The following appeared in The New Republic online. I thought it was worth sharing as a reminder that not every voice from the Middle East is calling for jihad amd the destruction of the US. This piece by Egyptian playwright Ali Salem is a critical imagining of the terrorist mindset. (May require you to register in order to read it.)
IMAGINING THE INNER WORKINGS OF A TERRORIST'S MIND.
The War of the Hotels
by Ali Salem
In a culture of intellectual quiescence, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem stands out for his courage, his willingness to break with the crowd. Born in 1936, in the time of the monarchy, he made his own way through life, and educated himself in the classics. Some years ago he provoked a storm by openly journeying to Israel and writing about his experience in that country. This led to virtual ostracism by his peers. But he stood his ground, and in the crucial years since September 11 he has written scathingly and satirically of the pathologies of the Arab world--the anti-Americanism, the animus toward modernism, the refusal of the Arab intellectual elites to face the burden of Arab history. Salem is fierce in his denunciation of radical Islamism, and of the evasions and denials that sustain it in mainstream Arab life. What follows is a piece occasioned by the terrorist attacks on the hotels in Amman that took place last November 9. It appeared in Al Hayat, the London-based pan-Arab daily, from which I have translated it.
--Fouad Ajami
TNR also offered a link to the trailer for 'Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World' - well worth a look, as is the accompanying interview with Albert Brooks. The film seems to be a variation on Victor Borge's old adage 'laughter is the shortest distance between two people.'
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
The shadow of the Shoah...
Excellent:
We want to step out of the Shoah shadow, but we run into obstacles
As the Holocaust goes from memory to history, Jews have tried to move forward. But the deniers haul us back again
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday January 25, 2006
The Guardian
[I was reminded also of Isaac Deutscher 'The Non-Jewish Jew' - hat tip, Alexis
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0850362741/026-7447200-1373263
From Wikipedia:
[Deutscher's] definition of his Jewishness was: "Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Deutscher]
We want to step out of the Shoah shadow, but we run into obstacles
As the Holocaust goes from memory to history, Jews have tried to move forward. But the deniers haul us back again
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday January 25, 2006
The Guardian
[I was reminded also of Isaac Deutscher 'The Non-Jewish Jew' - hat tip, Alexis
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0850362741/026-7447200-1373263
From Wikipedia:
[Deutscher's] definition of his Jewishness was: "Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure the real, not spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Deutscher]
Friday, January 20, 2006
The future is not Orange...
Remeber the SDP? Polly Toynbee does, and she argues that New Labour is now to the right of the old Gang of Four. She suggests that the answer for the Lib Dems is to stop facing both ways and mount an attack from the left. (She's no fan of the Orange Book stuff.)
Not sure I agree with her, but here it is:
New Labour is now to the right of the SDP we formed in 1981
The Liberal Democrats could be a force for good if they gave up fantasies of power and occupied the space to Labour's left
Polly Toynbee
Friday January 20, 2006
Not sure I agree with her, but here it is:
New Labour is now to the right of the SDP we formed in 1981
The Liberal Democrats could be a force for good if they gave up fantasies of power and occupied the space to Labour's left
Polly Toynbee
Friday January 20, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
Genocidal Sudan awarded Chair of African Union
Outrage over the dictator poised to lead Africa
Telegraph
16/01/2006
Sudan's military dictator is likely to become chairman of the African Union and the continent's face to the world despite waging war in Darfur, it emerged yesterday. President Omar al-Bashir, who seized power in a coup and harboured Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s, will host a meeting of African leaders in Sudan next Monday. They are due in Khartoum for a summit of the African Union, an alliance of all 53 countries in the continent. They are likely to outrage human rights groups by electing Mr Bashir as their chairman and Africa's most prominent statesman for the next 12 months.
...
Mr Bashir is expected to be elected even though his Arab-dominated regime is conducting a brutal campaign against rebels in Sudan's western region of Darfur, where almost two million people have been forced into squalid refugee camps. ... Some 300,000 people, about five per cent of the population, are believed to have died in Darfur since the onset of war three years ago.
