Apparently Steven Speilberg's Munich is even worse than predicted. The problem is not Speilberg's skills as a film maker. The problem is his descent into a moral relativism that treats terrorists who deliberately kill and injure innocent civilians with the same sympathy shown toward those who fight such terrorists.
Read the initial commentary at Captain's Quarters first. Captain Ed notes the startling contrast between the moral clarity in Schindler's List and the moral relativism in Munich. Why did Speilberg portray Oskar Schindler as a hero for standing up to German fascists who were killing innocents, while Israelis who stood up to Palestinian terrorists who were killing innocents are portrayed far less heroically? Captain Ed puts his finger on it:
"Fascists in uniforms are bad; fascists in hoods and headdresses are people just like you and I. Huh?"
Captain Ed has since taken time to sit through Munich and provides a more complete review here. His bottom line: "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."
Read Debbie Schlussel's full review at FrontPage Magazine. Here are a few excerpts:
"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."
"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.)"
It gets worse, descending into fiction and deceptive half-truths:
"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."
And there's plenty of illogic in the movie too:
"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."
Let's travel back in time to 1972, when the Munich massacre occurred. In 1972 the Olympics returned to Germany for the first time since 1936, when Hitler had tried to use the Games to show off the "superiority" of his Aryan race on the world's stage.
Germans hoped the 1972 Munich Games would help in some way to heal the wounds caused by Hitler. The German president welcomed the Olympics as "a milestone on the road to a new way of life with the aim of realizing peaceful coexistence among peoples."
Wrong. Not wrong due to any fault of Germany, nor any fault of Israel. Wrong because Arab terrorists decided to use the peaceful Olympics as their venue of choice for hostage taking and murder. What does it tell you at these terrorists decided to use a moment that symbolizes world peace and unity like the Olympics for their murderous rampage?
On the morning of September 5, with six days left in the Games, eight Arab terrorists stormed into the Olympic village and the apartment building where the Israeli athletes were staying. Two innocent athletes were killed and nine more were seized as hostages. The terrorists demanded the release of over 200 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, along with two renowned German terrorists.
After a day of unsuccessful negotiations, the terrorists took the hostages to the military airport in Munich for a flight to the Middle East. At the airport, German sharpshooters opened fire in an attempt to save the hostages, killing three of the Palestinians. In the ensuing gun battle, all nine of the hostages were killed, along with one policeman and two terrorists.
Athletic competition was suspended for 24 hours. During a day of mourning, a memorial service was held at the main stadium in front of 80,000 spectators. In a controversial decision, the IOC president declared, "the Games must go on." The Games were finished with the Olympic and national flags flying at half-mast, and with eleven innocent athletes and an innocent police officer dead for no reason other than to the whims of power-hungry Arab madmen.
For the world, it was a passing momentary shock; for the innocent targests of this terrorist attack, it meant that they lost their lives and their futures, and left shattered and devastated families behind.
In the movie Munich, the contempt for these innocent victims of this terrorist attack is sickening. This from Debbie Schlussel:
"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."
It takes hard work to turn genuine evil into the moral equivalent of fighting genuine evil.
"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."
Why is the lack of moral clarity in Munich a problem? The problem is that the movie is based on a historical event. It will be the only "history" of this terrorist attack that many people ever know. In addition, people draw lessons from history. Terrorists included.
The lesson Spielberg apparently wants people to draw from the terrorist attacks at the Munich Olympics is that we should try to "understand" the murderers of innocent civilians, as long as the murderers are of the correct ethnic group, wear the right head gear, and claim to have the correct grievances. (Understanding Nazi murderers is apparently not required because they wore uniforms.) Or if we don't sympathize with the terrorist murderers, Speilberg wants us to at least find it in our hearts to abhor those who fight the murderers.
Whatever Steven Spielberg's strengths as a film maker, moral clarity in war on terror is not among them.
If genuine evil is to be understood, if innocent death is to be treated as only slightly more tragic than the death of terrorists who deliberately murder, and if fighting to stop the murder of innocents is to be portrayed as morally suspect and ultimately futile, then what are we left with?
Front Page Magazine sums it up:
"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."
We can only hope that Speilberg has not also unwittingly written the epitaphs of countless more innocent victims of terrorism.
_________________________________________
Updates 1/2/06, 1/3/06, 1/6/06 and 1/9/06. Also worth reading: Justice Must Be Done by Judea Pearl, mother of terrorism victim Daniel Pearl, and Speilberg's Moral Confusion by Mona Charen at National Review.
I knew Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore, and neither of them was black.
Posted by: Yale Richmond | January 05, 2006 at 09:15 PM
Thanks for the information. In attempting to verify your correction, I came across this excerpt from Powerline ( http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/003983.php). This excerpt clarifyies that Noel and Moore were machined gunned to death:
"The Black September gang took Moore and two others hostage -- Cleo Noel, Jr., the United States ambassador to Sudan, and Guy Eid, the Belgian embassy's charge d'affaires. Two other diplomats taken by the Black September operatives were released.
"The Black September gang demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy, of a Black September leader held in Jordan, and of several members of the Baader-Meinhof gang held in Germany. On March 2, President Nixon and representatives of the other two governments announced that they would not negotiate with terrorists for the release of the diplomats.
"The Black September operatives allowed Noel, Moore, and Eid to make out their wills but refused their request to allow them to call their wives. The order to kill the three hostages was delivered by shortwave radio to the Black September operatives in Khartoum by Yasser Arafat or his deputy Salah Khalaf from Beirut. Shortly thereafter that evening, on March 2, 1973, the operatives took Noel, Moore, and Eid to the basement of the embassy and murdered them by firing forty rounds from machine gun fire that raked the bodies of the three men with bullets from their feet to their head in order to inflict the maximum amount of suffering."
The main point of the excerpt quoted in my post remains correct: real-life Palestinians did indeed kill U.S. diplomats and in very unpleasant ways, contrary to what happens in the Speilberg film, in which Palestinian terrorists have deals with CIA officials not to harm American diplomats.
Posted by: Gina Cobb | January 06, 2006 at 01:12 AM