Ed Lasky writes an article in The American Thinker titled, “Spielberg’s Silent Victims.” The article relates that Spielberg granted no moral standing whatever to the surviving relatives of the slain Israeli athletes.

Postmodern ideology places victims at the very top of the pecking order of morality. Unless, of course, the victims come from a class of persons deemed by the supreme authorities of political correctness (The New York Times, Hollywood, and academia) to be pariahs.

Steve Spielberg’s controversial new movie Munich demonstrates this principle.

Maureen Dowd infamously characterized Cindy Sheehan as embodying “absolute moral authority” in opposing the Iraq War because her son Casey, who volunteered to serve, was killed in Iraq. The much larger number of bereaved American parents who lost children in Iraq, but who supported the war, garnered almost no attention or imputed authority from Ms. Dowd and her press colleagues. Some victims are more equal than other victims, you see.

Mr. Spielberg granted no moral standing whatsoever to the bereaved relatives of the slain Israeli Olympians. Even worse, his representatives insulted them. The story of his treatment of the surviving relatives, victims directly comparable to Ms. Sheehan (except of course that Casey Sheehan volunteered for war while the Israeli athletes volunteered for Olympic competition), is rather shocking.

The film has been the subject of criticism across the political spectrum. Some of the complaints include:

– Spielberg’s use of a notoriously anti-Israel playwright to write a script that equates Israel’s preventive measures to stop terror with terror itself.

– The movie used imagery to suggest that somehow Israel was responsible for 9/11. The film does this by adding an unnecessary scene at the end of the movie. The camera pans from the face of one of the Israelis who was part of the team that found the terrorists and dealt justice to them to the image of the World Trade Center – thereby somehow trying to link, fallaciously, the Israelis’ actions to the attack on the WTC (which took place over a quarter-century later).

– The movie’s implication that Israelis concerned themselves with the financial costs of the program to kill terrorists as much as the morality of the program, betraying a stereotypical obsession with money.

– Spielberg used a book that has been thoroughly discredit as a source for the movie.

– Spielberg took great liberty with facts, as Aaron Klein’s new book on the Munich massacre and its aftermath demonstrates.

The author of the definitive history, Aaron Klein, states:

If I were making a movie, I would make a different one. I know the facts, and the facts on the ground tell a different story.

One point, among many, made in Klein’s book is how the widows and surviving family of the Israeli victims were abused by European governments, which not only refused to help Israel stop terror but actually cooperated with terror groups to appease them.

The wife of one of the murdered athletes, Ankie Rekhess-Spitzer, believes that the film uses the Munich massacre and the follow-up campaign to stop the terrorists to illustrate the folly of violent retaliation, and that for her the “comparison is thin.” She says,

It is basically a post-9/11 anti-war film. I told this to Kathleen Kennedy (the producer). She did not deny it. Only Munich is not Iraq. Our athletes went to compete in the Olympic Games and were murdered in cold blood, and nobody was willing to lift a finger to locate or punish the killers. Something had to be done.

It is truly sad that the producer of a great film like “Schindler’s List” would become so morally confused and produce this fictionalized attempt to equate Palestinian terrorists with those Israelis who felt that unless they retaliated, more innocent Israelis would be murdered.

UPDATE:
Read an excellent review of “Munich” by Scott Holleran
Read another well-written article by Kate Wright at The American Thinker, “The Lion that Roars for Peace.”

Previous Posts:
Spielberg’s Munich – Fantasy Fiction
“Munich” stands for “appeasement”