Spielberg told critic Roger Ebert . . .

One asshat told another asshat . . .

Yup, the same thing with peace initiatives and concessions. Take your pick. It's all about half measures. Your either in, or your out.

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, assuming that half of the world's population mutilates both of the eyeballs of the other half. Now Spielberg has me wondering if this kind of pacifist logic violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics as well as common sense.

While Spielberg looked at the problem and then retreated to the warm safe embrace of mindless liberalism, I do give him kudos for at least looking at it - most liberals don't look farther than personally inconvenient law enforcement efforts to stop terrorism, well short of looking at terrorism itself.

The true answer to terrorism is not simple force, nor simple appeasement; it is bureaucracy. Yes, the looming, rules encumbered, boring beast we are all too familiar with here in the West.

Terrorism (as a major phenomenon) only works because it has places to live where the laws are not enforced - from the bananna republics to the French ghetto. These are the places anyone can come to from around the world, where they will be (internationally) embraced, all sins forgiven, and given the "opportunity" to channel their various psychoses into group sanctioned violence directed at those portrayed by media around the world as "the bad guys" - a pretty attractive idea to any hooligan.

This gestation period is critical for terrorism - compare the damage caused by real terrorists i.e. suicide bombers, beheadings and of course 9/11 vs the "best" that the West can produce i.e. Tim McVeigh, who was deadly but a flash in the pan comparatively speaking (his squatter friends in the militias sputtered and fizzled when the FBI learned to simply surround them and wait them out - and the IRA is not really a presence outside of the UK anymore).

If we are successful in Iraq, successive generations of Iraqis will grow up in an increasingly more bureaucracy laden environment (that's what democracy does), where individual frustrations are diffused (not to be mistaken for defused) through the ballot boxes and the myriad of designated government complaint offices, sapping the motivation of would be troublemakers with the mental anaesthetic of the daily grind.

(That BTW is the reason I believe a lot of libertarians are joining ranks with liberals against the WOT)

Bureaucracy - in its established, calcified state - is what terrorists fear most. They know that violence can make short term gains against them but does not work as a long term solution (not with the madrassas daily sucking in urchins and haters like giant vacuum nozzles), and appeasement is just a slippery slope leading to victory for them - but once The System is in place with its thousands of unionized mumbling zombies, it's nigh impossible to bring down. They know it, and we need to know it too if we're going to win this.

No Scott I think the issue is much different.

What causes Terrorism in the Muslim form (as distinct from localized IRA, Tamil Tigers, Sikhs, various Latin American guys like FARC etc) is the goals.

The other secularist terrorists have various nationalist or political aspirations, mostly related to grabbing the State treasury and looting the nation. They are not a trans-national ideology or interested in provoking world-wide conflict.

Islam in the idea of the Caliphate, which is the BASIS of Islam, gives a framework for terror. Either the modern world of Nokia, Disneyland, Godzilla, Sony, Coca-Cola, Jackie Chan, Samsung, Batman, and Jet Li wins; or the vision of the utopian Islamic Caliphate turning the whole world into Sixth Century Arabia wins.

You can't have both, and modern communications and the shrinking of the world, the intrusion of Jet Li and Batman into formerly completely isolated Muslim lives accelerates this conflict. You can't live life according to Allah if you love Jet Li and Denzel Washington.

Hollywood is likely THE MOST GUILTY directly of provoking terrorism simply by making fun and extremely attractive entertainment that by speaking to the core assumptions of the modern world just screams that "Allah is dead." And beckons to the "future." Filled with Action-Adventure heroes and comedies where people act in profoundly Western Ways (yes ESPECIALLY Jet Li).

This international ideological conflict won't end until one or the other ideology is destroyed. Considering that Nokia's gross revenues exceeds the non-oil related exports of Arab states I know where I'd put my money. Want to save lives and min violence? Win a lot faster, before you have a Nuke exchange or five.

Spielberg is guilty as most. Raiders and ET? Subversive in the extreme of the idea of the Caliphate.

I just love how geniuses like Spielberg don't get the moral equivalence he is spouting. As described in the article, "Palestinian terrorists murder Israeli athlets.....Israeli counterterrorists assassinate Palestinian terrorists."

This is described as a cycle of violence. Geeze, kind of like, "Street drug dealers shoot innocent old lady on steps.......police officers shoot armed drug dealer."

Yeah, that seems equally blameworthy. No reason to take sides or anything.

I saw "Munich". The political message is the typical liberal crap--violence begets violence, etc. But it's a great spy/political thriller. I would recommend it on that basis alone, though it is a bit long.

Funny how the "cycle of violence" types don't seem to recognize that any "cycling" is due as much to the restraint of the good guys as the beliefs of the bad guys. I'm not advocating genocide, of course. But I recognize that the bad guys don't always share our values -- and there would be nobody left to perpetuate the violence if we shared theirs.

Spielberg could benefit from getting out of his ivory tower and living in Israel in for a while. He is obviously disconnected from reality.

(this is the REAL Bob here)

This is almost a moot point as Munich is completely bombing in the theaters. It 8 days it has done $1.5M. It'll be lucky to do $3M I think.

This is not a Schindler's List ($96M) that is sympathetic to terrorists. This is more like a small indy film and is having almost no impact and no resonance.

"a response to a response doesn't really solve anything." Yeah, if we hadn't responded militarilly to Hitler, the world would have been....enslaved. Idiot!! Spielberg is just another Hollywood pacifist. People like him think that freedom doesn't come with a price. Fools!!

What causes terrorism is the fact that, as a tactic, it works. Rather well. And we in the civilized West have made sure of it. Ask Gerry Adams. Or Nelson Mandela.

The only thing that'll stop it is our insistence that anyone who uses terrorism to promote his cause loses. By default. Period. No matter how compelling or sympathetic the cause may be. Bush made some very encouraging rumblings in that direction right after 9/11 and I thought we'd gotten the message at last, but it wouldn't seem so.

We can't afford to indulge terrorism as we have in the past, and nuclear weapons are why. Damn, I hope we don't learn that one the hard way.