Will Spielberg’s 9/11 Documentary Take Up Where Israel-Bashing “Munich” Left Off?

Avner hunted Black September operatives involved in the 1972 slaughter of eleven Israeli Olympians. He began his mission as a believer, convinced that he was securing his people and bringing their enemies to justice.

Now, Avner is confused, conflicted. For every Terrorist secretly killed, Islamic retaliation eliminated an embassy, a team, a close friend. He lives in fear of being hunted, realizing that this fear, as a new shadow, will cleave to him until death.

Avner stands in an empty New York City field. His Mossad handler requests that the young man return to Israel, a metaphor, of course, for calling him back to his original disposition towards hunting the killers of innocent Jewish people. Avner’s conscience cries out, “What have I accomplished? For every man I have killed, another has taken his place. Where will it end?”

“I cut off my fingernails,” retorts the callous elder, “even though they will grow back.” The agent departs, refusing to break bread with the exile. The audience watches the “abandoned Jew” a moment longer, long enough to ask, “Who is right?” Should cold-blooded murderers be hunted and destroyed before they can kill again, or is this the road to endless bloodshed and mutual hatred?

Steven Spielberg, who wove this story of the Israeli pursuit of Black September for his 2005 film, Munich, will force his answer on the audience. The Director had addressed the audience in an unusual, taped “Personal Message” rolled before the feature played in theaters. Spielberg presented himself as the mature, impartial poser of a question. “My movie is not intended to be a statement about the actions of Israel. I merely ask if countries intend the consequences of policies they feel compelled to adopt.”

For all his apparent impartial objectivity, Spielberg pronounces a fatal sentence against Israel in the final seconds of his film. His camera abandons the remorseful, haunted Jewish executioner in his empty field and pans the New York skyline until it rests on…of course, our Towers, the next escalation in the war Israel started by having the stone-age reaction of self-preservation.

“Violence” begets only violence, anguish, personal and social destruction.” It is trite. It is contrived. It is cruel. Spielberg offers no solution, only a moment of silly Hollywood propaganda.

Munich was irresponsible and transparent. It fueled the anti-War left and afforded viewers an opportunity to revel in their own moral superiority. Why, only the enlightened elite can witness, in a plush seat with Dolby sound, the butchery of Israeli youth and remain true to the cause of real pacifism!

On January 15, Spielberg announced his intention to produce a documentary for the Discovery Chanel on the reconstruction of the new World Trade Center Towers, including a special commemoration of those who were killed there in 2001.

While the new Tower rises, Spielberg will be reconstructing our national understanding of what actually occurred on September 11.

We can be certain the Islamic Terrorists will be but a negligible chorus. The stars will be President Bush, stumbling about in all his culpable splendor. We will descend into Machiavellian puppetry with a leering Cheney and watch Madam the National Security Advisor against a backdrop of spider-webs.

From the comfort of the cutting room and the clear skies of Los Angeles, Mr. Spielberg will sanitize the inhuman vaporizing of three thousand friends and family members and, in keeping with the final message of Munich, make sure we leave convinced that we deserved the attacks because of the part America plays in the endless cycle of terror.

NewsReal Blog

Founder and Board Member of HRW Blast HRW's Anti-Israel Bias

Maybe it was the fact the latest revelation that the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, Joe Stork, had praised the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that finally forced some introspection at the organization, but two members of the Human Rights Watch board have now broken ranks with their own organization to criticize the obvious bias in its handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Allison Hoffman buries the lede in her article for Tablet, but it doesn't matter -- she's got the goods:

At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”...

“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” Read more here ...

Source: The Weekly Standard
H/T WeaselZippers

The jihadist monster has turned on itself

March 05

Pakistan must fight the enemy within following the latest terror attack, warns Ramesh Thakur

WHEN terrorists struck Mumbai on November 26 last year, the English cricket team was touring India.

