Saving Spielberg

The only likely battle in which Steven Spielberg's death will be required will be the fight over his will.

STEVEN Spielberg last month made a heroic offer he's in no danger of ever having to make good.

Stung by the criticism that his new film Munich is a sell-out to terrorists, the world's most famous Jewish director declared: "If it became necessary, I would be prepared to die for the USA and for Israel."

If necessary. I doubt Spielberg can even imagine how his scratching from the credits might be required. The only likely battle in which his death is required will be the fight over his will.

But how nobly his words must echo in the halls of his California mansion, where the mighty mogul is protected by bodyguards and sleeps so far from any front line that he'd need to refuel his private jet, the martially named , to actually reach it.

Mind you, Spielberg may yet surprise me by abruptly joining the armies of either the US or Israel, which are manned by folk who really do face death from killers trying to destroy their countries, along with the rest of the West and its sinful Hollywood culture.

Still, I doubt it. This is the director whose most famous war film is about American soldiers saving one of their privates from the risk of fighting on D-day.

And now he's given us Munich, in which he purports to show what happened when Israel sent a team of agents to kill, one by one, the Palestinian terrorists behind the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

W HAT Spielberg was answering in his "die if required" reply to Der Speigel last month was in fact a question he was never asked – and which he'll never need answer, at least by deeds.

Truth is, there's never actually been a shortage of Jews or Americans required to die for Israel or the US, or for simply being citizens of the West. Plenty are blown up or shot each year.

What the West needs is not citizens prepared to die for their countries but, if need be, to kill for them. And here is where the great director feels queasy and asks to be excused while he quickly makes his next movie, Saving Private Spielberg.

No need for that, actually. Spielberg has already made his excuses with Munich.

The most sinister thing about this hyped film, with its noisy soundtrack of the wringing of well-manicured hands, is not that it attacks Israel – although it does.

Nor is it that in telling how Israel hunted down the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the Munich slaughter and other attacks on Jewish civilians Spielberg presents fiction as facts – although he does that, too.

No, the true shame of Munich is that he spent nearly $100 million to make a seductively deceitful film that warns we are evil if we fight back against the terrorists trying to kill us.

In fact, killing even in self-defence makes us worse than the Palestinian terrorists who tie up Jewish sportsmen and then machinegun them.

To make his argument work, he perpetrates several frauds in this film, which – please note – opens with the title: Inspired by real events.

First, he gives the Palestinian terrorists a makeover so complete not even Yasser Arafat would have known them. Look! No bloodstains even. Every one of the men he shows being hunted down and killed is portrayed as a poet, lover of literature, warm father, helper of strangers, or noble patriot.

There isn't one terrorist in the film that Spielberg doesn't seem to want us to like. Certainly, not one of those assassinated is ever shown doing terrorist-type things themselves, like blowing up planes, executing gymnasts or snarling infidel.

Just to be sure of our sympathies, Spielberg at the end of Munich shows the purported head of the five-man Israeli assassination team, Avner Kauffman (played superbly by Australian Eric Bana), admitting in despair that he has no evidence his victims were ever guilty of anything. A final shot of the Twin Towers of New York, since destroyed by Osama bin Laden, tells you to think of Iraq.

In his next deceit, Spielberg shows the Israeli assassins falling apart under the horror of having killed. They may think they are saving their country, but they are destroying themselves.

So Avner is left half-mad with guilt. His bomb maker cries "We're supposed to be righteous" and blows himself up in despair. Two others are killed in revenge attacks – fulfilling the bomb maker's prophecy that "all the blood comes back to us".

And Avner declares in the end that shooting back at terrorists achieves nothing: "Every man we killed was replaced by someone worse."

That bad, huh? Of course, if Spielberg's film was sold as pure fiction he'd be perfectly entitled to argue that killing terrorists was so terrible that you'd get attacks of the ETs.

But he's sold this instead as a tale of the real terror of Munich and Israel's revenge – as a film, he says, that dares "ask questions about America's war on terror and about Israel's responses to Palestinian attacks".

The odd thing is that while Spielberg may like to ask questions, he seems deaf to the answers of those who were actually there.

Munich is based, as the credits confirm, on Vengeance, a book on Munich by the Canadian writer George Jonas, who wrote it with the help of Yuval Aviv, allegedly the real Avner. Aviv later charmed Spielberg himself.

Israeli journalists and officials of Mossad, Israel's spy service, say in fact the closest Aviv ever got to being a secret agent was working as a security guard, checking passengers on El Al flights, but Spielberg insists that "everything he says is true".

So what does this truthful "Avner" actually think about killing terrorists? Says Jonas, who knows him well: "He had no pangs of guilt." Other Mossad spies or Israeli soldiers involved in the assassination program say they didn't feel bad either.

A new British documentary, Munich: Mossad's Revenge, interviewed three of them, and one, asked whether the assassins had agonised over their task, replied: "No hesitations. No, No. No."

Another agent, interviewed by the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, said: "We identified completely with our mission after what the terrorists did to our athletes in Munich."

And the last time I talked to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, who also helped kill some of the targets while dressed as a woman, he seemed chirpy and most unapologetic.

The inconvenient truth for Spielberg is that sometimes there is no other way to protect the citizens of a democracy than by killing those determined to wipe them out. More sober men than Spielberg know this and can live with the consequences.

Thank them for it. Without them, Israel would have been destroyed in its four wars for survival – including the Yom Kippur war of 1973, just one year after Munich.

Without us shooting back, bin Laden would also be running his terrorist empire in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein would not only still tyrannise Iraq, but Kuwait, too. Hitler, of course, would have kept his gas chambers burning for years.

What would Spielberg have us do? In Munich, he has Avner cry: "If these people committed crimes, we should have arrested them."

That would have been nice, naturally. But there have always been weasels in the fight against terrorism.

Germany, for instance, let go three of the Black September terrorists behind the Munich massacre after Palestinian hijackers threatened to blow up a plane. France, Greece, Italy and Cyprus all allowed Palestinian terrorism suspects to freely roam their countries.

Spielberg doesn't investigate that, of course. Giving in to violence doesn't seem to shock him.

But fighting back? Gosh – call him when the shooting is over. He'll jet over at his leisure to declare that he'd have been prepared to die, of course, but did anyone really have to kill? After all, what danger was he ever in, really?