Spielberg’s new film “Munich” has stirred a tremendous amount of controversy since its release several weeks ago. Today, in the special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we host a debate on the movie and its meaning.

To present the case that Munich is simply just a fictional film that doesn’t warrant the condemnations it has received from critics, we are joined by:

Phyllis Chesler, author of the recently published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com.

Carl F. Horowitz, (no relation to David Horowitz) director of the Organized Labor Accountability Project of the National Legal and Policy Center, based in Falls Church, VA. He has a Ph.D. in urban planning and public policy from Rutgers University.  

and

Ariel Chesler, a matrimonial attorney in Manhattan.

To present the counter-argument that “Munich” is a terrible movie that lies about history, we are joined by:

Debbie Schlussel, a Conservative political commentator, radio talk show host, columnist, and attorney. Her website is DebbieSchlussel.com.

Arnold Steinberg, a political strategist who has written graduate texts on politics and media. His expertise includes message and public opinion.  Early in his career, he worked for U.S. Sen. James L. Buckley (NY), where he began his involvement in national security.

and

Andrea Levin is executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

FP:  Phyllis Chesler, Carl Horowitz, Ariel Chesler, Debbia Schlussel, Andrea Levin and Arnold Steinberg, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Dr. Chesler, let me begin with you. Allow me to start with some of my own thoughts to stimulate this discussion.

You have come out defending the Spielberg movie to a certain degree, saying that it is “just a film” and that is does a level of justice, on several realms, to the true historical event.

A film that is dedicated to depicting a historical event, I am afraid, is not “just a film.” It has a certain degree of responsibility to historical truth.

This is a fictional movie about a true historical event, the 1972 massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich, that presents history wrong. Aside from the facts that it distorts facts, which we will discuss in this symposium, it engages in a sickening moral equivalency, applying a notion of “the cycle of violence” to a situation in which the Holocaust is simply literally being replayed. In other words, the cause of Israel’s thirst to survive and the Palestinian terrorists’ yearning to extinguish Jews is portrayed to be on a relative moral playing field. Both sides are portrayed as equal in their objectives. The lives of the innocent victims of terror are morally equated with the terrorists’ lives. This is an intellectual and moral crime.

Dr. Chesler, let’s say I made a movie about Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald, and then I depicted the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Suppose I made equivalent the struggle of the Jewish rebels with the objectives of the Nazis carrying out the Final Solution. Let’s say I humanized the Nazis and painted a picture in which they were just as human and justified as their victims and I implied throughout the whole movie that the “cycle of violence” that emerged in the Warsaw Uprising was unproductive.

When people would come forward to criticize me, would you come to defend me and say: “This is just a film”?

Phyllis Chesler: Obviously, I do not agree with Spielberg's critics. Had the film offended me as much as it has offended its critics, I would have subjected it to the same rules of evidence that Eichman's trial in Jerusalem required.  But I am not defending the film you are attacking because I saw a very different film. Notebook in hand, I went prepared to be sickened. That is not what happened. While the film is not a great film, it is, dramatically, a very absorbing film and in my view, a balanced one as well. While the film fictionally humanizes two Palestinian terrorists it humanizes the Israelis even more; and, although it portrays Israeli unofficial agents targeting terrorists for assassination it also depicts the Munich massacre itself for the entire length of the film.

There is nothing pretty about Spielberg's depiction of that massacre, nor do the Palestinian killers at Munich make any speeches about "injustice" or about justified motive.  Only much later do we hear one rather unsympathetic Palestinian terrorist describe his plans to get rid of the Jewish state both demographically, by over-populating, and through a reign of terror that might last for one hundred years. I did not find him or his speech sympathetic nor did I believe his longing for a "home" he has probably never himself seen.

As to your movie about Auschwitz: Spielberg, in my opinion, has himself already made a film about the Holocaust that was morally defective--far more so than his film about Munich is. "Schindlers List," also based on a real historical occurrence and pegged to a book, focused on the exception, not the rule; he would have us forget the six million Jews who were murdered as we focused on the handful who, courtesy of one compassionate Christian, were saved and for whom they worked as slave laborers. 

