As many of you know Munich has begun being screened in theaters across the Country. The story Spielberg has created in which the terrorists are just “misunderstood” will definately be loved by those in Hollywood so to counter this lovefest I began collecting a bit of information about this fraud of a movie. First a few reviews. The first being David Brooks from the NYT’s:
Every generation of Americans casts Israel in its own morality tale. For a time, Israel was the plucky underdog fighting for survival against larger foes. Now, as Steven Spielberg rolls out the publicity campaign for his new movie, “Munich,” we see the crystallization of a different fable. In this story, the Israelis and the Palestinians are parallel peoples victimized by history and trapped in a cycle of violence.
In his rollout interview in Time, Spielberg spoke of the Middle East’s endless killings and counterkillings. “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine,” Spielberg said. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end?” The main problem, he concluded, is intransigence itself. “The only thing that’s going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you’re blue in the gills.”
[…]This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent. But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.
There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg’s fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in. Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong. Understandably, he doesn’t want to portray Palestinian terrorists as cartoon bad guys, but he simply doesn’t portray them.
Steven Zeitchik from Forward:
The most surprising thing about Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” a conversation piece long before it even got out of production, is the limpness with which it lands.
[…]Spielberg has never been one to ease off the schmaltz button, and it would be naive to think he’d change now. “Munich” is a film that painfully wants to be heard, so painfully that it shouts its prescription at every turn. But to listen to its cry is to be struck by a strange absence of meaning.
[…]And so it goes, a film that manages to be very intense without being particularly good. Soon, the Palestine Liberation Organization begins striking back, first against innocents and then against the team. Spielberg suavely uses the indirection of an off-screen news report to inform of these attacks, as if to suggest that the consequences of the team’s actions exist only at the edge of their consciousness ? that to effectively carry out assassinations, one must tune out everything, even threats to one’s survival. But what we also don’t see is how much Spielberg plays fast and loose with causality: One of the supposed consequences of the assassinations, a deadly Black September attack the Athens airport in 1973, has never been linked by historians to the Israeli retaliations. (Moreover, the film is based on “Vengeance,” a disputed book that purports to show the Israeli team haunted by its actions.) Some may argue that the film fictionalizes to serve its cautionary lesson. But when you start monkeying with such biggies as motive and consequence, you’re crossing a line.
[…]What Spielberg seems to have wanted is a morality play ?? a warning about the dangers of emotions in politics, especially Israeli politics. Which brings us back to the Zionism question. There’s been some advance speculation in the media that the movie would be decidedly pro-Israel, but it’s a hard case to make, unless you consider the very decision to show Israeli retaliation as a kind of political pornography meant to get the faithful off on the sight of dead terrorists, absent the inhibiting effect of morals or context.
[…]By the last quarter the film completely unravels, going from a plea for peace to a character study of a man betrayed by his government. Even if we hadn’t seen it before, it would feel false. An agent this seasoned ?? even in a more innocent time in Israeli history ?? shouldn’t be this wide-eyed.
In a recent interview, Spielberg said that he didn’t want to make another “Raid on Entebbe,” the Charles Bronson vehicle that whiffs of propaganda. Spielberg’s movie distinguishes itself from that pulp, but is no less binary in its way. In setting up a world where there are those who get the conflict’s pointlessness and those (fools) who don’t, he has simply swapped one form of simple-mindedness for another.
[…]At the end of nearly three hours, “Munich” amounts to little more than a stylish bumper sticker ? well meaning and eye catching but ephemeral, a deceptively slight work that dissolves in its own seriousness.
Debbie Schlussel from Frontpage:
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.
[…]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.
[…]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.
[…]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.
Even fellow blogger Ed Morrissey gets into the mix:
On its most facile level, Munich is a gripping film. Had it been based on complete fiction — if Spielberg had had the sense to manufacture a hypothetical instead of hijacking history and twisting it — then it might have even had a valid point to make. Spielberg has lost nothing as a film director in a technical sense, and apart from Schindler’s List, this is his grittiest film ever. Eric Bana gives a wonderful performance as Avner, the leader of the team tasked with taking the battle against Black September to the streets. Ciaran Hinds and Geoffrey Rush are just as good — Hinds just finished getting significant American exposure as Julius Caesar in the wonderful HBO series Rome, and he will whet appetites here for more. The cinematography, music, mood, and all of the technical efforts put into the film are first rate, without a doubt.
