Free Republic

Back in 2015, a new M.P. from Streatham was among those running to replace Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party in Great Britain. This was Chuka Umunna, who suddenly pulled out, explaining that he didn’t want to put his wife through the ordeal of the campaign and his possible win. He worried, he said, about her loss of privacy. He was also 36 at the time, and may have felt unready; he knew he had plenty of time to prepare for a run. As it happens, the Labour Party then elected, by a landslide, the far-left ideologue Jeremy...

California Democratic congressional candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar was barely on anyone’s radar last week in his longshot bid against [recently indicted] GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, in an overwhelmingly Republican district. With his [now] boosted chances, though, has come scrutiny of his dark family past -- his grandfather was a member of the Palestinian Black September terror group that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

When the London games officially launch July 27, Bob Costas will stage his own protest of what he calls a "baffling" decision: the NBC sportscaster plans to call out the International Olympic Committee for denying Israel's request for a moment of silence acknowledging the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Games.

DSC — Munich: The Real Assassins Munich: The Real Assassins 1972 Munich Olympics: before the eyes of millions of television viewers, 11 Israeli athletes are murdered by Black September, a radical group within the PLO. This is the true story behind the extraordinary mission of revenge planned by Israel in response. JAN 22 2006 @ 10:00 PM

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List taught a new generation of movie-goers the reality of the World War II Holocaust. Spielberg’s new movie, Munich, regrettably undoes some of his earlier good work, in recounting Israel’s response to the slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Liberation Organization at the 1972 Olympics. Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Israeli agents to hunt down and liquidate the PLO assassins, as a “Never Again!” message of life affirmation to the evil forces of the world. Recent statements by Mr. Spielberg (Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Time) regarding his new movie suggest that his “close...

I don't know which is more amazing: that Steven Spielberg managed to make the best movie of the year in just four months or that it's his second huge film of 2005. Either way, "Munich" is a poignant political masterpiece that will no doubt be very controversial. It's the best movie of 2005, coming in at the last minute to best other terrific entries including "Walk the Line," "Match Point," "Capote," "Mrs. Henderson Presents," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "A History of Violence" and even "Memoirs of a Geisha." "Munich" is "inspired by real events," those being the 1972 murders...

Steven Spielberg, IN ONLY INTERVIEW WORLDWIDE BEFORE 'MUNICH' RELEASE Discusses CONTROVERSIAL New Film to Open Dec. 23. ‘There has never been an adequate tribute paid to the Israeli athletes who were murdered in ’72,’ Spielberg says. “I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today,” director Steven Spielberg tells TIME in an exclusive cover-story interview. “But it’s certainly worth a try,” Spielberg says. Since filming began in June, the movie (reported to cost around $70 million) “has been surrounded by rumors, criticism, and suggestions that Spielberg was...

There will be no press junket, no premiere and, most importantly, no Oscar marketing campaign beyond trailers and posters for Steven Spielberg’s movie Munich, I have learned. This dicey decision to have no traditional publicity for the film before and after it opens December 23 is the director’s alone. He will not even be giving press or broadcast interviews. “The official strategy is for the movie to speak for itself,” an insider told me this week. “All they’re going to do is just show the movie to people. You have to be Steven Spielberg to get away with that.” But...

A New York Times article, today, confirms everything I've written and worse regarding Steven Spielberg's upcoming "Vengeance" movie. It is now a certainty that Mr. "Schindler's List" will expend the capital he earned on that film to now HUMANIZE(!) Palestinian terrorists who murdered the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. It's bad enough that Spielberg ran the script by Arafat-fan Bill Clinton--Arafat ordered the Olympic athlete massacre--and other assorted Clintonistas who drooled over Arafat, like Mike McCurry and Dennis Ross. Worse is the revelation that playwright Tony Kushner (a self-avowed socialist and gay activist) is praised for "humanizing the...

Marking the end of a long and bloody life. Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, 75, died this week in a Paris hospital. Often praised for leading the establishment of a Palestinian state, he devoted his life to violence and the utter annihilation of the Israeli people. A weapons smuggler as a teenager, Arafat would become the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1969. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, a number of hooded gunmen, identifying themselves as "Black September"--a covert terrorist unit of the PLO--took several Israeli athletes hostage. In the siege that followed, 11 Israeli athletes, 5 Palestinian gunmen,...

<p>For a citizen of a country manacled to its past, Dr. Georg Sieber had a remarkable knack for seeing the future. In the months leading up to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West German organizers asked Sieber, then a 39-year-old police psychologist, to "tabletop" the event, as security experts call the exercise of sketching out worst-case scenarios. Sieber looks a bit like the writer Tom Clancy, and the crises he limned drew from every element of the airport novelist's genre: kidnappers and hostages, superpower patrons and smuggled arms, hijacked jets and remote-controlled bombs. Studying the most ruthless groups of that era, from the Irish Republican Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Basque separatist group ETA and West Germany's own Baader-Meinhof Gang, he came up with 26 cases, each imagined in apocalyptic detail. Most of Sieber's scenarios focused on the Olympic Village, the Games' symbolic global community; one that did not -- a jet hired by a Swedish right wing group crashes into an Olympic Stadium filled with people -- foreshadowed a September day in another city many years later.</p>