Munich

By James Bowman
New York Sun
December 30, 2005

The most misleading line in Stephen Spielberg's Munich comes near the
beginning. Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, tells her cabinet, "Every
civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own
values." The implication is that Meir was reluctant to hunt down the
terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre, and that doing so was
contrary to Israeli, and civilized, values.

The truth is just the opposite. Meir understood that Israel's chief
obligation is to ensure that Jews will never again be slaughtered with
impunity, simply for being Jewish. Holding mass murderers accountable is not
a compromise; it is Israel's reason for being.

The most misleading omission from Munich is Germany's response to the
massacre. Germany released the Black September terrorists less than two
months after they had killed eleven innocent civilians. Israel had to hunt
down Black September, because Germany didn't value Jewish lives enough to
capture, try, and imprison those who kill Israelis on German soil. (Also
missing from the film is any mention of Germany's refused to allow the
Israeli Olympians their own security detail, despite credible threats to
their safety, and Germany's refusal to let Israel conduct a rescue
operation.) Meir said that she was "literally physically sickened" by
Germany's capitulation. She continued, "I think that there is not one single
terrorist held in prison anywhere in the world. Everyone else gives in."

Nobody can accuse Stephen Spielberg of insensitivity toward Jews and Israel.
But by trying so hard to appear evenhanded, he has made an incomplete and
imbalanced movie. In Munich, those who would murder racist butchers are no
better than the butchers themselves. Conservative columnist Warren Bell put
it best when he described Munich's simple-minded morality like this: "when
good guys kill bad guys, they're as bad as bad guys." Liberal writer Leon
Wieseltier concurred: "Munich prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a
discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion.
This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety
of other people can hold."

If both sides of the political spectrum can agree that a nation is not only
right, but obligated, to act as Israel did, why does Munich try so hard to
say otherwise?

A large part of the blame belongs to the screenwriter, Tony Kushner, whose
literary accomplishments (Angels in America, among other brilliant plays)
are too often overshadowed by an extreme left-wing political agenda. Why on
Earth would anyone entrust a script about Israel to someone who declared, "I
wish modern Israel hadn't been born?" (So much for impartiality.)

Spielberg and Kushner end up glorifying Jewish victims, but deploring those
who would keep Jews from becoming victims. Their sense of Jewish tragedy
blinds them to the possibility of Jewish heroism.

And yet, even if Munich had gotten the dialogue, plot, and tone right, there
would still be something missing. Rather, there would be someone missing, a
character, Avery Brundage. The reason Munich matters so much to American
Jews has nothing to do with Arab terrorism or European appeasement. Those
complementary stories were familiar to the world decades before Munich. It
was Avery Brundage, an American, who so outraged. The same Avery Brundage
who, as head of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1936, had insisted on sending
an American delegation to "Hitler's Games" in Berlin; the same Avery
Brundage who, in 1941, was expelled from the anti-war America First
Committee for his Nazi allegiance; this was the man who, in 1972, was
president of the full International Olympic Committee. According to Time
Magazine, during the standoff, Brundage's chief concern was with "remov[ing]
the crisis from the Olympic Village," as if to say, "There's no way we can
save the hostages. Let's at least save the Games." After the murders,
despite strong opposition within the IOC, including from the German
organizers, Brundage insisted that everything go on as if nothing had
happened. He refused even to mention the dead Israelis in the following
day's memorial ceremony. Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray summed up
Brundage's decision like this: "Incredibly, they're going on with it. It's
almost like having a dance at Dachau."

Murray's comparison is apt. It was Dachau that taught my grandfather's
generation the importance of Israel as a haven in a world that is too often
either hostile or indifferent to Jews. And when he was my age, my father
watched Munich, the massacre, live on tv, and he learned the same lesson.
Thirty-three years later, Munich, the movie, forgets to explain why Israel
acted as it did.

That's the story Steven Spielberg missed.