Telegraph
16/01/2006
Sudan's military dictator is likely to become chairman of the African Union and the continent's face to the world despite waging war in Darfur, it emerged yesterday. President Omar al-Bashir, who seized power in a coup and harboured Osama bin Laden for five years in the 1990s, will host a meeting of African leaders in Sudan next Monday. They are due in Khartoum for a summit of the African Union, an alliance of all 53 countries in the continent. They are likely to outrage human rights groups by electing Mr Bashir as their chairman and Africa's most prominent statesman for the next 12 months.
...
Mr Bashir is expected to be elected even though his Arab-dominated regime is conducting a brutal campaign against rebels in Sudan's western region of Darfur, where almost two million people have been forced into squalid refugee camps. ... Some 300,000 people, about five per cent of the population, are believed to have died in Darfur since the onset of war three years ago.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Will Jesus take the stand?
An interesting test of faith... [I've quoted a large chunk but it's really worth reading the whole thing.]
Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest
From Richard Owen in Rome
AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.
The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist.
Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ’s historical existence.
Yesterday Gaetano Mautone, a judge in Viterbo, set a preliminary hearing for the end of this month and ordered Father Righi to appear. The judge had earlier refused to take up the case, but was overruled last month by the Court of Appeal, which agreed that Signor Cascioli had a reasonable case for his accusation that Father Righi was “abusing popular credulity”.
Signor Cascioli’s contention — echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites — is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims.
Btw this article sits nicely alongside other faith related posts which you can find here.
Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest
From Richard Owen in Rome
AN ITALIAN judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed.
The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist.
Signor Cascioli, author of a book called The Fable of Christ, began legal proceedings against Father Righi three years ago after the priest denounced Signor Cascioli in the parish newsletter for questioning Christ’s historical existence.
Yesterday Gaetano Mautone, a judge in Viterbo, set a preliminary hearing for the end of this month and ordered Father Righi to appear. The judge had earlier refused to take up the case, but was overruled last month by the Court of Appeal, which agreed that Signor Cascioli had a reasonable case for his accusation that Father Righi was “abusing popular credulity”.
Signor Cascioli’s contention — echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites — is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims.
Btw this article sits nicely alongside other faith related posts which you can find here.
Phone fun
I'm not sure if this is strictly within the remit of this blog, but it was too much fun not to share:
Predictive, yet unpredictable
James Meek
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian
[...] My 2005 Nokia won't recognise the words "Mozart" or "Beethoven", for instance. But it does recognise "Wagner" and "Strauss". It is familiar with "Nazi" and "communist"; but it hasn't heard of "haddock" or "avocado". It knows Picasso and Gaugin, but seems to be unacquainted with Raphael and Leonardo. Likes Elvis and Dylan; hasn't heard of the Beatles. Seattle, Quebec and Tampere (Finnish city, pop 200,000), yes; Newcastle, Cardiff and Sheffield (English city, pop half a million), no.
If you expect your Nokia to know what you're on about when you message your partner, "That shop in Bolton has the grout we need," it will begin grumpily demanding, "Spell?" If, however, you want to say: "Who's your favourite dictator, Stalin, Hitler, Franco or Napoleon?" the mobile understands exactly what you mean. My phone goes all talk-to-the-hand if I try to message somebody to remember to get the emulsion, and that Sainsbury's has guavas. But write: "Marxist dogma relies too heavily on the dialectical approach," and the Nokia begins, figuratively speaking, to nod in agreement.
On the basis of its vocabulary, in short, my 21st-century Nokia phone, if it were a person, would be a heavily bearded lecturer from the London School of Economics in 1975, smelling strongly of pipe smoke. And I'd be the last person to want that academic out of my mobile. I just wonder whether he might not be joined in there by someone a bit more UK 2006-specific.
Predictive, yet unpredictable
James Meek
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian
[...] My 2005 Nokia won't recognise the words "Mozart" or "Beethoven", for instance. But it does recognise "Wagner" and "Strauss". It is familiar with "Nazi" and "communist"; but it hasn't heard of "haddock" or "avocado". It knows Picasso and Gaugin, but seems to be unacquainted with Raphael and Leonardo. Likes Elvis and Dylan; hasn't heard of the Beatles. Seattle, Quebec and Tampere (Finnish city, pop 200,000), yes; Newcastle, Cardiff and Sheffield (English city, pop half a million), no.
