"But the artists and filmmakers who are fondest of that handy platitude are never able to tell us what the answer is, particularly in cases involving terrorist acts, acts that generally exist outside the context of sane moral reasoning. Diplomacy, obviously, is a much more civil and ethical way of solving disputes than violence is. But if terrorists were responsive to diplomacy, we'd have to call them by another name."

Talk about simple-minded platitudes. So George Bush is right? "They attack us because they hate our way of life." Violence is the best answer to terrorist attacks?

Political terrorism is not the act of insane mass murderers. In the context of violent political conflicts it is quite sane and rational, and sadly often quite effective. Would Arik Sharon have pulled out of Gaza without Palestinian terrorism? Not likely. And look at all the "benefits" bin Laden has reaped by his attack on the U.S. He has gotten the U.S. involved in two wars that are draining our energies and which serve as recruiting and training grounds for his jihad against the West. He even got the U.S. to withdraw its bases from Saudia Arabia (one of his key demands). Quite sane and rational from his perspective.

What IS irrational is the knee-jerk reaction that terror invokes: the need to lash out in revenge, the willingness to act in a way that turns you into the moral equivalent of the terrorists, the willingness to ignore the innocent victims of YOUR acts of violence who will turn around and justify their violence by your murders and on in endless cycle of blood letting. Not to speak off the irrational fear which allows us to exaggerate the threat of terrorism and to give up hard-won freedoms in the name of "protecting" ourselves.

Violence begets violence. There are many ways to respond to terrorist violence and yes diplomacy is one of them. And diplomacy doesn't mean "appeasement" or giving the terrorists what they want (in fact, the violent reaction is exactly giving the terrorists what they want). It means looking hard at complex conflicts and trying to find imaginative ways to solve them. In the end they almost always do somehow get resolved, except in the interim thousands of lives are lost and wasted for no good reason except to appease our instinct for revenge and satisfy the power lust of voracious politicians.

I think that the mix of blood and milk on the floor after the first of Avram's targets is dispatched is actually meant to evoke kosher dietary rules in which milk and meat are not to be mixed, and blood is forbidden as a foodstuff under any circumstances. Hence, Avram's preparation of a brisket for that first, meet-your-hit-squad dinner. A scene that felt to me like it was cribbed from one of the opening episodes of MTV's Road Rules. The cinematic strawberry vanilla swirl on the floor indicates, to me, that Avram has sacrificed his own central ideology in the killing of this man as surely as it indicates Spielberg's continuing dependence on ever more graphic violence to get his point across. I believe that this is the only really intelligent image in this film.

When Spielberg goes for the tired joke of depicting the two sets of shady mofos in their Greek "safe house" as they quarrel over what plays on the radio, finally settling on the smooth sounds of Motown, I thought that I was going to pass out with shame for what currently passes for thoughtful cinema in America. This recalls the scene in Jaws in which Brody, Quint and Hooper bonded over their scar stories before being brought back to reality by Quint's horrid tale of surviving amid sharks on the sunken USS Indianapolis. The bogey in that film was a shark named Bruce, a robot that didn't work and was hence rendered much scarier by being generated mostly in the individial minds of everyone who has ever swum in water over their heads. He might have been better off depicting the Islamic radicals in MUNICH the same way. He's being praised for granting them a humanity that's been lacking in American cinema. Sadly, it's the quality of our films, our cultural export to the world that's deteriorated over the years. It's gotten dumber and greedier and meaner, much like our politicians. Clinton's great transgression was that he got some blow jobs i the oval office. Bush has been a killer, and just as we tolerate more violence in our movies than we do sex, it's likely that his great transgressions will go largely unpunished. Bush keeps Saddam's pistol in the room where Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman. Funny that both of them retreated to that little den to play with their guns. Perhaps it should be walled off.

Mr. Spielberg, for his part, still treats his audience to all manner of cinematic splatter in the ways that those "terrorists" meet their ends despite the fact that this hit squad is a combination of the gang who couldn't shoot straight and those guys from Queer Eye. Minus the queer of course. Something that's proven to us in possibly the worst sex scene ever conceived, in which Avram has Broadcast News worthy flop sweats as he takes his wife and thinks an awful lot about those athletes and all that shit that went down in the helicopter. The Mata Hari who almost seduces Avram is shot three times in the neck and head and we get to see her walking the length of her boho barge with her breasts exposed before the fx guys started going for it with the squirty blood thing in her neck wound. This is another weird juxtaposition of sex and violence and I REALLY want to know what SS was thinking here.

This film is a steaming piece of corporate Hollywood poo. The fact that it's being treated as intelligent cinema reinforces how dearly we hold on to that most important of our inalienable rights: the right to remain utterly ignorant of the realities of the world we live in and to substitute our own versions of reality for the truth.