It went back home but returned just a little later to complete a curtailed tour in a show of determination to deny terrorists the satisfaction of victory. But the Indian Government cancelled the planned Indian cricket tour of Pakistan for January this year.

Pakistan successfully appealed to Sri Lanka to replace India. The Sri Lankan team was rewarded on Tuesday by being attacked in a surreal replay of Mumbai by a group of about a dozen well-trained, disciplined, heavily armed young men executing an audacious, carefully planned mission with commando-style precision and toughness. Six policemen and two civilians are dead, including the bus driver whose heroics prevented the entire Sri Lankan team from being massacred.

The implications are many and far-reaching. Some can yet be positive.

This may be the first time since the Munich Olympics in 1972 that sportspeople have been targeted directly by terrorists.

Pakistanis believed that because of the game's passionate popularity, terrorists would not risk a public backlash by attacking cricketers. In fact they have attacked the team that came to show solidarity when arch-enemy India withdrew. This is the end of innocence for the most genteel of games.

Second, it should disabuse innocent foreigners of the notion that the terrorists infesting Pakistan have Kashmir as their agenda.

Mumbai last year already proved that the terrorist leaders mean what they say when they lump together Hindus, Christians and Jews as common enemies of Islam. Indeed, a Los Angeles Times story suggested that a primary aim of the Mumbai attacks was to disrupt the growing relationship between India and Israel.

Third, it should help to convince the Pakistani establishment that the jihadist monster it has spawned is now its own biggest security threat.

An irritant for India is proving to be fatal for Pakistan, destroying it from within. To the anguish of many, the Government recently surrendered control of the lovely Swat Valley, a mere 160km from Islamabad, to Islamists whose agenda had been roundly repudiated by voters in recent elections. As the extremists regroup in the notorious Afghanistan-Pakistan border badlands and strike with growing daring and impunity on both sides, a gathering war-weariness in NATO is encouraging negotiations with "good" Taliban as a means of containing "bad" al-Qa'ida. This could prove a dangerous self-delusion.

Fourth, it should drive home to all South Asian leaders the folly of believing that their neighbour's terrorist is their own freedom fighter. Indira Gandhi played that game domestically with the Sikhs and her son Rajiv played it with Sri Lanka: both paid with their lives, felled by the bullets and bombs of the monsters they had created.

Related to this, fifth, the region's governments must co-operate in their intelligence, law enforcement and political remedies to the common scourge of terrorism. Its infrastructure of madrassas, recruitment centres, financial networks and training camps must be uprooted across South Asia. India can be the solution to Pakistan's nightmare of militancy, but not until such time as New Delhi is convinced of Islamabad's good faith, which to date has been conspicuously lacking.

The Pakistan Government has been in denial, obfuscation and diversion mode with regard to the Pakistani origins of the Mumbai attacks and possible complicity of Inter-Services Intelligence agents, rogue or not.

Conversely, it is disheartening to read that India's home and foreign ministers were quick to say "I told you so" instead of letting the rebuke lie implicit while offering unconditional solace, sympathy and support to a nation in shock. A little neighbourly magnanimity can go a long way in times of national peril. The Indian team, playing in New Zealand, wore black armbands in sympathy when news of Lahore came through.

Building on anti-terrorism co-operation, South Asians also could look to foster common institutions such as regional human rights commissions (they should avoid Canadian-type Frankensteins that mock the rights they should protect), press councils, a common peacekeeping doctrine for UN deployment, joint tourism promotion, combined protection from abuse of nationals working as labourers and domestic help in the Middle East.

With greater cross-border flow of goods, services and people, even the Kashmir dividing line could be made irrelevant in practice without confronting the thorny issue of sovereignty. Special envoys of former president Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reportedly had worked out such a deal after several rounds of secret discussions. Courage deserted one or both, Musharraf is out of power and now Singh faces elections in April-May. However, the deal could be resurrected after May.

Ramesh Thakur is founding director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Ontario and adjunct professor at Griffith University, Queensland.

Source: The Australian