Munich- some reflections
I went to Pleasure Island yesterday and saw the movie "Munich". It is a story dealing with the murder of the 1972 Israeli Olympic weightlifting team by the Palestinian terrorist group called the Black September,and how Israel dispatched a secret undercover assassin team to find and kill each of the terrorists. It was well acted and directed, and technically brilliant. I was a junior at Jacksonville University in 1972 when the Olympic massacre took place and seeing the actual newsreels of Jim Mckay announcing the death of all the rest of the Israeli weightlifting team at the airport brought flashbacks when I saw him on television deliver that announcement surrounded by several of my jewish friends at school.
As always,Steven Spielberg, who directed and produced this movie produced a first rate movie experience. I was overall however, disappointed by a few major things. It was overly bloody and gory. Now I expected a violent picture but the scenes of blood and gore were overdone and unnecessay. I also was disappointed and surprised that Spielberg would include a frontal nude scene of the woman operative who the mausad assassinated and left frontally naked in her blood. The movie would have received an R rating just for the violence, but the gore and the nudity were unnecessay to the movie.
My final disappointment was in Spielberg's message that he was conveying in the film of moral equivalence between the Israeli assassins and the Palestinian Black September Group. Though Jewish, Spielberg does have great sympathy for the Palestinian cause for a homeland. Ignoring the history of the region, he attempts to nuance the conflict to communicate to the audience that there is moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians. Even though Israel is fighting for survival in a country surrounded by millions of Arabs, they are wrong to retaliate for the murder of innocent victims. This seems to be the message he is conveying in the movie. While the audience is repulsed by the Palestinian terrorism, we are to be sympathetic to their passion for a homeland. All this despite the fact that the Palestinians were never a nation in the middle east while Israel has a 3000 year history in that region. The 1948 UN partition plan gave Palestine a homeland which they refused and declared war on Israel the next day with several other middle east Arab nations. Israel occupies less than 1% of the land in the middle east but the PLO charter is to destroy Israel and murder all the Jews. As a Christian, I have supported the Israel cause politically,economically,culturally and scripturally. I don't endorse everything Israel does. They are not spiritually redeemed and they will cause moral atrocities that I abhor as well. Even a Christian nation can do this. They should be called to account for this as well. But to say the Palestinians are morally equal and even superior in their cause and methods is to ignore moral distinctions which is why Spielberg is a postmodern man. That is, he believes there are no moral absolutes except the absolute that all morals are relative. RATING B+
As always,Steven Spielberg, who directed and produced this movie produced a first rate movie experience. I was overall however, disappointed by a few major things. It was overly bloody and gory. Now I expected a violent picture but the scenes of blood and gore were overdone and unnecessay. I also was disappointed and surprised that Spielberg would include a frontal nude scene of the woman operative who the mausad assassinated and left frontally naked in her blood. The movie would have received an R rating just for the violence, but the gore and the nudity were unnecessay to the movie.
My final disappointment was in Spielberg's message that he was conveying in the film of moral equivalence between the Israeli assassins and the Palestinian Black September Group. Though Jewish, Spielberg does have great sympathy for the Palestinian cause for a homeland. Ignoring the history of the region, he attempts to nuance the conflict to communicate to the audience that there is moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians. Even though Israel is fighting for survival in a country surrounded by millions of Arabs, they are wrong to retaliate for the murder of innocent victims. This seems to be the message he is conveying in the movie. While the audience is repulsed by the Palestinian terrorism, we are to be sympathetic to their passion for a homeland. All this despite the fact that the Palestinians were never a nation in the middle east while Israel has a 3000 year history in that region. The 1948 UN partition plan gave Palestine a homeland which they refused and declared war on Israel the next day with several other middle east Arab nations. Israel occupies less than 1% of the land in the middle east but the PLO charter is to destroy Israel and murder all the Jews. As a Christian, I have supported the Israel cause politically,economically,culturally and scripturally. I don't endorse everything Israel does. They are not spiritually redeemed and they will cause moral atrocities that I abhor as well. Even a Christian nation can do this. They should be called to account for this as well. But to say the Palestinians are morally equal and even superior in their cause and methods is to ignore moral distinctions which is why Spielberg is a postmodern man. That is, he believes there are no moral absolutes except the absolute that all morals are relative. RATING B+
posted by blepein | 6:57 AM
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