Let them kill you and they'll stop killing you

I won't see Speilberg's Munich even though the usual suspects are telling me that I can't pass judgement on it until I do. They told me the same thing about Farenheit 9/11. When I finally saw that film I realized that my criticisms, which were based on reviews from writers I respect and my own prejudiced--the horror, the horror!--opinion of Michael Moore, were in fact too lenient. The only way to counter the West L.A. liberal Jews walking out of the Westwood Crest Theater and rubbing their chins while deep in thought would be to draw their attention to a critical review from a fellow Jew(as long as it's not Dennis Prager) in the NY Times. Well, what do you know? Look what I found:

Gradually, as the assassinations begin, the moral weight of their acts brings the team of assassins close to breakdown. Avner (played by Eric Bana) hesitates before shooting one of his targets. The Mossad agents argue about whether they should rejoice in their success. One suggests that the Palestinians learned their tactics from the Israelis. Another, pointing to increasing acts of terror around the world in apparent response to their success, says, "All the blood comes back to us." By the end of the movie, Avner thinks the Israelis are going to kill him. He renounces his country. And he warns of a cycle of violence.

But the film is so intent on its theory that it eagerly departs from previous accounts - or even plausibility about how Mossad agents might act. It supposedly takes its guidance from George Jonas's contested 1984 book, "Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team," which is itself presented as an account based upon the recollections of the disenchanted head of the Mossad team. But Mr. Jonas's Avner, unlike Mr. Spielberg's, is not paralyzed by moral doubt; Mr. Jonas writes that he has "absolutely no qualms about anything they did."

Moreover, the film, to make its argument about the cycle of violence, ends up treating the Munich massacre almost as if it were the original act of Palestinian terror. The elimination of context makes the Israeli response seem intemperate, while all future acts of Palestinian terror are treated as if they were responses to the Israeli assassinations. But as the historical Meir well knew, in the years before Munich, maniacal terrorists aligned with the Palestinian cause had bombed a Swissair jet, thrown hand grenades into crowds at Israel's airport, hijacked planes and associated themselves with other terror groups trained and partly financed by the Soviet Union. These, like the attacks that followed Munich, were part of a continuing war, not evidence of an amorphous cycle of violence that developed out of Israel's attempts to undermine terror.