Why You Won’t Look at Spielberg’s Munich the Same Way Again
From the Times of Israel, via Der Spiegel:
The Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics were assisted by a German neo-Nazi, a German newsmagazine reported Sunday. The neo-Nazi, Willi Pohl, helped forge passports and ferried one of the Black September terror cell ringleaders around Germany in the weeks before the Olympic massacre.
Based on recently released files from Germany’s security service BfV, der Spiegel reported Sunday that Pohl had met with Saad Walli, an “Arab-looking man” who boasted of his contacts to the radical wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization, seven weeks before the massacre in September 1972. Saad Walli was the code name of Abu Daoud, one of the masterminds behind the attack.
The 2,000-page report, which the police of the city of Dortmund sent to the BfV and other national authorities, does not mention any efforts made by any of the contacted officials to apprehend Abu Daoud in the weeks prior to the massacre, the weekly reported.
In October 1972 Phol was arrested by the police and was found in possession of grenades, arms and ammunition. The weapons were thought to be held in keeping for Black September to be used in a retaliatory attack against German targets. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
Pohl, who today makes a living writing crime novels and has “credibly distanced himself from terrorism,” according to Der Spiegel, helped Abu Daoud in several ways. He helped him forge passports and other documents and drove him “across the country, where he met with Palestinians in several cities,” the magazine quotes Pohl as saying.
I wonder what Steven Spielberg — auteur, with Tony Kushner, of the unconsciously (on Spielberg’s part anyway) anti-Israeli film Munich — must be thinking now that links with the Holocaust have been drawn. As one who has been known to write crime novels myself, the mystery for me is why Spielberg, after Schindler’s List, would make such a film, as if the Israeli vengeance were in any way morally equivalent to the horrendous racist mass murder. I think the answer is Kushner. I doubt Steven, not really a news maven, had any idea of the extent of the playwright’s anti-Zionist animus.
Now that the links between Neo-Nazis and Palestinian terrorists are made manifest, will the director have the courage to disavow his own film? If he really wants to do something for Israel, he should.
Cross-posted from PJ Tatler.
“the mystery for me is why Spielberg, after Schindler’s List, would make such a film, as if the Israeli vengeance were in any way morally equivalent to the horrendous racist mass murder.”
It seems to me that some Jews feel like they have to criticize Israel to prove their progressiveness, their non-Zionness, if you will. In some ways, having made a film that spoke so eloquently and uncompromisingly about the Holocaust, Spielberg may have felt even more pressure to prove he’s sympathetic to some of Israel’s enemies.
Then, there’s the melancholy fact that it’s just plain easier to declare yourself an enemy of tyrannies that have been roundly trounced by history 50+ years ago. It would take real guts to take on today’s lefty anti-Semitism, I mean, given how widespread those ideas are in H’wood.
The Spielberg film I could never understand was Saving Private Ryan. The men talk a great deal about why they’re fighting and they have no clear idea. Tom Hanks finally says, if we do this mission, we win the right to go home. I understand this was after D-Day, the men were tired, they’d taken so many casualties, it’s all so de-humanizing. BUT, the man who made Schindler’s List thinks this is a war without a clear rationale? Auschwitz wasn’t a rationale? Incredible.
I’ve never been taken with Spielberg’s “Schindler” either, because no matter how you cut it, it comes out as a film about a good Nazi.
The survivors and their families have a different view, one that trumps word play.
Arabs are not fans of Munich and that is because Munich is not a solid case of moral relativism as much as perhaps a view that the application of violence has its limits and diminishing returns, even if one is 100% on board with the post-Munich Israeli operation, especially given the time span of a conflict now lasting 6 decades.
The Ottoman Empire’s presence in Palestine was enabled by armies and the British Mandate too. In the end Israel was established by armies and armies have ensured the continued existence of Israel. But this slow motion warfare today has to end some time.
Like it or not Europe ultimately created Israel, first in the form of emigres tired of European anti-Semitism, then in the stated goals of the British Mandate, and lastly with the Holocaust, which sped up pre-WW II immigration which can perhaps be said to have pre-visioned something like the Holocaust.
The Arabs were the unlucky recipients of outside forces but then they already had been for centuries due to the Turks. Is the consolation supposed to be that the Turks were Muslims as well? And who were these Palestinian Arabs? Were they heterogeneous or homogeneous? Even today no one seems to be sure but the fact an Albanian dynasty right next door in Egypt ruled for 35 years after WW I is suggestive.
In the end, the idea seems to be that it’s okay for Europe to create countries as long as they’re Muslim like Jordan or for the West Bank to be ruled by Jordan because they’re Muslims or for Egypt to be ruled by Macedonian Albanians because they’re Muslims but don’t let a foreigner be a Jew. Tough luck – Muslims aren’t going to dominate a polity 100% of the time and being on the other end of Muslim politics isn’t so fun so why should Muslims indulge in it themselves?
It’s not like those Muslims didn’t repeatedly express their own violence to circumvent Israel. But what had worked for centuries didn’t work this time and so those Muslims should understand what it’s like to be Christians in Egypt who can never be President or Christians and Jews who lived under Muslim domination for centuries.
You can’t always have your own way and if an argument can be made for diminishing returns for Israeli operations such as post-Munich a much larger argument can be made for diminishing returns for Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza as violence over 60 years has bought them nothing but Orwell’s boot stamping on their faces forever.
If the Muslim concept when it comes to sharing land is my way or the highway then Arabs in the former Mandate and in refugee camps in Lebanon are going to be living on the highway forever. Sometimes you lose – deal with it – like Christian and Jews dealt with it for 14 centuries. Only children are going to obsess over 1% of land they no longer control while ignoring 99% they still do control. I realize that’s scant consolation for the 1% but reality has it’s own priorities and we all must live within them, like it or not. Agitating forever won’t work and I’m glad Vicksburg isn’t still declaring themselves a Confederate enclave.
If Arabs on the West Bank would dedicate themselves to peace they could at least rule themselves but they don’t want that. They live in a fantasy world where it’s all or nothing, Israel to disappear, equivalent to thinking Constatinople will someday be Christian again.
Good points. And thank you for using Arab and not Palestinian, as there is no such thing. Palestinian politics is like African-American politics writ large. Arabs in Palestine, supported primarily by Christians in the West, who hate the only economic benefactor in the region, Israel, are largely ignored by Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Right you are, StanO:
“There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Golda Meir, Sunday Times, June 15, 1969)
wonder if Willi Pohl was a technical advisor to the movie Munich. He could participate in the actual killing and then get paid for the remake by a Jew, Spielberg. At the same time, he could get a lot of quality time with Tony Kushner
what a deal
To be generous, all of Spielberg’s “adult” work suffer from profound moral confusion.
Everytime I read of his participation in a political fundraiser I see the humble smiling
Morally vapid face. The face, I fear, of a coward.
Hollywood must endorse entertainment only……Their core business is to sell tickets at the box office, but they appear to be more interested in party politics. The new age Jews who control the American film and television industry are atheists, and have far left objectives and goals. The Hollywood Jew have a distinctive indifference towards Israel. I have several times urged Steven Spielberg to put his money where his mouth is……..