And every last bit of it gets wasted by a silly sense of moral equivalency that comes from a fundamental misrepresentation of the threat Israel faces, and in the strongly suggested allegorical sense, the threat that faces the US and the West now.
A number of pundits have already linked to the reports of historical and factual errors in the Spielberg/Kushner script, but I’m less interested in the details of these deviations than the reason Spielberg employs them. He has the assassination squad argue incessantly about the morality of their actions, the futility of violence, and so on, even while killing off the Black September terrorists one by one. Most allegorically, they all wonder why they should bother when the PLO replaces the targets they kill with worse people than before. And while the movie gives a couple of references to the scores of terrorist attacks the PLO conducted through the 1970s, they never show any of them outside of the Munich massacre, and only then at the end of the movie after beating us over the head with the faux internalized guilt that springs entirely out of Spielberg’s imagination.
The difference that Spielberg glosses over is that these agents targeted specific members of the PLO and Black September organizations, and in response to an atrocity that not only took place in front of the world, but for which the world refused to hold the Palestinians responsible. In the beginning, we find out that the BS perps live quite openly in Europe, but Spielberg never asks why — not even once. Why did Europe and the West not arrest these terrorists and bring them to justice? Because the West made the same mistake then that Spielberg makes now: they felt that the Israelis and the Palestinians were equally guilty of the same terrorism. Never mind that the Israelis didn’t hijack airplanes, didn’t deliberately target and kill unarmed civilians, and didn’t kill American diplomats (another Black September operation that Spielberg neglects to mention in Munich).
By equating the two sides, Spielberg and the world gave the perpetrators of terrorism the same moral standing as its victims, especially when the victims sought to ensure that their enemies could not live long enough to plan more such attacks. It’s like saying that the perpetrators of Lidice were certainly naughty, but the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was just as bad. It’s absurd, and the absence of any mention of this fundamental, yawning chasm between the Israelis and the PLO/Black September terrorists provide the only true allegory in Munich — the defeatism in which Avner and his compatriots indulge (in the film) matches perfectly with the Left’s moral equivalency of Islamist terrorists and the supposed atrocities of the West, and their unwillingness to fight against Islamist aggression.
In fact, the problem with Munich isn’t that it is a terrible film; the problem with it is that is so well-made. Without the context of the nature of the two combatants, viewers will buy into the defeatism and futility that Spielberg and Kushner want to sell so badly.
Andrea Levin from CAMERA speaks out:
Steven Spielberg and an army of well-paid consultants and spinmeisters are pulling out all the stops to promote Munich and fend off damaging criticism of the movie about the murder of Israeli Olympic athletes and the effort to track down the crime’s masterminds. The campaign has even included courting family members of the slain men for endorsements to blunt a gathering storm of negative commentary from the likes of David Brooks in the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic and Andrea Peyser in the New York Post.
[…]In Munich there are no Palestinians clamoring for the destruction of Israel – as all Palestinian groups did then and, regrettably, leading groups continue to do today. On the contrary, in a contrived encounter between Avner, the movie’s lead, and a PLO member, the latter insists he simply wants a homeland.
He also blames Jews for turning the Palestinians “into animals” and charges them with exploiting guilt over the Holocaust.
In all of this one sees the biases of Tony Kushner, the radical playwright brought in by Spielberg to reshape the script. Kushner has repeatedly called the creation of Israel a “mistake,”blamed Israel for “the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people,”and advocated policies to undermine the state.
Israelis in the film, including Prime Minister Golda Meir, do make their case. But the language is often self-incriminating and vengeful. Meir says: “I don’t know who these maniacs are and where they come from. Palestinians – they’re not recognizable. You tell me what law protects people like this…Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”
The charge that Israel believed targeting terrorist leaders compromises its values rather than affirms its obligation to seek every means to defend itself against aggression is pure Hollywood concoction. But spiraling self-doubt about the use of force is central to Munich, with one team member, an ambivalent bomb-maker who eventually blows himself up, lamenting “We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong…we’re supposed to be righteous. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish…”
Thus, not only, in the film’s account, was it futile to assassinate terrorist masterminds, because new and worse replacements sprang up to escalate the violence, but eliminating terrorists ostensibly destroyed the souls of the Jewish hit team. During the movie’s production, numerous Israelis with knowledge of the actual events disputed Spielberg’s central themes. But the Hollywood director, along with Kushner, ignored them and insisted on their own dark story.
