When I first heard that Steven Spielberg was directing a movie based on the 1972 murder of the Israeli Olympic team and Israel’s secret effort in the following years to bring to justice the men responsible for that horrible act, I was actually pretty excited. Schindler’s List
If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Once you’ve done that — evoked the killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would today be not much older than Spielberg himself — you have an obligation to get the story right and not to use the victims as props for any political agenda, let alone for the political agenda of those who killed them.
And that’s just the opening paragraph, it gets worse from there. Not only are the Palestinian terrorists who planned and carried out the mass murder in Munich portrayed in a sympathetic manner, but Spielberg actually seems to have sympathy for their cause:
The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: The Jews stole our land and we’re going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back. Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say . . . the same thing. The hero’s mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says: We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.
Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe’s guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?
Like I said, I was looking forward to seeing this movie. Based on what Krauthammer has to say, and other reviews I’ve read, now I’m not so sure.
