‘September 5’ Film on 1972 Munich Olympics Captures the Truth About Terrorism
It’s not cozy Christmas fare, but if you want to see a movie that gets the past half-century of Palestinian terror right, go to a movie theater and see “September 5.”
This compact Paramount release, covering the 1972 Summer Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich, has a refreshingly simple — but not simplistic — take: Kidnapping and murdering civilians is bad, and there is no context in which to justify it.
Swiss-born Tim Fehlbaum, the director, isn’t known for ideology; his previous features were science fiction and horror.
It’s the absence of ideology here that works.
We see the Munich terror attack unfold through the eyes of journalists at ABC Sports — people who are competent at their job, covering the pre-attack Games, but who aren’t foreign-policy “experts.”
So when the ABC team, guided by rookie producer Geoffrey Mason (actor John Magaro), hears gunshots from the athletes’ housing compound that September dawn, the reaction is natural, in an era before reporters came to associate global events with terror risk: shock and perplexity.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
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