RUTH KING

“I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine. There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”

Who said this? Dennis Ross or Martin Indyk or Yossi Beilin or Shimon Peres? No, they actually might have said something like this but without supporting Israel’s right to respond strongly when attacked.

Steven Spielberg said this to Time magazine when discussing his movie “Munich.” In fact, Spielberg has assiduously avoided lending his support to ads, organizations, divestment moves calculated to weaken Israel. “Schindler’s List” brought Holocaust awareness to millions who knew precious little, if anything at all, about the Holocaust. More important, under his aegis, thousands of survivors gave recorded testimony which serves as permanent refutation of the Holocaust deniers such as Mahmoud Abbas and Iran’s president.

Nonetheless, Spielberg is a chump, hustled by two con men, George Jonas and Yuval Aviv, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad. The latter’s fiction and conspiracy theories were rejected by the families of the victims of Pan Am 103, and Aviv went on to work for Pan Am’s representatives against the parents’ claims. Much more can and will be written about this duo in a forthcoming issue.

Spielberg is also a dolt for collaborating with Tony Kushner, a leftist on record as saying “I wish that modern Israel had not been born." Jonas and Aviv were perfect for Kushner because their anti Israel and anti Mossad “faction” fit in nicely with his existing bias.

I have no intention of touting an objectionable movie or defending its producer, but one has to ponder who is responsible for creating a climate in which a movie can attempt to demonstrate moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims.

In fact, is there a more glaring example of moral equivalency than the Oslo accords which elevated the mastermind of the Munich massacres to the status of statesman? This arch terrorist and murderer of thousands of innocent civilians in Israel and throughout the world became a most favored guest in the White House, was lionized by legislators, the State Department, given a Nobel Peace Prize and legitimated by none other than the Prime Minister of Israel with the fawning approval of assorted academics, writers and commentators in Israel and America.

Yes, everyone rightly laments the martyred Israeli athletes in Munich, but only two decades later, and virtually within weeks of elevating Arafat to a “partner for peace” the Palestinian Arabs embarked on a terror spree killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. The victims were called “casualties of peace” by none other than Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin. When Jewish residents of Gaza, or Judea and Samaria were killed…..well, you see…..they were “settlers” and occupiers….really should not have been there. Obstacles to peace you know.

If that is not moral equivalence what is?

Spielberg pompously calls his movie “a prayer for peace” and goes on to state: “ Because the biggest enemy in the region is intransigence.” Hmm. Where have we heard that drivel before?

From Peace Now and the New Jewish Agenda and countless spineless Jewish members of the media and the academic elite.

In fact, Spielberg goes on to quote Amos Oz: “…..the worst conflicts are those that break out between people who are persecuted.” That explains it. Both sides are persecuted. Oz is one of Israel’s “respected” writers.

In an interview with the Times of London, Kushner declared: “I deplore the brutal and illegal tactics of the Israel Defense Forces in the occupied territories. I deplore the occupation, the forced evacuations, the settlements, the refugee camps, the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people.” Kushner sounds just like the Israeli professor Ilan Pappe or dozens of American Jewish academics or the ladies of Jewish Women for Justice in Palestine.

Spielberg is going with the flow. As I write, Abe Foxman, the director of the ADL, has just announced that he thinks the movie is perfectly dandy.

Too bad that Speilberg’s enablers did not get rolling credits at the end of the movie, but maybe he’ll thank them when he accepts his second Oscar for a movie dealing with Jewish issues.

EDWARD ALEXANDER

Ruth King, to whom we are all indebted for her astute watchfulness, appears to think that although Spielberg's "Munich" film is indeed awful, its awfulness is mitigated by the fact that he shares with other liberal Jews the inability to recognize the full evil of the world and that he has promoted "Holocaust awareness."

But not even the roster of villains she compiles includes anyone who endorsed, as Spielberg does in his image of the burning Twin Towers at the film's end, the current orthodoxy of progressive antisemites, i.e., that Israeli "intransigence" caused 9/11.

As for Spielberg's achievement in demonstrating that, yes, Jews really were murdered by the Nazis, one needs to ask why it is that "teaching Holocaust awareness" has proceeded in lockstep for decades with the intensification of Israel-hatred.

Europeans, after all, are full of this "Remember Auschwitz" business; and they use it precisely to lull Jews into a sense of false security while they paint Palestinian Arabs as "the victims of victims" and depict Israel as the center of the world's evil.

"Teaching the Holocaust" does not help Israel unless you understand--as Spielberg is not mentally equipped to do--what Shmuel Katz has always reiterated: namely, that Israel was founded in spite of the Holocaust, not because of it, and that it was the Jews themselves, not conscience-stricken western nations, that broke down the gates of Palestine.

As Cynthia Ozick said on TV some years ago to an Israel-hater who had just published a book deploring his church's persecution of the Jews centuries ago: "Weeping over Jews long dead means absolutely nothing if you fail to come to the defense of the living ones in Israel."

Edward Alexander is the co-author (with Paul Bogdanor) of the forthcoming The Jewish Divide Over Israel (Transaction Publishers).