Several Thoughts, Ending with "MUNICH"
Bookworm had three other interesting posts that fit in with others I have blogged on recently
1) This one with a link to Jeff Jacoby's column from Dec 19, 2005 called
Obsessive anti-Semitism . Here, he reminds us that it is not just Israel that Iran and other militant Muslims hate... and it is a warning that we need to heed!
2) Another highlighting an article found here written by Thomas Lifson, editor of The American Thinker in his Dec 20, 2005 article called "The Liberal Bubble". This article is excellent!
3) And finally, here, a review of MUNICH, Steven Spielberg's latest movie. I have heard several movie reviewers give thumbs down to the historical accuracy of his movie, in spite of the fact that he is also Jewish.
I had been going to write something about this the other day, when I heard Andrea Peyser speaking about it with vehemence. Her column is what had brought her to the attention of the Fox News program she was on. There, among other things, she said that he should have stopped with Schindler's List.
In another blog, Brad Miner (CompassPointsBlog) has some strong points about the movie also. He ends with:
"Now if this juxtaposition is meant to suggest–and how can it not?–that Israel’s or America’s policies are the causes of 9/11, then Spielberg really has dived deep into the Michael Moore end of the Hollywood pool.
It’s one thing to have sympathy for the Palestinians’ quest for statehood, but quite another to suggest that Munich or 9/11 were consequences of the failure to achieve it. That’s Islamist propaganda.
That Spielberg would buy into such a view isn’t simply sophomoric; it’s sinful."
The main complaint is that none of the survivors were spoken to when the writing took place, according to some reviews that I have heard and read. And today, many of the movie goers are not even aware of what really happened in the Olympic Games of Munich. I remember it well.
Yale Kramer's article has an excellent review, and suggests more reading material in his column (THE HISTORICAL FACTS YOU WILL NOT LEARN ABOUT IN SPIELBERG'S MOVIE THAT MOTIVATED GOLDA MEIR'S POLICY OF AGGRESSIVE DETERRENCE)
Part of what he goes into is important to know:
The details of the botched rescue attempt and shootout were never revealed to the press at the time but can be seen in a superb documentary film, One Day in September, based on many hours of interviews with those who participated in the events of that day (click here). An excellent book with the same title (click here) but much more detail, written in association with the documentary but independently by Simon Reeve, a British journalist, appeared in the same year, 1999. In it he tells the shameful story of the German cover-up and the true Israeli response to the Munich Massacre. Spielberg, take note.
The insults of that day -- the arrogant, cold-blooded, murderous behavior of the terrorists; the disregard and indifference of the politically powerful Olympic Committee; the rigid, bungling, incompetent German police -- all of these fed the outrage of Golda Meir and her ministers in the weeks afterward while they were formulating a rational policy to deal with Arab terrorism. The first principle was to depend on their own Israeli resources to protect their citizens because no one else seemed to care.
If what happened on September 5, 1972, wasn't enough to force the policy of retaliation, what happened less than two months later made it a virtual certainty.
On the morning of Sunday, October 29, a Lufthansa Boeing 727 on its way to Frankfurt from Beirut was hijacked by two Palestinian terrorists who demanded that the three Black September terrorists who survived the Munich shootout were to be released immediately. If not they would blow up the plane.
Without even informing the Israeli government as a courtesy, the Germans capitulated and told the hijackers that the three men would be ready to be picked up within an hour and a half. According to Chancellor Willy Brandt: "The passengers and crew were threatened with annihilation unless we released the three Palestinian survivors of the [Munich] massacre. Like the Bavarian government, I then saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed."
In the course of the making of the documentary film and writing of the book One Day in September, it was revealed that the hijacking had been set up between Black September and the German government. The Palestinians had threatened the government that they would launch a wave of bombings and hijackings against Lufthansa unless the three Munich terrorist survivors were released. The "hijacking," according to sources in Germany, Israel, and Palestine, was a compromise agreed to by senior officials in the German government. "Yes, I think it's probably true," said Ulrich Wegener, who was an eyewitness to the events at the time and who later became founder of the elite GSG-9 West German counterterrorist unit after the Olympics. "The German government thought they could negotiate with the terrorists and could convince them that they would give them money and something else to get rid of them....But of course it was the wrong way, no question, because when one case is solved in this way other cases will come."
He goes on, and I heartily recommend the entire article be read,
The SAD part of this story versus the movie is that there are enough people out there who do NOT know the story (my age included) that will believe Spielberg's version SOLELY because it is about a true historical event!!! I have blogged before about propaganda in the film and other media, and this is an example of it. He goes on, and I heartily recommend the entire article be read here.