If you expect your Nokia to know what you're on about when you message your partner, "That shop in Bolton has the grout we need," it will begin grumpily demanding, "Spell?" If, however, you want to say: "Who's your favourite dictator, Stalin, Hitler, Franco or Napoleon?" the mobile understands exactly what you mean. My phone goes all talk-to-the-hand if I try to message somebody to remember to get the emulsion, and that Sainsbury's has guavas. But write: "Marxist dogma relies too heavily on the dialectical approach," and the Nokia begins, figuratively speaking, to nod in agreement.
On the basis of its vocabulary, in short, my 21st-century Nokia phone, if it were a person, would be a heavily bearded lecturer from the London School of Economics in 1975, smelling strongly of pipe smoke. And I'd be the last person to want that academic out of my mobile. I just wonder whether he might not be joined in there by someone a bit more UK 2006-specific.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Vote Hamas!
Well, not really, but I thought it would be eye-catching. Anyway, here's an interesting piece about Hamas' latest manifesto.
Hamas drops call for destruction of Israel from manifesto
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Thursday January 12, 2006
The Guardian
Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto for the Palestinian parliamentary election in a fortnight, a move that brings the group closer to the mainstream Palestinian position of building a state within the boundaries of the occupied territories.
The Islamist faction, responsible for a long campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis, still calls for the maintenance of the armed struggle against occupation. But it steps back from Hamas's 1988 charter demanding Israel's eradication and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place.
Hamas drops call for destruction of Israel from manifesto
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Thursday January 12, 2006
The Guardian
Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto for the Palestinian parliamentary election in a fortnight, a move that brings the group closer to the mainstream Palestinian position of building a state within the boundaries of the occupied territories.
The Islamist faction, responsible for a long campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis, still calls for the maintenance of the armed struggle against occupation. But it steps back from Hamas's 1988 charter demanding Israel's eradication and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Saddam's Terror Training Camps
Saddam's Terror Training Camps
Weekly Standard
Jan 2006
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. ...
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. ...
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S.intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator.
It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years. Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent.
Weekly Standard
Jan 2006
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. ...
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. ...
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S.intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator.
It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years. Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent.
Monday, January 09, 2006
You couldn't make this up
I hope this will be an ongoing thread to which all will contribute. The spirit of Littlejohn lives on!
Schools alarmed over orange pips
Telegraph
09/01/2006
Orange pips and plum stones have become the latest concern for health and safety enthusiasts, a report reveals. Some schools, which are giving out free fruit to their pupils under a health initiative funded by the Scottish Executive, believe that fruits with pips are dangerous and so are avoiding them. "We tend not to use stone fruits because of the safety issues. Orange pips fall into that category," a respondent to the study said.
CENSORS have banned young children from buying the new series of Doctor Who on video or DVD on the grounds of “excessive cruelty” towards a Dalek.
Children have been banned from collecting chickens' eggs at the National Trust's showpiece farm because it is now deemed by health and safety advisers as too hazardous
I particularly appreciated the contribution from the gentleman who discovered, after his daughter grazed her knee in the playground, that even cotton wool is considered too dangerous to be held in the school office, lest it be left behind in the wound.
Schools alarmed over orange pips
Telegraph
09/01/2006
Orange pips and plum stones have become the latest concern for health and safety enthusiasts, a report reveals. Some schools, which are giving out free fruit to their pupils under a health initiative funded by the Scottish Executive, believe that fruits with pips are dangerous and so are avoiding them. "We tend not to use stone fruits because of the safety issues. Orange pips fall into that category," a respondent to the study said.
CENSORS have banned young children from buying the new series of Doctor Who on video or DVD on the grounds of “excessive cruelty” towards a Dalek.
Children have been banned from collecting chickens' eggs at the National Trust's showpiece farm because it is now deemed by health and safety advisers as too hazardous
I particularly appreciated the contribution from the gentleman who discovered, after his daughter grazed her knee in the playground, that even cotton wool is considered too dangerous to be held in the school office, lest it be left behind in the wound.
Long live the British Sergeant Major
Priceless.
