- Funny that the Movie is called "Munich" since, until about 20 years ago, the very word "Munich" was a synonym for appeasement of evil-doers and moral equivalency, the result of Chamberlain's famous "scrap of paper" in which Hitler promised, in Chamberlain's words, "Peace in our time." Is Speilberg aware of the background of "Munich?
unich,' Steven Spielberg's new movie, is less about Golda Meir avenging the 1972 Munich massacre than it is about George Bush waging the War on Terror, which makes it doubly hard to believe that the historical allusion wasn't part of the calculation that went into constructing the title.1
What was Spielberg thinking? Was he thinking at all?
Hasn't he read bin Laden's comments about The War in general or his comments about The War and clinton in particular? 2
Why doesn't he realize that the terrorist's impetus is precisely the "Munich" syndrome of appeasement, self-loathing and psychologizing that is practiced so fastidiously by the American Left
today?
And why doesn't he see 'Israel' as simply the terrorist's metaphor for us all, for western civilization in its entirety?
If Spielberg and Kushner were to hear bin Laden, were really to hear him, they would begin to understand that it is not Israel, not George Bush, but they, the American Left, who are bin Laden's aiders and abettors. 3
- At the time, '96, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
bill clinton
Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002
Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio:
I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer
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WAR AND TREASON AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Mia T, December 29, 2005
inch Sulzberger scurried to the C-SPAN confessional even as the fires raged under the mammoth heap of ash and twisted steel that was once the Twin Towers and 2801 human beings. He had to make certain no one would blame The New York Times....
COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH FOOTNOTES
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1.
['Munich' is] Spielberg's not so subtle commentary about our post 9-11 world is the ultimate obscenity:
In the film, an actress playing the prime minister of Israel Golda Meir sees the answer clearly: Strike back! If the terrorists respect no limits in their war against the Jewish people, then the killers and those who direct them should not feel safe anywhere either. She orders her intelligence service -- the Mossad -- to track them down in their European havens and kill them.
HUMANIZE THE TERRORISTS?
If such an order seems vaguely familiar to American audiences, it should. The comparison between Meir's order and the reaction of President Bush when he told rescue workers at ground zero that those who brought down the towers would soon be hearing from Americans is more than obvious.
That sort of blunt threat wasn't well-received in those quarters where our conflict with fundamentalist Islam is seen as a function of America's alleged sins against the world. Rather than seeking out Al Qaeda, some sages told us to look in the mirror if we wanted to see the real bad guys. And that is precisely the message that Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (who shares a writing credit with Eric Roth) seem to be making about Israel in "Munich."
It should be noted that the film has already come in for justified criticism for being primarily based on a book whose primary source was a fraud. Vengeance by George Jonas purported to tell the tale of a disillusioned Mossad agent, but it turned out the man was just a cab driver with an Israeli accent, and not an ex-spy. But even if we discount this, the film still fails its subject matter. That's because the goal here is not merely to wrongly argue that the battle against Palestinian terror is as criminal as anything the terrorists have done; its purpose is also to humanize the terrorists....
But the problem with this film isn't just an obsessive refusal to be judgmental about terrorism or the tedious speechifying that overwhelms the action. There's something even more insidious at play here.
The main character, the Israeli agent Avner (played by Eric Bana), doesn't just loose his marbles because of a mission whose efficacy might well be debated. Spielberg's Avner rejects not merely a policy but Israel itself, which he abandons for the apparently more humane confines of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Spielberg even uses an image of a still-standing World Trade Center to punctuate a scene in which Avner rejects Israel to lead us to falsely think 9/11 might have been avoided had America also abandoned the Jewish state.
That "Munich" would have such an anti-Zionist denouement (in contrast to "Schindler's List," which tearfully concluded with the playing of the song "Jerusalem of Gold") is unsurprising due to Kushner's involvement.
Though primarily known for his extravagantly praised plays about the plight of gays suffering from AIDS, Kushner is also a hardcore left-wing Jewish critic of Israel. He has edited a book of anti-Israel essays, and even told Ha'aretz that Israel's birth was a "mistake" he wished had never happened.
As for the director and prime mover of this project, in the years since the release of "Schindler's List" and his subsequent contributions to Holocaust remembrance projects, Spielberg has become something of a secular Jewish saint. As such, he's apparently worried enough about his image to employ former Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross to spin for "Munich," in addition to Eyal Arad, a leading Israeli public-relations torpedo who also works for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
They may well succeed but if there was ever a movie that ought to provoke outrage, it is "Munich." The film concludes with a bizarre scene in which the disillusioned Avner daydreams (fantasizes?) about the actual events of the massacre while having sex with his wife. As their coupling reaches its conclusion, we see the bound Israeli athletes slaughtered by their Arab captors.
By this point, a weary audience that has been subjected to many other obvious and heavy-handed clichÈs so familiar to Kushner's work is forced to wonder whether Avner now sees himself as one of the killers. At the same time, the audience is also being asked to see Israel and the war on terrorism as forces that are literally screwing the world.
Perhaps the fact that "Munich" is such poor entertainment will do more to limit the damage it does than anything said by its critics. But it would be a mistake to let this film pass without a response from those who care about the survival of both Israel and the West.
You don't have to insist that everything Israel or America does to fight terror is wise to understand that the war they're fighting is just. Judging the murderers and those who fight such criminals as morally equivalent is not wisdom. It is, as Steven Spielberg has now shown us, the ultimate obscenity.
Immoral equivalence
Jewish World Review
Dec. 22, 2005 / 21 Kislev, 5766
By Jonathan Tobin
WHY DID BILL CLINTON IGNORE TERRORISM?
