Steven Spielberg is one of America’s greatest filmmakers.

He wasn’t always.

Allow me to recap his career. This context-setting is important.

Steven Spielberg’s earliest commercial successes as a director — Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, the Indiana Jones series, and Jurassic Park — were great entertainments and great commercial successes, but there was no intellectual weight to them.

The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun started showing his serious ambitions but he didn’t quite pull it off. The Color Purple was a commercial success, while Empire of the Sun bombed, but neither film won him any Oscars and both received mixed critical acclaim.

As a producer Spielberg added to his reputation for having as good a commercial sense as any impresario in history with popcorn blockbusters such as Poltergeist, the Back to the Future series, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

It wasn’t until Schindler’s List that Spielberg showed he had fully matured as a filmmaker, winning the Triple Crown of movie-making — box office, critical acclaim, and Oscars for Best Picture and Best Directing. He pulled off the same triple crown five years later with Saving Private Ryan, a film that, if not as unreservedly distinguished as Schindler’s List, gave us the most horrifically realistic film portrayal of the D-Day landing as could be re-created on film.

After missing the target entirely with AI: Artificial Intelligence — a syrupy but nihilistic mess that convinced me that he was the Anti-Disney — Spielberg redeemed himself in my eyes by directing three excellent, mature, and thoughtful films in a row – Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, and The Terminal.

Then in 2005, Steven Spielberg combined the emotional gravity of Schindler’s List with everything his career had taught him about science-fiction and action movie-making to film the definitive version of H.G. Wells’ pre-World-Wars novel of worldwide war — War of the Worlds.

Which brings us to the second Steven Spielberg-directed film released in 2005, Munich.

Like earlier of his films such as Schindler’s List, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg has chosen a real historical event as the subject of Munich; in this case, the murderous attack on the Israeli athletic team at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian terrorist group, Black September.

A less ambitious filmmaker — one without the surefootedness demonstrated by Spielberg’s last four films – might have been content to spend his 164 minutes of running time merely documenting the terrorist attacks, with the same moment-to-moment grit he’d brought to Saving Private Ryan.

And let’s be honest. Until Munich, Steven Spielberg’s movie-making career has run away, screaming in terror, from fomenting any major controversy.

Nobody was going to identify with the man-eating shark of Jaws, or feel sorry for the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

No critic or Academy-Academy Award voter was going to walk out of Schindler’s List thinking, “You know, I don’t think the Nazis hated the Jews anywhere near as much as Spielberg shows.”

Nobody concludes from Catch Me If You Can that check-fraud is a promising career choice, and only Earth First! would sign onto the alien agenda to exterminate the human species portrayed in The War of the Worlds.

Steven Spielberg finally makes the grade as a filmmaker of lasting significance merely by his willingness to express a point of view that wins him no new friends but gives critics across the spectrum a new chance to skewer him.

Take Michael Medved’s USA Today review of Munich, as a good example. Medved correctly notes that Spielberg has not made a one-sided film which unreservedly damns the Palestinians for targeting civilians while unreservedly praising the Mossad operation that hunted down and killed the Black September murderers. Medved criticizes Spielberg for including dialogue by the Israeli assassins questioning whether their systematic killing of Palestinian terrorists might be provoking terrorist responses.

Spielberg doesn’t shy away from controversial thoughts in Munich, but neither does he take cheap shots.

Throughout Munich, a luminescent moral distinction is made between the Palestinians’ willingness to target innocent civilians and the Israelis extreme attempts to avoid collateral damage against the innocent.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg refuses to make his villains cardboard cut outs. Every character in Munich — Israeli, Palestinian, mercenary — is fleshed out. Violence — whether against Israelis or by Israelis — is shown in nauseating and heart-wrenching detail.

The only appearance of Americans in Munich is the implication that CIA operatives pretend to be the drunken American bar-brawlers who stymie the Mossad assassination of a Palestinian terrorist responsible for the Munich murders because this Palestinian terrorist sells the CIA valuable intelligence. It’s the sort of point about the complexity of intelligence gathering that John le Carre would have made.

As well — simply as genre film-making — Munich is a noir, Cold-War-era spy thriller, with the sole departure being that the primary players are Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, rather than Americans and Russians.

But Spielberg’s “equivocation” between Palestinians who kill innocent Israeli athletes, and Israelis who respond by hunting down and killing the Palestinians who hunt and kill them — that critics such as Michael Medved see in Munich — highlights a crucial question that concerned the Israelis in 1972 and is now a question facing Americans post-9/11: is the War on Terror really a war?

Steven Spielberg does not, in Munich, advocate for the cause of a Palestinian homeland. A discussion between the Mossad agent in charge of killing the Olympic murderers, and his terrorist target, clearly expresses the orthodox Israeli view that Israeli Jews have no other turf on which they can establish a homeland, but that the Palestinian Arabs do.

I have written in a previous article titled “Unholy Lands” that I regard the United States of America as a far more suitable and secure homeland for the Jewish people than Israel could ever be; and I think history strongly suggests that the rest of the Islamic world only cares about the Palestinian Muslims to the extent that the Palestinians can be pawns in the Muslim agenda to push the Jews into the sea.