Stand by your ironing boards
By John Keegan
Telegraph
09/01/2006
Accompanied by his father the Prince of Wales, Prince William, 23, was spared the traditional chore of carrying in his ironing board as he arrived at Sandhurst yesterday to begin his training as an Army officer. When I first knew Sandhurst, at the end of the Fifties, an ironing board was not one of a new cadet's necessities. Now it is.
The Army thinks that ironing improves an officer's character as well as appearance, just as polishing boots does. It is laborious and time-consuming work and incompetence provides a drill sergeant with many opportunities for criticism.
No doubt Prince William's colour sergeant has been rehearsing the line: "Mr Wales, Sir, idle trousers." Perhaps something wittier will emerge to pass into Sandhurst folklore, along with the unforgettable reproof: "Mr King of Jordan, Sir, you are an idle little monarch".
Stand by your ironing boards
By John Keegan
Telegraph
09/01/2006
Accompanied by his father the Prince of Wales, Prince William, 23, was spared the traditional chore of carrying in his ironing board as he arrived at Sandhurst yesterday to begin his training as an Army officer. When I first knew Sandhurst, at the end of the Fifties, an ironing board was not one of a new cadet's necessities. Now it is.
The Army thinks that ironing improves an officer's character as well as appearance, just as polishing boots does. It is laborious and time-consuming work and incompetence provides a drill sergeant with many opportunities for criticism.
No doubt Prince William's colour sergeant has been rehearsing the line: "Mr Wales, Sir, idle trousers." Perhaps something wittier will emerge to pass into Sandhurst folklore, along with the unforgettable reproof: "Mr King of Jordan, Sir, you are an idle little monarch".
Thursday, January 05, 2006
And the winner is...
Another good reason to register with TNR online - this article does just what it says on the tin:
TNR ONLINE'S DESPOT OF THE YEAR AWARD
TNR ONLINE'S DESPOT OF THE YEAR AWARD
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Munich
Pasted below is a pretty critical review of Spielberg's film about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre - Munich. Haven't seen the film yet so can't say whether it's an unfair review or not but there's some interesting stuff here.
The New Republic Online
TWO PROBLEMS WITH MUNICH.
Twin Pique
by Richard Just
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.24.05
Last week I attended a screening of Munich in Washington. The evening included testimonials to the film's cinematic power from former Clinton officials Mike McCurry and Dennis Ross, both serving as consultants to the movie's rollout, plus more praise from Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter and Foreign Policy Editor-In-Chief Moisés Naím. Slaughter commended the film--a fictionalized account of Israel's attempts to track down and assassinate the terrorists who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre--for showing how, in responding to violence with violence, liberal societies "can lose the very values that we're fighting for." She also lauded the movie's main character, an Israeli assassin who is conflicted about the morality of his mission, for realizing that "we have to do this not as a war, but within the legal system." (Following these thoughts, the audience broke into spontaneous applause.) Naím called the movie "wonderful" and said it left him "speechless."
Part of me wondered if we had all watched the same film. For one thing, as Leon Wieseltier pointed out two weeks ago in TNR, Munich is a "tedious" movie, "soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness." But two additional aspects of the film struck me as problematic. First, events of recent history have rendered Spielberg's central argument questionable at best, empirically false at worse. And second, the film's last scene contains a particularly ugly suggestion about the relationship between Israel and September 11. Who knows whether Spielberg intended this suggestion. But it is there; and audiences will see it whether he intended it or not.
The evening's most awkward balancing act belonged to Dennis Ross whose attempt to fulfill his duties as a Munich promoter while also maintaining his political sanity more or less led him to claim that the film's message was something other than the film's message. Ross began by saying that the movie's perspective on counterterrorism was "that you have to respond--it's understandable that you respond--but when you respond, you're actually confronted with real dilemmas." Then he said, "And the choices are hard, and sometimes you pick the best of the bad alternatives." This sounded like a grudging endorsement of targeted assassinations. Perhaps misunderstanding Ross or perhaps seeking to steer his fellow panelist back to safer ideological turf, Naím, the group's moderator, said, "Yes, and in fact Steven Spielberg says that a response to a response is not, does not solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine of hatred and revenge." At this point the game was up; Ross had been unmasked. (There would be no spontaneous applause for these comments.) He responded, "I think that is certainly a perspective that he brings to bear." Well, yes: It's the entire point of the movie; and Spielberg has said as much (in the director's own words, "a response to a response doesn't really solve anything"). Ross then went on to explain that he supported targeted assassinations but that the movie's message was that "you really have to craft your response with care." "I think it provokes a discussion about targeted killing, and not whether it's wrong or right, but maybe you ought to talk about it; maybe you ought to think about it," Ross said. So the message of this ambitious two-and-half-hour movie is that we should "think" about targeted assassination. But why "think" about a policy option that "doesn't really solve anything"?