Was it simply the constraints of his liberal mindset, or was it something even more threatening to our national security?
by Mia T, 8.18.05
(viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
thanx to jla and Wolverine for the audio
"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'
I thought that my virtual obsession with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him."
bill clinton
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in '91 and he went to the Sudan.
We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden].
So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have; but they thought it was a hot potato. They didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
bill clinton
Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002
Clinton Reveals on Secret Audio:
I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer
I M P E A C H M E N T
h e a r --c l i n t o n --l o s e --i t
by Mia T, 11.11.05
This legacy confab is in and of itself proof certain of clinton's deeply flawed character, and a demonstration in real time of the way in which the clinton years were about a legacy that was incidentally a presidency.
Madeleine Albright captured the essence of this dysfunctional presidency best when she explained why clinton couldn't go after bin Laden.
According to Richard Miniter, the Albright revelation occurred at the cabinet meeting that would decide the disposition of the USS Cole bombing by al Qaeda [that is to say, that would decide to do what it had always done when a "bimbo" was not spilling the beans on the clintons: Nothing]. Only Clarke wanted to retaliate militarily for this unambiguous act of war.
Albright explained that a [sham] Mideast accord would yield [if not peace for the principals, surely] a Nobel Peace Prize for clinton. Kill or capture bin Laden and clinton could kiss the accord and the Peace Prize good-bye.
If clinton liberalism, smallness, cowardice, corruption, perfidy--and, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Cuomo, clinton cluelessness--played a part, it was, in the end, the Nobel Peace Prize that produced the puerile pertinacity that enabled the clintons to shrug off terrorism's global danger.
COMPLETE ARTICLE
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BIN LADEN FINGERS CLINTON FOR TERROR SUCCESS (SEE FOOTAGE)(may 1998)
- In the first part of this interview which occurred in May 1998, a little over two months before the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Osama bin Laden answers questions posed to him by some of his followers at his mountaintop camp in southern Afghanistan. In the latter part of the interview, ABC reporter John Miller is asking the questions.
Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.
- After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....
The American people, by and large, do not know the name bin Laden, but they soon likely will. Do you have a message for the American people?
I say to them that they have put themselves at the mercy of a disloyal government, and this is most evident in Clinton's administration....
THE THREAT OF TERRORISM IS AS CLOSE AS A CLINTON IS TO THE OVAL OFFICE
- 3.
- Yitzhak Shamir Validated:
THE CLINTONS ARE "A GREAT DANGER TO JEWS"
by Mia T, 11.15.05
- "I view Hillary Clinton as a great danger to Jews if she is elected."
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former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
Jewish Press, July 2000
Clinton also referred to the Oslo peace process -- by any standard a total and abject failure -- "our best chance for a lasting and comprehensive peace."
I'm surprised he wasn't booed off the stage.
"If you work for peace and fail, fewer people will die than if you do not work at all," he said.
Tell it to Neville Chamberlain.
Clinton offered up a three-point peace plan:
- He suggested Palestinians "use their opportunity in Gaza to do a better job of fighting terror." A better job? How about any job?
- He suggested Israelis must find a way "to organize their politics" so that "their search for peace can continue." Isn't it time for world leaders to acknowledge that Israelis have done all they can -- that they have gone above and beyond the call of duty in working for peace? Am I the only one who finds such remarks rather insulting? How do Israelis view it?
- And he suggested that the "most important" step is that Jews around the world and friends of Israel "have a special responsibility to give financial, moral and technical support to the Palestinian people to help the Gaza gamble succeed and to the Israelis to give them time to sort through their political situation."
This is what passes for deep thinking among world leaders.
Jews have a special responsibility to come to the aid of their embattled, bleeding, battered brothers and sisters in Israel. Suggesting Jews should divert their support to aiding the budding anti-Semitic, terrorist state of Palestine is immoral and unconscionable.
It is like suggesting that the best hedge against the rise of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s would have been diverting financial and technical aid to Germany....
Bill Clinton did his level best to destroy Israel during his eight years as president. He twisted Ehud Barak's arm to the point that the former prime minister had virtually given his country away to Yasser Arafat. Only a strange twist of fate, in which Arafat rejected the giveaway, halted the process and saved Israel from the unimaginable horror of being sliced and diced.
When people like Bill Clinton talk about a "peace plan" for Israel, what they really mean is a "piece plan" -- in which Israel would be left with only an indefensible piece of its historic land.
That's not peace ... it's ethnic, religious and cultural suicide.
Clinton's Israel 'piece' plan
Posted: November 15, 2005
Joseph Farah - Yitzhak Shamir Validated:
halk this one up to the ultimate clinton mulligan.
The clintons' photo-op trip to Israel this week was punctuated yesterday by the above statement, which was shameless, self-serving, stupid, anti-Semitic and perilous... even by clinton standards.
To fully appreciate the context of the clinton trip and statement, one must understand that both are:
- an extension of the clintons' arm-twisting, dangerous-for-Israel phony rapprochement in the Mideast.1
- confirmation that the clintons are a mortal danger for Jews2, for Israel, for the region, for America3 and for the world.
- an extension of the clintons' abject failure to confront terrorism, generally4
- all about the Nobel Peace Prize:
- the opening move in the Mideast to erase clinton's failure at both--his presidency and his legacy. (Hope apparently springs eternal for the snake-oil saleman from Hot Springs.)
It is not surprising that the clintons chose Israel to deliver the opening move. Israel is at once the clinton failure focal point and potential sore point in '08. Israel--and, as a Jew I am ashamed to say, the Jews-- have always been an easy mark for the clintons.
Continued Jewish support is essential if clinton is to pull off the ultimate mulligan, a do-over presidency and legacy, if you will.
with its theology of contempt? 