At the time, Spielberg was greatly honored for this film. Few attacked him. What's different now? The time in which we now live (post the intifada of 2000, post 9/11, post 3/11, post 7/7, etc.) has us all on considerable edge. We view each film, each book, each conference, every conversation, as a matter of life and death. I myself have taken the monitoring of culture very seriously. We are at war, jihad has been declared, the Jewish state has borne the brunt of Islamic hatred of the West and our most cherished values--but fighting one film is probably not as important as fighting the Palestinianization of the western campus and media, etc.

Of course, you might argue that fighting such a high profile film is an expedient way to symbolically challenge such Palestinianization and you may be right. And, I do think your analogy to the Holocaust film you might make is certainly chilling: I am not sure you are right. However, no one film can present the tragedy and complexity of the Middle East in 2 1/2 hours. Thousands of volumes will not do it either. 

Here's an interesting scenario to ponder. My friend, Bill Hoffman, the playwright and opera librettist, has suggested that Spielberg hired Kushner, who is well known for his politically correct anti-Zionist views, precisely in order to co-op him and his supporters into supporting (or at least not criticizing) a film that would otherwise be far too pro-Israel for them.

FP: I don’t know what it means to “fictionally” humanize terrorists. Humanizing terrorists is humanizing terrorists. And it is a grotesque, violent, inhuman, damaging and shameless thing to do.

Yes, “no one film can present the tragedy and complexity of the Middle East in 2 1/2 hours.” But it helps when you don’t apply moral relativism between Nazis and their victims.

I saw this film and I can tell it does this in many instances.

In any case, Ms. Schlussel?

Schlussel: Is Ms. Chesler for real?  This is a "balanced" film?  Huh?  Either she was on her cellphone during the film or her critical thinking skills need some polish. 

First off, it was not "balanced" at all, but if it were, is that a good thing--to "balance" Islamic terrorists who are in the wrong and those who seek to eliminate them and the problem to peace and tranquility that they represent?  Is it "balanced" to show Arab terrorists reading the "Arabian Nights" in Italian and going to upscale gourmet bakeries (all while being kind to the help) and not showing these terrorists in action planning a massacre of innocent human beings?  Hello! 

Is it "balanced" to show them as doting fathers with cute, piano-playing little girls, but not showing the cute, little girls who lost their fathers to those terrorists?  Is it "balanced" to show terrorists as nice guys offering cigarettes and sleeping pills to their hotel neighbors, but not the murders they planned? 

This is a bit strange coming from someone who claims to be pro-Israel--or even just anti-terror--to say the things she's saying. I suppose that if the KKK makes a movie--or say, Leni Reifenstahl's Hitler propaganda--that Ms. Chesler will say, "Well, it's JUST a movie."  Clearly, she is out of touch with today's America, which believes what it sees on a screen.  Oops, I forgot, she thinks there's nothing wrong with the fraud that is "Munich," that it's "balanced." 

And then, there's the part where she says it's "dramatically very absorbing."  Sorry, but it was not that at all.  It was very boring, tedious, and way too long at almost 3 hours.  Brevity is the soul of wit.  But "Munich" is neither brief nor witty.  And it is also soul-less.  Chesler cites the fact that the murders of the athletes are portrayed in the film.  Yet, she doesn't mention that the scenes are interspersed during a sex scene, in between orgasms.  She doesn't have a problem with that? 

I don't have any playwright or opera librettist friends, and maybe that's the problem.  I'm far too Middle America too see what isn't there, as Ms. Chesler does.  I see what IS there, and it is a disgusting sympathy towards Islamic terrorists who would destroy us.  Ms. Chesler just doesn't get it.  Even Spielberg, himself, told TIME and USA Today, that he wants the world to see "Munich" (and his remake of "War of the Worlds") through a post-9/11 prism and to look at America's War on Terror through the film. 

Ms. Chesler doesn't want us to see Spielberg's obvious propaganda the way that even Spielberg says it is meant to be viewed.  And a rotten egg is a rotten egg, no matter how much Ms. Chesler wants to pretend it is a tasty omelette.

FP: Carl Horowitz?