Ross's contortions get to the heart of a major problem with Munich's argument. He is right that the movie entertains the debate about targeted killings largely on practical, rather than moral, grounds. The movie may hint that such assassinations are immoral, but it seeks to prove that they are ineffective. Unlike Ross, Spielberg believes that violent reprisals simply don't work. The problem is that the last three years of Israeli history have shown Spielberg to be wrong. According to The Jerusalem Post, the number of Israelis killed by terrorists has fallen steadily in recent years, from 453 in 2002 to 52 in 2005. It is true that targeted assassinations have been only one component of Israel's anti-terror activities; the construction of a security fence around the West Bank was probably the most important step. And it is also true that plenty of other developments--the death of Arafat, the pullout from Gaza, the reinvigoration of the Israeli center--have brought us to the current hopeful moment in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Still, it seems likely that targeted assassinations played a constructive role in weakening and demoralizing terrorist organizations. At the very least, Sharon has disproven the conventional wisdom that fighting terror with military measures only perpetuates the cycle of violence.
Because its thesis willfully fails to take account of recent Israeli history, Munich feels like a movie that was conceived four or five years ago and frozen in time. And in fact, it was. Speaking at last week's panel, the film's co-producer, Kathleen Kennedy, explained that "we began this process around the year 2000" but "tabled the project for about 8 or 9 months" after September 11. (She also said something revealing about the movie's origins. When they first considered the idea, "Steven and I ... were acutely aware of what had happened at the Olympics in 1972, but we had no idea about this story that unfolded after that." They had never heard of Israel's reprisals? These were not exactly a secret. Fortunately, they turned to an expert, Tony Kushner: "And Tony, some of you may know, has been steeped in the area of politics in the Middle East and really deeply understood the complexity of what it was we were embarking on, in terms of the politics of the story we were trying to tell.") If Munich had been made in 2000, it would still have been troubling to those of us who believe, like Dennis Ross, that killing terrorists is morally defensible. But one would have had to at least entertain the film's practical argument about the cycle of violence. Now, circumstances have changed--because while Spielberg was making a movie he calls a "prayer for peace," Ariel Sharon was doing some very unpeaceable things that have, finally and thankfully, made peace possible.
A dim argument about counterterrorism aside, the thing that bothered me most about Munich--and that has received little attention in the early round of reviews and commentary--was the film's final scene. The movie concludes in New York, and after the dialogue ends the camera pans away from the actors and towards the Manhattan skyline, where it comes to rest on a shot of the Twin Towers. There are many reasons why Spielberg might have chosen to end the film this way. The most obvious is to draw a connection between his movie and our politics: to say, in other words, that the questions raised by his film are not just historical but also contemporary. Fair enough. The other obvious reason to use the Twin Towers was as a cheap emotional prop: to ensure that viewers leave the theater with a lump in their throats that the movie hasn't really earned. This isn't an admirable moviemaking device. But given how common it has become to exploit September 11 in our culture and politics--not to mention how common it is for bad films to beg viewers for unearned emotion--it is hard to work up indignation on this count. Besides, Martin Scorcese ended Gangs of New York exactly the same way. So Spielberg's cheap emotional trick isn't even an original one.
