Big surprise: Liberal director makes movie about terrorism that ignores evil

Stephen Spielberg, the movie director who, in my view, did more to degrade popular entertainment and tastes during the last 25 years than any other person, has now favored us with a liberal propaganda movie, Munich. Purportedly about the Palestinian terrorists’ war on Israel in the early 1970s, it actually creates a moral equivalence between the murderers of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the Israeli agents who tracked down and killed the murderers. Ironically, Spielberg, a liberal Jew who presumably despises Patrick Buchanan, would appear to agree completely with Buchanan’s remark in April 2002—when Israel finally struck back at Palestinian terror infrastructure in the West Bank after enduring a year of escalating terror attacks—that the Israeli government “is the mirror image of Hamas and Hezbollah.” However, Spielberg creates moral equivalence between terrorist killers and their victims, not by saying that Israel is as bad as Hamas and Hezbollah, but by erasing the question of evil from the picture altogether. As David Brooks writes in his December 11 New York Times op-ed, “What ‘Munich’ Left Out”:

This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent. But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg’s Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.

There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg’s fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong. Understandably, he doesn’t want to portray Palestinian terrorists as cartoon bad guys, but he simply doesn’t portray them.

There’s one speech in which a Palestinian terrorist sounds like Mahmoud Abbas, but beyond that, the terrorists are marginal and opaque. And because there is no evil, Spielberg gets the Israeli fighters wrong. Avner is an American image of what an Israeli hero should be….

Recent history teaches what Spielberg’s false generalization about the “perpetual motion machine” of violence does not: that some violence is constructive and some is destructive. The trick is knowing the difference. That’s a recognition that comes from reality, not fables.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2005 11:04 AM | Send