Those pondering whether life imitates art or art imitates life would do well to ponder the trajectory of moral decline since the early 2006 release of Steven Spielberg's movie Munich. A scene in that movie depicts a Mossad hit squad, dispatched to avenge the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, running from room to room in a mayhem-filled apartment in Beirut. They're holding photos of suspects next to the faces of men about to be executed for something they may or may not have done. The dimly lit rooms are full of screaming women and children and men dying of gunshot wounds because they resembled someone the Mossad had condemned to death.
What Spielberg decried as immoral, racist, Israeli-style "justice" is now the norm for America, which Spielberg had posited as an alternative to the Israeli approach. Beginning with the Bush administration's turn to torture as the solution to terrorism, Americans, including Jewish Americans like Spielberg, have watched in dismay as the rule of law was replaced by the Jewish reading of the lex talionis. Art found its fulfillment in life when Navy seals broke into a compound in Pakistan and murdered someone they claimed to be Osama bin Laden. We'll never know whether that man was in fact Osama bin Laden because the body was dumped into the sea, "according to Islamic burial customs." Whether Osama bin Laden was guilty of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center is something else we'll never know because he was never put on trial. No one has ever been put on trial for those attacks, and the nagging questions that have persisted over the past decade remain unanswered.
What perdures is the wreck of the rule of law in America and the ongoing Israelification of our military and intelligence agencies, which now function as judge, jury, and executioner in carrying out targeted assassinations by drones and more conventional means. Spielberg is no Hitchcock, and Munich lacks the moral depth of Hitchcock's World War II film Lifeboat, but even Spielberg's conflicted account of the bloody sequelae of the Munich massacres shows that Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Acclaimed cultural critic E. Micheal Jones is the editor of Culture Wars magazine.
What Spielberg decried as immoral, racist, Israeli-style "justice" is now the norm for America, which Spielberg had posited as an alternative to the Israeli approach. Beginning with the Bush administration's turn to torture as the solution to terrorism, Americans, including Jewish Americans like Spielberg, have watched in dismay as the rule of law was replaced by the Jewish reading of the lex talionis. Art found its fulfillment in life when Navy seals broke into a compound in Pakistan and murdered someone they claimed to be Osama bin Laden. We'll never know whether that man was in fact Osama bin Laden because the body was dumped into the sea, "according to Islamic burial customs." Whether Osama bin Laden was guilty of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center is something else we'll never know because he was never put on trial. No one has ever been put on trial for those attacks, and the nagging questions that have persisted over the past decade remain unanswered.
What perdures is the wreck of the rule of law in America and the ongoing Israelification of our military and intelligence agencies, which now function as judge, jury, and executioner in carrying out targeted assassinations by drones and more conventional means. Spielberg is no Hitchcock, and Munich lacks the moral depth of Hitchcock's World War II film Lifeboat, but even Spielberg's conflicted account of the bloody sequelae of the Munich massacres shows that Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Acclaimed cultural critic E. Micheal Jones is the editor of Culture Wars magazine.