No, the reason this final shot disturbed me was not because of the way Spielberg likely intended it but because of the way many viewers will likely see it: as a statement that Israel is somehow responsible for September 11 and therefore responsible for America's current geopolitical predicament. I do not mean "responsible for September 11" in the sense meant by the conspiracy theorists who maintain that the Mossad orchestrated the attacks or that Jews were warned to stay home from work the day of the strikes. Of course, there are plenty of people who believe such things, particularly in the Middle East, and perhaps they will see Munich and find their views implicitly reaffirmed in the movie's last frame; but Spielberg cannot be held responsible for the wild interpretations of conspiracy theorists. What he can be held responsible for is an interpretation of the last scene that he may not have intended but that he should have foreseen: One can view the last shot as drawing a loose but linear link between decades of Israeli counterterrorism and September 11. This false yet potent link already exists in the minds of some Americans and many Europeans. It is reasonable to fear that after millions see Munich, the link will exist in the minds of many more.
Consider the movie's ending in light of its larger argument that, from the 1970s on, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism have been locked in a violent cycle doomed to endlessly spiral forward into the future. What does a final shot of the Twin Towers mean in this context? Audiences could be forgiven for assuming Spielberg's point is that the cycle of violence Munich identifies spiraled forward and eventually hit American shores on September 11. In other words, if Israelis hadn't run around Europe assassinating Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, the World Trade Center would still be standing today.
Needless to say, this is an inaccurate reading of history. It is also unfair to Israel: In a year that has seen liberal American churches denounce the Jewish State, a mass-market movie that seems in its final moments to hold Israel responsible for September 11, and that will be adored by liberal audiences (it has already been praised by liberal reviewers), will not do Israel any favors with American public opinion. The whole implication is also destructive to American politics. The idea that America's current situation on the world stage is primarily the result of our accidental involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence corrodes any chance of honest debate about our foreign policy.
Spielberg may be breaking new ground by drawing an implicit link between Israel's post-Munich operations and September 11; but he is hardly the first to intimate that on September 11 and since, America somehow became enmeshed in a fundamentally Israeli matter. "[T]his is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days," wrote Robert Fisk in The Nation weeks after September 11. "It is also about U.S. missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia--paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally--hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." In the Los Angeles Times, Alexander Cockburn wrote, "I doubt the suicide bombers went to their deaths in the cause of forcing women to stay home and only go shopping when clad in blue tents or of having men never trim their beards. More likely they were moved to action by Bin Laden's main political themes as expressed on at least one tape in which he denounces Israel's occupation of Palestine and U.S. complicity with that occupation." What began in the days after September 11 would continue as America's response to September 11 widened to include the Iraq war: Elements of the left would seem to take special joy in trying to entangle Israel in these discussions. In 2002, I covered anti-Israel rallies that turned into antiwar rallies. Or were they antiwar rallies that turned into anti-Israel rallies? It was sometimes hard to tell. Even the respectable left played its part. Hence the oft-made point that one way to neutralize Al Qaeda would be to impose Israeli-Palestinian peace, as if September 11 was an act of protest against Barak's failure to cede enough territory at Camp David. This is exactly what the last scene in Munich more or less implies: that if only Israel had negotiated more and retaliated less, Muslim terrorism as we know it would have been stillborn years before the towers fell. Spielberg may not have intended this message. But it is the message many viewers will understand. Perhaps Dennis Ross can explain to these viewers why they are wrong.
Richard Just is editor of TNR Online.
The New Republic Online
TWO PROBLEMS WITH MUNICH.
Twin Pique
by Richard Just
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.24.05
Last week I attended a screening of Munich in Washington. The evening included testimonials to the film's cinematic power from former Clinton officials Mike McCurry and Dennis Ross, both serving as consultants to the movie's rollout, plus more praise from Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter and Foreign Policy Editor-In-Chief Moisés Naím. Slaughter commended the film--a fictionalized account of Israel's attempts to track down and assassinate the terrorists who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre--for showing how, in responding to violence with violence, liberal societies "can lose the very values that we're fighting for." She also lauded the movie's main character, an Israeli assassin who is conflicted about the morality of his mission, for realizing that "we have to do this not as a war, but within the legal system." (Following these thoughts, the audience broke into spontaneous applause.) Naím called the movie "wonderful" and said it left him "speechless."
