Spielberg's Munich Pact

Spielberg's Munich Pact By Debbie Schlussel FrontPageMagazine.com | December 22, 2005

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?

But not as much as he and admittedly anti-Israel scriptwriter Tony Kushner lied in this two-and-a-half-hour-plus celluloid fairy tale. Like the book on which it’s based, Munich is long, boring, and filled with fakery.

Spielberg’s Golda Meir is unsure about going after the Munich terrorists. She wavers and constantly seeks reassurance that this is the right thing. But the real-life Golda Meir could not have been more certain and intent on killing these terrorists.

Spielberg’s “Black September” terrorist group is named after the Munich terrorists, who murdered the Israeli athletes in September. The real-life “Black September” is so named after Jordan’s massacre of 10,000 Palestinians in September 1970 – causing many Jordanian Palestinians to flee for safety in the West Bank and Israel.

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.

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.

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.

What can you expect from the man who said his meeting with Fidel Castro “was the eight most important hours of my life”?

Using voiceovers from TV and radio news accounts of the Olympic massacre, Spielberg presents the media confusion over whether the Israeli athletes and their Palestinian captors survived. Spielberg shows scenes of families of both Israeli athletes and Palestinian terrorists sobbing – as if their relatives are on equal moral footing. After it is confirmed the Israeli athletes were murdered, Spielberg uses news footage showing pictures and names of the Israeli dead. Interspersed with that, he shows Golda Meir and Israeli generals looking though photos and announcing the names of the Palestinian terrorists. They’re equal in this movie – Get it?

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.

When Israel won the Yom Kippur War, when it hunted down the Olympic terrorists, when it invaded Lebanon and had Yasser Arafat in its sites in Beirut, the world respected Israel – and so did its Islamic enemies. And terrorist attacks stopped or slowed. When Israel showed weakness – signing empty peace treaties, like Oslo; pulling out of Southern Lebanon in an hour; and giving away Gaza – the world disdained Israel, and so did the Palestinian terrorists. That's when the terrorist attacks acceleterated. Many more Israelis have been murdered and maimed in the twelve years after the Oslo accords than in the twelve years before.

In Munich, repeated scenes of the Israeli athletes being taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorists show a poster of Masada in the background at their Olympic quarters. Masada was a famous mountain fortress in Israel, where ancients Jews made their last heroic stand against the Romans. Masada became a symbol of Jewish heroism that inspired the imagination and spirit of the founders of Israel.

But the symbolism of the Masada poster is lost on Spielberg. In his Munich vision of the world, he doesn’t want a heroic last stand against terrorists. He just wants us to roll over and die without a fight.

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.

There are a lot of people named Abu in this film – Abu Youssef, Abu Salameh, etc. But the biggest Abu is the one in the credits, Abu Spielberg – Minister of Disinformation.

It is strange when Spielberg and a host of other Hollywood directors try to probe the mind of terrorists... make them sympathetic and not see terrorism for the evil that it is. Hollywood has now a morbid fascination with terrorism and with the Left's point of view that there is no "good and evil" in the world, just differences of values -- which if we can adjust would make the world a happy peaceful place. Good and evil are intractable and cause conflict; whereas "value" relativism is about subjectivity and equality, where tensions can be reduced with a little value adjustment. Spielberg is Jewish and it seems he has given up on his faith and have followed the recent trend to portray terrorists in a sympathetic light (how Jewish Hollywood can bear to do this is beyond me). George Lucas' Star Wars still shows the fall from good to evil and has not given up on those categories. But Spielberg seems to think that it is all relative -- no good and evil in the world. With the Left's faith that 'conflict resolution' comes about through ridding the world of moral absolutes, that all values are subjective and equal, we can see how Spielberg is like the silly Jewish figure in Woody Allen's Zelig, who ends up at a Hitler rally near the Fuhrer. In other words, he doesn't see evil when it is right under his nose... more tragic than comic.

Here's an excerpt from an article that gives an overview of CIA/PLO links:

A genuine request for a dialogue soon came from Arafat, who sent two messages to the United States requesting clarification of the U.S. position on key diplomatic issues. The Nixon administration agreed to a meeting, and on Nov. 3, 1973, Vernon Walters, then deputy director of the CIA, met secretly in Rabat, Morocco with a top Arafat aide.

Henry Kissinger later described the Rabat meeting in the second volume of his memoirs, "Years of Upheaval." Walters was instructed to say that the question of who represented the Palestinians-Jordan or the PLO-was an "inter-Arab concern." The PLO took this as an American invitation to seek Arab backing as the sole representative of the Palestinians, and they obtained this status the following year at an Arab summit meeting in Rabat. Arafat expected, wrongly, that this would lead to prompt American recognition of the PLO.

The diplomatic discussion in Rabat was fruitless, Kissinger said in his memoirs. "The beginning of our dialogue was also its end . . . ," he wrote. "At this stage, involving the PLO was incompatible with the interests of any of the parties to the Middle East conflict."

But the Rabat meeting did produce the first tentative understanding on curbing PLO terrorism. "After it, attacks on Americans-at least by Arafat's faction of the PLO-ceased," Kissinger wrote.

Walters made the same judgment about a halt in PLO terrorism in a vague reference to the meeting in his 1978 memoir, "Silent Missions." He wrote: "On one occasion the U.S. government sent me to talk to a most hostile group of terrorists. I saw them alone and unarmed in a part of the world sympathetic to their cause . . . . We were able to communicate and there were no further acts of blood between us."

The diplomatic dialogue may have lapsed after the Rabat meeting, but not the discussions about security. The culmination was the November 1974 meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Palestinians thought they had been promised that their steps to curb international terrorism (and their new status as "sole, legitimate representatives of the Palestinians") would be a prelude to American recognition of the PLO.

But that was not to be. Kissinger later added the condition that the PLO must publicly accept U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and recognize Israel's right to exist. The Reagan administration set a further requirement that the PLO must renounce terrorism. (Arafat argues the PLO met these conditions in the resolutions passed in Algiers last month; the State Department says it didn't.)

The highpoint in U.S.-PLO security cooperation came during the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war. Arafat's men protected the American Embassy in West Beirut and the apartments of individual American diplomats. When the embassy was finally evacuated on June 20, 1976, Arafat's top intelligence man-Abu Hassan-managed the security arrangements.

President Ford thanked the PLO publicly for its help in evacuating the embassy, telling reporters: "The PLO and all other parties in the Lebanon area have cooperated completely in making it possible for us to evacuate the Americans and the other nationals without any incident whatsoever."

Arafat cited this 1976 evacuation as an example of PLO security assistance in the Playboy interview: "I have a letter from Henry Kissinger, an official letter, thanking the PLO and the Palestinian troops for the sacrifices they offered to save the lives of the Americans."

Perhaps the most intriguing contact of all came in December 1976, after the Lebanese civil war had ended. According to Arab and American sources, Abu Hassan was invited to the United States on what was described to the PLO side as an official visit. He came to Washington and met with CIA officials, including Ames(Robert, not Aldrich). He then went to Louisiana, and then to Hawaii for rest and relaxation with his fiance'e. The director of central intelligence at the time was George Bush, but there's no evidence that he met personally with the PLO man.

Abu Hassan was killed on Jan. 22, 1979, by an Israeli car bomb in Beirut. But security cooperation continued between the United States and the PLO. During the Iran hostage crisis, Arafat (at the request of the Carter administration) arranged the release of the first 13 hostages from Tehran. Later, Arafat obtained the bodies of eight U.S. servicemen killed at Desert One during the failed rescue mission.

The entire article is available at:

http://www.davidignatius.com/journalismAgents.html

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