But if there is any equivocation in Munich, it’s simply this: Palestinians are portrayed as Israel’s enemy.

In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg shows the SS extermination of Jews in the Krakow ghetto. Nazis are portrayed as regarding Jews as vermin, with no more qualms about exterminating Jews than the Orkin Man has while exterminating termites.

What Spielberg didn’t portray in Schindler’s List was the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews armed themselves and held out against the SS so long that the SS commanders started referring to the Jews not as vermin, but as “the enemy.”

I have often said that if I am going to be killed by anti-Semites merely for having been born Jewish, I will make it my dying work to make my killers regard me not as vermin but as the enemy.

Since 9/11, I have been a supporter of the War on Terror — including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I have been willing to set aside my view of Israel as a Utopian experiment which is historically destabilizing to the security of my own homeland because since America was attacked on 9/11 Israel has been an indispensable strategic ally of the United States in the struggle against those Jihadis who sneak-attacked the chief financial and military defense headquarters of my country on September 11, 2001, murdering over three thousand of my countrymen.

But I have also written that if we’re to say, as President George W. Bush does, that we’re in a War on Terror, that this means we have an enemy. Our adversaries — whether we call them soldiers, or terrorists, or enemy combatants — are nonetheless the enemy irrespective of whether that enemy wears a uniform, or operates as cut-outs outside of a direct chain of command and control (such as special intelligence units employed by our own government and our allies), or even whether our enemy engages in the targeting of civilians in an attempt to sap our will to fight, as did the United States when it bombed the German city of Dresden in World War II.

One of the most moral statements that President George W. Bush ever made was that the advanced technology that the United States had developed for waging war made it far more possible to target the enemy with fewer civilian casualties. It is laudable — even morally imperative — that a nation with the ability to direct its power in surgical strikes against armed combatants does so.

But it would be unhistorical and hypocritical nonsense to argue that modern warfare by the United States and its allies — or retaliatory strikes by the State of Israel against Palestinian camps where terrorists blend into civilian populations — has been free from slaughtering civilians … or even that non-combatant British loyalists were not targeted by the American revolutionaries in our own War for Independence.

What distinguishes the United States of America from any other revolutionary movement in human history is that the goal of our revolution was not a homeland for an ethnic or religious tribe, but freedom for the individual. The American Revolution is America’s greatest export, and it would be as relevant a struggle in another solar system — as portrayed in the wonderful recent movie Serenity — as it was on the continent of North America two centuries ago.

Contrariwise, the modern Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine is fundamentally no different in its tribalism than the IRA movement for Ireland to be free from British rule. Neither do I accept the Jewish claim that God played real-estate broker to the Jews, nor the Muslim claim that they’re entitled to the entire planet because God later told that to Muhammad and Muhammad was the last dude that God was ever going to talk to. I’ll take personal exception to this last point because God has been chatting me up for years.

Unbelievably to me, Michael Medved slams Steven Spielberg as having incorporated anti-Semitic elements in Munich. He criticizes Munich for its lead character, an Israeli Sabra’s, decision to leave his career as a Mossad assassin and move his wife and baby to New York. I don’t know about Michael Medved, but as an American I find this the most patriotic moment of the movie.

Medved also levels charges of anti-Semitism against Spielberg for the film’s portrait of the Israeli government’s thrifty cost-accounting of its counter-terrorism operation. Not only does Medved miss the point that this cost-accounting is to highlight that Israel is a small country without the resources a superpower such as the United States would have for such an operation, he also seems to forget that Steven Spielberg is the same Jew who made Schindler’s List. I find this sort of moral amnesia the worst sort of ingratitude and context dropping.

Worse, Medved reminds me of left-wing blacks such as Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory who apparently believe Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice lost the melanin in their skin the day they rejected a Marxist worldview. The proper response to both Harry Belafonte’s party-line test for being black, and Michael Medved’s party-line test for being a good Jew, is a stream of profanity.

Michael Medved is wrong to attack Steven Spielberg for slicing through the contradiction that we can be engaged in a War on Terror but that those who attack us don’t rise to the dignity of being our enemy.

I don’t like it when self-righteous bastards regard me as vermin, and I’m not going to make the same mistake with my enemies.

By embracing controversy for the first time in his career, Steven Spielberg has finally come of age as a filmmaker. Munich is Steven Spielberg’s finest achievement on film to date — a masterpiece surpassing his previous artistic successes by bringing a darker, more realistic sensibility to his films than ever before.

Michael Medved now has to decide whether he’s a partisan first or a lover of movies, first, because Steven Spielberg’s only crime is a willingness to embrace a full context.
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J. Neil Schulman’s third novel, Escape from Heaven, was largely written in the weeks following 9/11, and he’s written a screen adaptation currently in development by his own company, Jesulu Productions. His latest nonfiction book is I Met God, just released as an audio book and being marketed to book publishers for print publication. Jesulu Productions is currently developing two additional motion pictures, and in Fall, 2006 Schulman will be producing a fourth, Lady Magdalene’s, an action comedy based on a new screenplay he’s currently completing.