innocent, piano-playing
daughters who will be fatherless. But he never shows the cute, young
daughters of the Israeli athletes who were made fatherless -- and whose
fathers, unlike the Palestinian terrorists, were innocent victims with no
choice in the matter.

Spielberg's Mossad agents say bigoted things like, "The only blood that
matters to me is Jewish blood," and go around killing innocent people at
whim. The real-life Mossad agents who hunted the Munich terrorists went to
great pains to avoid killing innocents (whether or not they were Jewish), a
reason it took so many years and financial resources to get all but one of
them. (Jamil Al-Gashey lives safely under the protection of the terror-state
Syria.) In real-life, they killed only one innocent man whom they mistakenly
believed to be a terrorist -- a Moroccan waiter in Norway -- for which those
Mossad agents responsible were tried, convicted, and imprisoned, something
that does not happen in the Spielberg version of events. Spielberg's Mossad
agents complain that Israel has no death penalty, so killing the terrorists
violates Israeli law. Real-life Israel does have a death penalty for Nazi
war criminals, like Eichmann, and recognized that the Munich terrorists were
equally worthy.

Spielberg's Mossad agents cry and brood a lot, unsure of themselves and why
they are pursuing terrorists. Been there, seen that before --  in the
left-wing Israeli film Walk on Water. But it bears little resemblance to the
real Mossad agents who hunted the terrorists. They were not metrosexual,
sensitive guys - as badly as Spielberg and Kushner would like them to be.
Like Golda Meir, they could not have been more certain of the just purpose
of their mission.

Spielberg's Mossad agents question why they should kill terrorists who
murdered innocent people, when they will be replaced by other terrorists.
Using that fallacious logic, why have a justice system at all? Bank robbers
who go to jail will be replaced by more bank robbers. Ditto for child
molesters, rapists, al-Qaeda terrorists, etc.

Then, there is something I haven't read in other critics' accounts of
Munich - something that made me sick to my stomach. Are the lives of the
innocent Israeli athletes so worthless that the scenes in which they are
murdered by Palestinian terrorists are interspersed with the self-doubting
Mossad agent having sex? How would Steven Spielberg like it if a loved one
was shown being bludgeoned in between scenes of a law enforcement official
bouncing up and down on top of the agent's naked wife? This happens twice,
the first time with a pregnant woman and a sexual position I thought was
reserved for NC-17 and X-rated movies. Thanks for cheapening these murdered
athletes' lives, Spielberg.

>From the beginning of this movie, the memories of these innocent victims of
terrorism are desecrated, their lives morally equated with Palestinian
terrorists' lives. The work Kushner and Spielberg expended to create this
undue symmetry of the asymmetrical is the hardest work they did in the
entire film.

What can you expect from the man who said his meeting with Fidel Castro "was
the eight most important hours of my life"?

Using voiceovers from TV and radio news accounts of the Olympic massacre,
Spielberg presents the media confusion over whether the Israeli athletes and
their Palestinian captors survived. Spielberg shows scenes of families of
both Israeli athletes and Palestinian terrorists sobbing -- as if their
relatives are on equal moral footing. After it is confirmed the Israeli
athletes were murdered, Spielberg uses news footage showing pictures and
names of the Israeli dead. Interspersed with that, he shows Golda Meir and
Israeli generals looking though photos and announcing the names of the
Palestinian terrorists. They're equal in this movie -- Get it?

That's the message of this movie: An eye for an eye doesn't work. Instead we
should just allow our enemies to take out both our eyes, with no end in
sight. Israel tried Spielberg's route, and the country's experience was just
the opposite of Spielberg's message.

When Israel won the Yom Kippur War, when it hunted down the Olympic
terrorists, when it invaded Lebanon and had Yasser Arafat in its sites in
Beirut, the world respected Israel -- and so did its Islamic enemies. And
terrorist attacks stopped or slowed. When Israel showed weakness - signing
empty peace treaties, like Oslo; pulling out of Southern Lebanon in an hour;
and giving away Gaza - the world disdained Israel, and so did the
Palestinian terrorists. That's when the terrorist attacks accelerated. Many
more Israelis have been murdered and maimed in the twelve years after the
Oslo accords than in the twelve years before.

In Munich, repeated scenes of the Israeli athletes being taken hostage by
the Palestinian terrorists show a poster of Masada in the background at
their Olympic quarters. Masada was a famous mountain fortress in Israel,
where ancients Jews made their last heroic stand against the Romans. Masada
became a symbol of Jewish heroism that inspired the imagination and spirit
of the founders of Israel.

But the symbolism of the Masada poster is lost on Spielberg. In his Munich
vision of the world, he doesn't want a heroic last stand against terrorists.
He just wants us to roll over and die without a fight.

Steven Spielberg built tremendous political capital with the making of
Schindler's List. But he blew it all on Munich. And he just wrote his
epitaph with it.

There are a lot of people named Abu in this film - Abu Youssef, Abu Salameh,
etc. But the biggest Abu is the one in the credits, Abu Spielberg - Minister
of Disinformation.