Part of me wondered if we had all watched the same film. For one thing, as Leon Wieseltier pointed out two weeks ago in TNR, Munich is a "tedious" movie, "soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness." But two additional aspects of the film struck me as problematic. First, events of recent history have rendered Spielberg's central argument questionable at best, empirically false at worse. And second, the film's last scene contains a particularly ugly suggestion about the relationship between Israel and September 11. Who knows whether Spielberg intended this suggestion. But it is there; and audiences will see it whether he intended it or not.
The evening's most awkward balancing act belonged to Dennis Ross whose attempt to fulfill his duties as a Munich promoter while also maintaining his political sanity more or less led him to claim that the film's message was something other than the film's message. Ross began by saying that the movie's perspective on counterterrorism was "that you have to respond--it's understandable that you respond--but when you respond, you're actually confronted with real dilemmas." Then he said, "And the choices are hard, and sometimes you pick the best of the bad alternatives." This sounded like a grudging endorsement of targeted assassinations. Perhaps misunderstanding Ross or perhaps seeking to steer his fellow panelist back to safer ideological turf, Naím, the group's moderator, said, "Yes, and in fact Steven Spielberg says that a response to a response is not, does not solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine of hatred and revenge." At this point the game was up; Ross had been unmasked. (There would be no spontaneous applause for these comments.) He responded, "I think that is certainly a perspective that he brings to bear." Well, yes: It's the entire point of the movie; and Spielberg has said as much (in the director's own words, "a response to a response doesn't really solve anything"). Ross then went on to explain that he supported targeted assassinations but that the movie's message was that "you really have to craft your response with care." "I think it provokes a discussion about targeted killing, and not whether it's wrong or right, but maybe you ought to talk about it; maybe you ought to think about it," Ross said. So the message of this ambitious two-and-half-hour movie is that we should "think" about targeted assassination. But why "think" about a policy option that "doesn't really solve anything"?
Ross's contortions get to the heart of a major problem with Munich's argument. He is right that the movie entertains the debate about targeted killings largely on practical, rather than moral, grounds. The movie may hint that such assassinations are immoral, but it seeks to prove that they are ineffective. Unlike Ross, Spielberg believes that violent reprisals simply don't work. The problem is that the last three years of Israeli history have shown Spielberg to be wrong. According to The Jerusalem Post, the number of Israelis killed by terrorists has fallen steadily in recent years, from 453 in 2002 to 52 in 2005. It is true that targeted assassinations have been only one component of Israel's anti-terror activities; the construction of a security fence around the West Bank was probably the most important step. And it is also true that plenty of other developments--the death of Arafat, the pullout from Gaza, the reinvigoration of the Israeli center--have brought us to the current hopeful moment in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Still, it seems likely that targeted assassinations played a constructive role in weakening and demoralizing terrorist organizations. At the very least, Sharon has disproven the conventional wisdom that fighting terror with military measures only perpetuates the cycle of violence.
Because its thesis willfully fails to take account of recent Israeli history, Munich feels like a movie that was conceived four or five years ago and frozen in time. And in fact, it was. Speaking at last week's panel, the film's co-producer, Kathleen Kennedy, explained that "we began this process around the year 2000" but "tabled the project for about 8 or 9 months" after September 11. (She also said something revealing about the movie's origins. When they first considered the idea, "Steven and I ... were acutely aware of what had happened at the Olympics in 1972, but we had no idea about this story that unfolded after that." They had never heard of Israel's reprisals? These were not exactly a secret. Fortunately, they turned to an expert, Tony Kushner: "And Tony, some of you may know, has been steeped in the area of politics in the Middle East and really deeply understood the complexity of what it was we were embarking on, in terms of the politics of the story we were trying to tell.") If Munich had been made in 2000, it would still have been troubling to those of us who believe, like Dennis Ross, that killing terrorists is morally defensible. But one would have had to at least entertain the film's practical argument about the cycle of violence. Now, circumstances have changed--because while Spielberg was making a movie he calls a "prayer for peace," Ariel Sharon was doing some very unpeaceable things that have, finally and thankfully, made peace possible.
