MaroonBlog

"Should you leave the debate to the great over-simplifiers? The extreme Jews and extreme Palestinians who consider any kind of negotiated settlement to be a kind of treason?"

Steven Spielberg was discussing his latest epic work of equivocation and non-postured moral posturing on Sunday when he unleashed on straw man "extremists" who decry his film, demonstrating one of the most frustrating trends in leftist ideology today: the moderate shift. Now, this isn't something new on the left, as Ted Kennedy and the gang of congressional soap-box mongers will tell you. In the abortion debate, for example, the pro-abortion tactic has been for decades to denounce the "extremists" who would outlaw any medicine developed after the discovery of America, do away with abortion, birth control, pregnancy pain-relief, MRIs, epi-pens, flu shots, and tylenol and demand everyone walk around with a Bible strapped to their crotch, and then claim moderation and compromise by asking only that abortion be kept out of the clutches of some phantom Christo-maniacs. Of course, as most pro-life people outside the imagination of Barbara Boxer will tell you, few people actually prescribe to the extreme ideology described. The effect is to shift the debate, by staking out an opposing idea so far flung and extreme, that whatever is suggested as an alternative will appear moderate by comparison.

Spielberg would have us believe that it isn't he who is extreme, but critics of his film. It seems those who disagree with his film must be too ideologically bullheaded to identify the Palestinian terrorists as human beings at all. His message is simple: if you don't buy my message, you are an ignorant savage. But most complaints about Munich are about Spielberg's surprising willingness to bend or distort facts to further his message. I, for one, am more inclined to believe the agents who were there, who point out a surprising number of inaccurate and down right false assertions in the film. In the Reuters interview, former agents of Mossad question the bungling of the agents, and lack of females in the contingents (including females was standard), the length of time spent in the field, and more. Spielberg is more than willing to paint a picture of a barren, lonely, wasteland of low lighting and dark hallways, where agents sit for weeks and ponder their purpose before screwing up another booby trap.

Spielberg seems enraged that critics are too "black and white", that those who don't like his film deny the humanity of the terrorists. But he fails to see that the humanity of the terrorists is not the issue, and never was. Serial killers, rapists, child molesters: all of them undeniably human. Yet there is something about the decisions they make that outweighs their simple existence as humans. One of the terrorists is shown to have children: yet are we to believe the Israeli victims had no families? The humanity of the terrorists was never the question: the barbarity of their acts is the grounds on which they should be judged. Its easy to pretend that there was another way, that a "negotiated settlement" could have ended it all peacefully. What negotiated settlement does Spielberg have in mind? He must be aware that the PLO at the time was in no mood to negotiate, and that their demands during the hostage crisis were as unreasonable as they were unlikely. And caving to the demands would only have insured more terrorist act by a desperate and plainly violent Palestinian movement. Many on the Right are upset with the film because it focuses so much on the reasons for committing an act of terror, yet so little on the nature of justice that compels a civilization to extract punishment on those who choose terror. Spielberg, a Jew, knows that Judaism provides a rich religious background for understanding, and the Old Testament is rife with examples of, and reasoning for, the balance being set aright, and enemies being smitten by the forces of right. Even Jason and I have gotten into the discussion of the necessarily reciprocal nature of Justice. Spielberg, grasping, appeals to the motives of the perpetrators, but shows the Israelis as vengeance hungry and brutal. He even goes so far as to suggest that the policy of brining terrorist to justice is the problem, not the solution, by way of his cute juxtaposition of the World Trade Center at the films end. What motives, I have to ask, could he possibly believe justify such acts, or even validate them enough to be discussed as valid rather than dismissed and condemned outright? At the risk of sounding extreme, I have to venture none.