FrontPage Magazine reviews the new Spielberg film Munich, which Steven Spielberg based on the discredited book Vengeance, and finds it offensively appeasing towards the terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. FPM reports that the movie appears to want to create an allegory between the Israeli effort at eradicating terrorism back then and our efforts today in Iraq and elsewhere:

Like the book on which it’s based, Munich is long, boring, and filled with fakery. ...

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?

Debbie Schleussel obviously doesn't care much for Spielberg's vision of moral relativity. I wonder why he didn't have Oskar Schindler fretting over whether to save the Jewish men and women under his protection in his remarkable film Schindler's List, since genocidal regimes would come and go as they had all throughout history. Oh, that's because he saw Schindler as a hero for standing up to genocidal nutcases. Fascists in uniforms are bad; fascists in hoods and headdresses are people just like you and I. Huh?

CQ readers can't say they weren't warned. I wrote about this last July, when word leaked from the production about the direction Spielberg took with Munich, made rather obvious by the hiring of leftist Tony Kurshner as the screenwriter. I may still try to catch this in the theaters if I can to write my own review of the material, but the limited film budget may just stop at Narnia for the next couple of weeks.

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