Prediction Confirmed: Abbas' Role Deleted from Spielberg's 'Munich'

My September 6 prediction has been proven correct: New Spielberg Movie on Munich Olympics Massacre: Abbas' Role Likely Deleted

There is a news story today that the mastermind of the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, Abu Daoud, is complaining that he was not contacted in the making of the new Spielberg movie on the topic. This means that Abu Daoud's revelations that the financier of the attack was none other than PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas will likely be whitewashed. This charge was confirmed by multiple sources within the Palestinian Authority according to the Israel Law Center.

Apparently Spielberg has been boasting that this movie has the potential to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. His breakthrough solution? Get the principals to understand they are engaged in a "cycle of violence." A scathing critique of the tired formula led by the movie's moral equivalence of the PLO attackers and the Israeli defenders was written by Leon Wiesentier:

A few days before I read in Time that Steven Spielberg's new movie is so significant that there would be no advance screenings of it, I went to an advance screening of it. The fakery is everywhere, isn't it, though in this instance it nicely captures the self-importance of this pseudo-controversial film. The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays. For this reason, perhaps, they have devised a movie that wishes to be shocking and inoffensive at the same time. It tells the story of the Israeli retaliation for the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972--specifically, of the nasty adventures of a team of five Israelis that is dispatched to Europe to destroy eleven Palestinians....It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience. Palestinians suppress their scruples, Israelis suppress their scruples. Palestinians make little speeches about home and blood and soil, Israelis make little speeches about home and blood and soil. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents. All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.... The screenplay is substantially the work of Tony Kushner, whose hand is easily recognizable in the crudely schematic quality of the drama, and also in something more. The film has no place in its heart for Israel. I do not mean that it wishes Israel ill; not at all. But it cannot imagine any reason for Israel beyond the harshness of the world to the Jews....Zionism, in this film, is just anti-anti-Semitism.... There are two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse. One of the Israeli killers recalls a midrash about God's compassion for the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, and keeps on killing. Another one of the Israeli killers protests that "Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong...We're supposed to be righteous," and keeps on killing. All this is consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was "not the right answer," and that the creation of Israel was "a mistake," and that "establishing a state means f***ing people over".... Yet the film proclaims that terrorists and counterterrorists are alike. "When we learn to act like them, we will defeat them!"

Update (Dec. 12): There are now many people making the same argument.

Tel Chai Nation has an excellent distillation of the issue.