A scurrilous screed, more anti-Israel and offensive than Paradise Now

Rating: 1/10 (25 December 2005)

I am shocked. Simply numbed beyond words. With the release of 'Munich', Stephen Spielberg has created the most offensive, vicious attack on the integrity and validity of the State of Israel since, well, the widely-discredited book on which this paean to anti-Zionism was based. He has debased, defamed, impugned and offended every man, woman and child who has given his/her life for the creation and sustenance of the Jewish state. The man who has single-handedly made it his life mission to ensure that a vivid, living testimonial to the Holocaust and Jewish history endures has turned his back on the present and future of his people.
My objections do not entirely mirror those of many of the other reviews I've read. Sure, the targets of the Mossad team's assassinations are portrayed EXCLUSIVELY and SOLELY as lovers of literature, doting fathers, harmless flirts, refined and sophisticated family men, etc. rather than the terrorist masterminds that they were. And yes, the Palestinian characters in the piece are given free reign to inveigh passionately on the 'justice' of their cause and the gripes that they have, without so much as a peep of retort from anything remotely resembling anything pro-Israeli. In fact, some of the lines that the Israelis say make them sound more bloodthirsty, parochial, self-obsessed and evil than the docile, art-loving, universalist Palestinian terrorists they are dispatched to eliminate (oh, were they terrorists? I was too busy watching them insist on paying for milk at the grocery store and translating works of literature to remember why they were being hunted). Lines like 'the only blood I care about is Jewish blood' and 'how do you think we got this land?! Through violence!' (paraphrase) were clearly not intended to elicit the same sympathy that seeing a terrorist who's planned the murder of innocents tenderly speak to his daughter is supposed to. So it's unbalanced. So there were speeches that bothered me. Eh, I can live with that. It's just a movie, after all, and Hollywood artisans are bound to put their own spins on hot-button political topics, and one cannot expect it to be anything more than oversimplified and one-sided in the context of a film.
Similarly, I disagreed with Spielberg's central assertion, repeated over and over throughout the film, that meting out punishment to criminals that fit the crimes they commit ONLY results in more crime, i.e. that violence begets ONLY violence. (In case you didn't quite get it the first hundred times it's brought up in such wink-wink, none-too-subtle references as immediately following the Mossad team's bombing of a terrorist with a terrorist bombing of innocents in the very next scene, the movie ends with an excruciatingly long shot of the World Trade Center. Get it? 9/11 stems from the fact that victims of terror have the audacity to strike back at their oppressors rather than succumbing to their wishes, which in turn leads the terrorists to strike again, Hint hint). The very famous, and equally tired, 'cycle of violence' lament. This sort of hippie-dippie, passive, thinking is a hallmark of the extreme left, and the kind of thinking that led to World War II, when Hitler's megalomaniacal moves were met by concession and appeasement by the West. It's the sort of thinking that would have invited Osama bin Laden for dialogue, or turned the other cheek, rather than pursuing him, after 9/11. What makes Spielberg's dope-smoking, turn-the other cheek, peace on earth nonsense all the more preposterous is that he does not even offer an alternative to exacting revenge on criminals and terrorists. He doesn't suggest dialogue as a viable means of righting a wrong or any other means of reconciliation. He only condemns: saying, implicitly and explicitly, through the voices of the characters and the consequences of their actions, exacting revenge on those who harm you is bad, ineffective, even morally equivalent (note the reprehensible interspersing of the voices naming the names of the 11 athletes and the 11 terrorists in one of the early sequences of the film, suggesting a moral equivalence between their deaths) and tantamount to terror. But he does not offer any discernible alternative, other than to roll over and die. That's been tried, for hundreds of years of Jewish history. It doesn't quite work.
Much as all of the aforementioned bothered me, I was willing to accept the film as an exciting, intriguing, if not entirely balanced work of art...until the last fifteen or so minutes. That's when it became clear that Spielberg had a vicious agenda to promote, one that is all the more hurtful, offensive, callous and Judas-esquire, insofar as it comes from the mind of a man who is purportedly a great admirer and fan of the state of Israel, but who comes off making a statement that would be more fitting in the works of Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, or worse.