America…F*ck Yeah!

I have posted my own thoughts previously on being torn about seeing Munich (which I still have not seen) and here, Charles Krauthammer posts his own thoughts after his viewing:

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Once you’ve done that — evoked the killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would today be not much older than Spielberg himself — you have an obligation to get the story right and not to use the victims as props for any political agenda, let alone for the political agenda of those who killed them.

…

Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. “Munich,” the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. No longer is it crude, grainy TV propaganda. “Munich” now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists’ intended message to every theater in the world.

I have read well over 50 articles discussing this movie, and this pretty much ends it for me. I will not see this movie, at least not in the theaters. My concern has always been whether I would be able to overlook the distortion of history and politics in this movie to be able to enjoy it as if it were just a bit of thriller fiction.

I just can’t.

This isn’t playing loose and fast with things that happened so long ago that they don’t matter, like William Wallace impregnating the Princess of Wales in Braveheart. Many of those involved in this horrific event are still alive and they, much less the dead, deserve to have their stories told straight and not used as a prop for Speilberg to show us all how we can solve all the world’s problems if we just listen to him.