In fact, historical accounts of Israel’s decision to target leaders of Black September, the group responsible for Munich, emphasize that the assault at the Olympics was part of a worsening series of terrorist attacks against Israel in 1972. Lod Airport had been struck twice in May with 32 killed. Only days after the September 5 Munich atrocity, an Israeli official was shot in Brussels, and two weeks later a letter bomb killed an Israeli in London.
Any nation supine in the face of such intensifying terrorism invites ever more fearsome attack. Yes, Israel’s new counter-campaign was reprisal for the Munich murders, but it was aimed at fighting back against a broad terrorist threat. What the various teams dispatched by Israel sought to do was standard in its general goal:
Shift the balance and force the adversary onto the defensive, disrupting operations, planning and command structure.
None of this common sense about self-defense and the context in which the Olympic massacre and Israeli reaction occurred are part of Munich.
Instead, Israel’s action battling its adversaries is cast as aberrant, bloody and counterproductive. It is no different from the assault of the terrorists and ostensibly spawns far greater violence.
Thus Munich is not fictionalized fact, but a falsehood at its core. Small falsehoods too promote its thesis of Israeli culpability. For instance, Meir is said to have shunned attending the murdered athletes’ funerals for fear of being booed because she refused to negotiate with the terrorists – yet as a New York Times piece reported one week after the killings, a poll found her the most popular figure in the nation. Meir as the war-like Israeli, refusing to settle matters in peaceful dialogue, fit the picture.
The movie concludes that Israel should have, in Avner’s recommendation, “arrested” the terrorists “like Eichman.” And, perhaps inspired by Kushner’s theme of the mistaken existence of Israel, an embittered and hounded Avner abandons his homeland for all-American Brooklyn.
Munich offends on other counts. A leitmotif linking Jews and money will make more than a few viewers wince. A Mossad handler growls: “I want receipts!” We’re not the Rothschilds, he says, just a small country. “We need receipts. You got me? Whatever you’re doing somebody else is paying for it.” Or: “A Jew and a Frenchman – we could haggle forever.”
In other coarse invocations of supposed Jewish banter and attitudes, a team member demands a comrade drop his pants to “see if he’s circumcised” when the teammate doesn’t understand the need for Jewish violence. An argument among the team has one Israeli shouting: “The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood!”
This and much like it is what passes for deep dialogue by two of America’s leading entertainment lights. Indeed, it is stunning to watch Munich and realize that its director brought Schindler’s List to the world. Where that was artistry drawn from truth, Munich is cinematic manipulation rooted in lies.
Evidently, exploring essential truths about Jews murdered 60 years ago by a regime that no longer exists and is widely reviled is one thing. Defending the truth about Jews who, over the last half century, have continued to be targeted for murder by Palestinians, Arab states, and in recent decades Iran, and whose stalkers have enjoyed the support of the U.N., scores of NGO’s, and perhaps attendees of Hollywood dinner parties, is quite another.
This movie could have been a reality in our time if Howard Dean and John Kerry had been in charge of our national security. Imagine the disaster that would have been. They would have been all over the airwaves apologizing to the world for our policies which obviously make some of you mad. Moral Equivalism at its worst.
It’s a disgusting reality of life in the leftard world that there is no good, and there is no bad. Just a bunch of misunderstood people caught up in this bad world man…..pass the bong dude.
The sad thing is that this movie seems to convey the thinking of the pre-9/11 left. If you believe America should not be seeking out those who want us destroyed then this movie is for you. If you believe the hijackers of those flights on 9/11 had valid reasons for killing 3000 of our countrymen, then this movie is for you.
If the above describes you, WTF are you doing reading my blog…DummiesU and KOSkiddies are over that way.
Check out Winds Of Change for links to the REAL story of Munich.
The sad thing is that this movie seems to convey the thinking of the pre-9/11 left. If you believe America should not be seeking out those who want us destroyed then this movie is for you. If you believe the hijackers of those flights on 9/11 had valid reasons for killing 3000 of our countrymen, then this movie is for you.
See author page