A dim argument about counterterrorism aside, the thing that bothered me most about Munich--and that has received little attention in the early round of reviews and commentary--was the film's final scene. The movie concludes in New York, and after the dialogue ends the camera pans away from the actors and towards the Manhattan skyline, where it comes to rest on a shot of the Twin Towers. There are many reasons why Spielberg might have chosen to end the film this way. The most obvious is to draw a connection between his movie and our politics: to say, in other words, that the questions raised by his film are not just historical but also contemporary. Fair enough. The other obvious reason to use the Twin Towers was as a cheap emotional prop: to ensure that viewers leave the theater with a lump in their throats that the movie hasn't really earned. This isn't an admirable moviemaking device. But given how common it has become to exploit September 11 in our culture and politics--not to mention how common it is for bad films to beg viewers for unearned emotion--it is hard to work up indignation on this count. Besides, Martin Scorcese ended Gangs of New York exactly the same way. So Spielberg's cheap emotional trick isn't even an original one.
No, the reason this final shot disturbed me was not because of the way Spielberg likely intended it but because of the way many viewers will likely see it: as a statement that Israel is somehow responsible for September 11 and therefore responsible for America's current geopolitical predicament. I do not mean "responsible for September 11" in the sense meant by the conspiracy theorists who maintain that the Mossad orchestrated the attacks or that Jews were warned to stay home from work the day of the strikes. Of course, there are plenty of people who believe such things, particularly in the Middle East, and perhaps they will see Munich and find their views implicitly reaffirmed in the movie's last frame; but Spielberg cannot be held responsible for the wild interpretations of conspiracy theorists. What he can be held responsible for is an interpretation of the last scene that he may not have intended but that he should have foreseen: One can view the last shot as drawing a loose but linear link between decades of Israeli counterterrorism and September 11. This false yet potent link already exists in the minds of some Americans and many Europeans. It is reasonable to fear that after millions see Munich, the link will exist in the minds of many more.
Consider the movie's ending in light of its larger argument that, from the 1970s on, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism have been locked in a violent cycle doomed to endlessly spiral forward into the future. What does a final shot of the Twin Towers mean in this context? Audiences could be forgiven for assuming Spielberg's point is that the cycle of violence Munich identifies spiraled forward and eventually hit American shores on September 11. In other words, if Israelis hadn't run around Europe assassinating Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, the World Trade Center would still be standing today.
Needless to say, this is an inaccurate reading of history. It is also unfair to Israel: In a year that has seen liberal American churches denounce the Jewish State, a mass-market movie that seems in its final moments to hold Israel responsible for September 11, and that will be adored by liberal audiences (it has already been praised by liberal reviewers), will not do Israel any favors with American public opinion. The whole implication is also destructive to American politics. The idea that America's current situation on the world stage is primarily the result of our accidental involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence corrodes any chance of honest debate about our foreign policy.
Spielberg may be breaking new ground by drawing an implicit link between Israel's post-Munich operations and September 11; but he is hardly the first to intimate that on September 11 and since, America somehow became enmeshed in a fundamentally Israeli matter. "[T]his is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days," wrote Robert Fisk in The Nation weeks after September 11. "It is also about U.S. missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia--paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally--hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." In the Los Angeles Times, Alexander Cockburn wrote, "I doubt the suicide bombers went to their deaths in the cause of forcing women to stay home and only go shopping when clad in blue tents or of having men never trim their beards. More likely they were moved to action by Bin Laden's main political themes as expressed on at least one tape in which he denounces Israel's occupation of Palestine and U.S. complicity with that occupation." What began in the days after September 11 would continue as America's response to September 11 widened to include the Iraq war: Elements of the left would seem to take special joy in trying to entangle Israel in these discussions. In 2002, I covered anti-Israel rallies that turned into antiwar rallies. Or were they antiwar rallies that turned into anti-Israel rallies? It was sometimes hard to tell. Even the respectable left played its part. Hence the oft-made point that one way to neutralize Al Qaeda would be to impose Israeli-Palestinian peace, as if September 11 was an act of protest against Barak's failure to cede enough territory at Camp David. This is exactly what the last scene in Munich more or less implies: that if only Israel had negotiated more and retaliated less, Muslim terrorism as we know it would have been stillborn years before the towers fell. Spielberg may not have intended this message. But it is the message many viewers will understand. Perhaps Dennis Ross can explain to these viewers why they are wrong.
Richard Just is editor of TNR Online.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)