A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
Steve Spielberg, Hollywood Jews and Jewish Heroes

After a five day visit to Israel, New York Giants running back Tiki Barber is heading back to the United States today. Barber went to Israel after Shimon Peres invited him following a chance encounter in a Manhattan restaurant. He told reporters: "I'm under no illusion that this trip is gonna bring peace, but it's gonna bring understanding at least to me, and I can give that back to someone else in the States."

In contrast to Tiki Barber, it is rare for a Jewish celebrity to visit Israel. Indeed, last week, Josh Malina of The West Wing, on a visit to Israel, asked, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, "Hollywood is filled with big Jewish stars, so why don't they speak out about the State of Israel?"

Also in contrast to Barber, the few Jewish celebrities who come to Israel do tend to be under an illusion that their visit will bring peace. Last year, when Seinfeld's Jason Alexander visited Israel, he came with a self-described "grass roots" peace initiative calling for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders that, he proclaimed, would succeed in ending the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This brings me to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is currently making a film about Israel's targeted killings of Palestinian terrorists involved in the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

The film will not be released until December, but early reports are very disturbing. According to a Reuters article, Daniel Craig, an actor in the film, said that the screenplay is a less-than-flattering portrayal of Israeli tactics. "It's about how vengeance doesn't work -- blood breeds blood," Craig is quoted as saying.

The Reuters report notes that five retired Mossad agents, all of whom served in key intelligence posts during the hunt for the terrorists responsible for the murder of the Israeli athletes, all stated that they were never contacted in any way about the film.

But according to the New York Times, the failure to actually speak with the relevant Mossad members does not stop the Spielberg film from portraying those very people as "struggling to understand how their targets were chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what, if anything, their killing would accomplish." In a statement to the Times, Spielberg confirmed that the film will focus on the Mossad agents' purported "troubling doubts about what they were doing."

As Michael Oren - author of the superb Six Days of War - noted: "I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about what they were doing. It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews."

Indeed, it seems that every film that relates to Palestinian terrorism must include Jewish angst about defending itself against terrorists. Take, for example, Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair, which purported to chronicle the hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists and the murder by those terrorists of Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish New Yorker who was shot in the head, his wheelchair-bound body thrown overboard. In the film, prior to her husband's murder but after the hijacking, Marilyn Klinghoffer, Leon's wife, expresses sympathy and even understanding for the PLO's terror against civilians. The obvious point of this fictional portrayal is that the Klinghoffers are especially sympathetic because they are Jews who also have "troubling doubts" about whether they or the terrorists who murder them are morally right.

Similarly, in Victory at Entebbe - the worst of three films about the heroic IDF rescue on the night of July 3, 1976 (exactly 29 years ago tonight) of 103 hostages of an Air France flight hijacked by the PLO, Richard Dreyfuss played Yoni Netanyahu (brother of Binyamin Netanyahu), the mission commander who died during the raid. Netanyahu was also portrayed as having sympathy for Palestinian terrorists and for the Palestinian cause, and having "troubling doubts" about what he was fighting for, all this surely to make it sadder when Yoni loses his life. Never mind that the Netanyahu family has always been devoted to the fight against international terror, or that in one of the letters published in Self Portrait Of A Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu, the real Yoni Netanyahu wrote, just after the 1973 Yom Kippur War:

"I see with sorrow and great anger how a part of the people still clings to hopes of reaching a peaceful settlement with the Arabs. Common sense tells them, too, that the Arabs haven't abandoned their basic aim of destroying the State; but the self-delusion and self-deception that have always plagued the Jews are at work again. It's our great misfortune. They want to believe, so they believe. They want not to see, so they shut their eyes. They want not to learn from thousands of years of history, so they distort it. They want to bring about a sacrifice, and they do indeed. It would be comic, if it wasn't so tragic. What a saddening and irritating lot this Jewish people is!"

Ultimately, the "troubling doubts" in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film are his own and those of his fellow Hollywood Jews who care much less about Israel than about their own reputation in the ultra-left entertainment industry. Especially absurd is that Spielberg's discomfort about Israeli anti-terror tactics apply to its response to the Munich massacre, given that, while Israel killed 10 PLO terrorists, there was very minimal collateral damage; the only innocent who died was a Moroccan man mistakenly thought to be one of the terrorists. Indeed, in the annals of military responses to terrorism, Israel's targeting of the perpetrators of Munich and Entebbe are among the most successful in having eliminated the terrorists without causing civilian collateral damage.

In sharp contrast to his film about Munich, Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, about World War II, appropriately includes no "troubling doubts" by the heroic American soldiers about the morality of their cause. While Saving Private Ryan hardly glorifies war - it shows all of war's brutality and the suffering of those who fought in it - the movie never questions the necessity of the war against Nazism.

Only when the subject is specifically a Jewish one does Spielberg have a need to express his "troubling doubts" and much worse, project those doubts onto his film's characters.

Following Schindler's List, Spielberg was often described as a Jewish hero. But Spielberg is apparently yet another Jew who is comfortable only with the Jew as a victim, as someone filled his angst and "troubling doubts" about a Jew defending himself against his murderer.

Steven Spielberg, who never bothered to express support for Israel during the Palestinian terror war, is not a Jewish hero, and today, 29 years after the heroic rescue at Entebbe, is a very good day to understand that. Our true heroes are Yoni Netanyahu, the Mossad agents who without any fanfare anonymously protect Israel, and all of the IDF soldiers who without "troubling doubts" risk, and all too often sacrifice, their lives for the sake of their people and their country.
posted on 7/03/2005