Carl Horowitz: You can tell a lot about a man by the enemies he makes.  And Steven Spielberg, I am happy to report, has made an enemy out of Mohammed Daoud, mastermind of the 1972 murders of those Israeli Olympic athletes.  Mr. Daoud is positively outraged.  “If he (Spielberg) really wanted to make the movie a prayer for peace, he should have listened to both sides of the story and reflected reality, rather than serving the Zionist side alone,” he told Reuters in a phone interview from Damascus, adding that he hadn’t seen the film.  He added:  “When I chose a long time ago to be a revolutionary fighter, I prepared to be a martyr.  I am not afraid, because people’s souls are in God’s hands, not Israel’s.”  And he threw in this little gem:  “We did not target Israeli civilians.  Some of the athletes had taken part in wars and killed many Palestinians.  Whether a pianist or an athlete, any Israeli is a soldier.”

Got that?  Spielberg should have shown the suffering of both sides, not just that of the Israelis.  And he should have depicted the “crimes” of Israel against the Palestinians.

In a bizarre way, Daoud’s noxious, factually-challenged rant performs a useful function.  For it indicates that Spielberg would have had to have gone a lot further to appease his Arab critics – that is, to make a film that truly was morally equivalent.  It’s easy to see why Daoud would be offended.  “Munich” showed the terrorists for what they were:  cold-blooded killers unencumbered by the slightest twinge of doubt or remorse.  The movie showed, by contrast, the Israeli hit team scrupulously concerned with avoiding collateral damage, particularly children.  It conveyed the Israeli government concerned with the defense of its people, and in the context of a West German government too gutless, and possibly anti-Semitic, to give the terrorists their just deserts.

Now I realize that displeasing a Palestinian terrorist does not in and of itself amount to sound political judgment.  But Steven Spielberg has to be understood as a distinct type:  a pro-Israeli liberal, not a pro-Israeli conservative.  While I am of the latter number, that doesn’t mean that the liberal view is either naive or treasonous.  Unfortunately, that is the view taken by a number of the movie’s critics, including (most recently) syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields.  Israel, as anyone who has spent time there knows, has plenty of liberals.  They are not appeasers of terrorists.  And as well as anyone, they grasp a fundamental demographic reality.

Yasser Arafat often remarked that his ultimate bomb was the womb of the Palestinian woman.  That belief was made palpable in “Munich” by a terrorist in a crucial dialogue exchange midway through the movie.  The sad thing is that no matter how many of those bastards you kill off, there always will be more to kill – and more and more and more.  A fanatic bent on propagating children, and plenty of them, for the main purpose of serving as warriors against an enemy of his own imagination typically will get his wish.

The real path to peace, much as it is difficult to resist the temptation to crave righteous vengeance, lies in weakening the culture of radical orthodoxy, that nexus of religious extremism, hatred of cosmopolitanism, humorlessness, high fertility rates, and a hysterical inability to reason or even allow others to reason.  For it is here where terrorism takes root.  Spielberg’s message at times may be muddled – and I do not believe “Munich” to be flawless – but it is always honest and at the very least plausible.  That’s something that can never be said of the message of Mr. Daoud or his fellow enablers of murderers.                 

FP: Munich was honest? A film which propagates moral equivalence should stand insulated from the charge of moral equivalence because a terrorist who hasn’t seen it has made a diatribe against its producer?

Please.

Is the “honesty” to be found in the fact that nowhere in the script can one find even one quote, one speech, mouthed by a terrorist depicting how much the Palestinians/Arabs hate Jews in the context of how this hatred stems from a pathology rather than from a victimization?

Is the honesty to be found in the Mossad agents arguing with each other about how their attempt to kill the terrorists reignites a cycle of violence (moral equivalency if you didn't catch it)?

Is honesty to be found in Spielberg having an Israeli agent saying: "I only care about Jewish blood”? This is how Spielberg chooses to symbolize a nation that has agonized more than any other in history about the urgency of sparing human blood on both sides in the face of fanatic suicidal attempts at its own extermination. Spielberg allows the implication that this disposition represents a nation that, for instance, could have just bombed the hell out of Jenin in 2002 for a revenge against an atrocious suicide bombing in Netanya, but that instead did a house to house job and lost 23 of its own men so that Palestinian civilians could be saved. And this symbolized Israel’s effort to preserve itself throughout its history. And to put words like this into an Israeli's mouth in a movie, to suggest that this is some kind of general disposition of Israel in how it has faced the effort to annihilate it, it is absolutely shameful and shameless.