Do you know what “Kosher Style” means? It means food that Jews – or, more correctly, some Ashkenazi Jews who live in the United States – like to eat, without any of the inconvenient requirements of kashrut, like kosher slaughter, for example, or separate utensils for milk and meat or rabbinic supervision of ingredients. In other words, “kosher style” means not kosher.

Now, do you know what “inspired by real events” means? It means something happened, some historical event, and in thinking about it or meditating on it, somebody is “inspired” to dream up a complete concoction out of thin air, without having to worry about what really happened, without having to pay attention to chronology, for example, or cause and effect or context. “Inspired by real events,” then means one thing: fiction.

This is basically all that anyone who sees the movie Munich by Steven Spielberg needs to know about it. He displays this little “get-out-of-jail-free” card at the very beginning of the film. It’s fiction. It’s a Hollywood fantasy. There is actually less that Munich has in common with the events surrounding and following the murder of the Israeli Olympians in that city in 1972 than a traif hot dog served with pickle relish has to do with kashrut. Much less, in fact, because Spielberg knows that most people will take this confession that the movie is a lie as reassurance that it is true, just as many people who hear the words “kosher style” will be deceived into thinking that what they are about to be served is in any way different from ham and Swiss with a side order of lard.

Initially, I wanted to write the definitive expose of Munich, but so many people have already pointed out so many of the movie’s flaws and distortions that there isn’t really a need for something definitive. Just read the column by Brett Stephens in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

For once, my personal observations regarding the anti-Zionism or falsification of Jewish or Israeli history in a movie have been pounced on by almost everybody who has chosen to put pen to paper. About the only thing left to talk about is the impact the film is likely to have on audiences, and that’s a subject about which I confess, I know essentially nothing. Mark Goldberg, with whom I saw the film, remarked that thinking about it and discussing it was a kind of Rorschach test. People will respond to it based on the degree to which what they saw on the screen coincides with or differs from whatever preconceived ideas they had brought with them to the theater.

It would be interesting to know what Steven Spielberg thought he was doing when he made this film. I am not a fan of his and I was one of a tiny minority who hated Schindler’s List, but I certainly did not and do not consider Spielberg to be a self-hating Jew. Why then would he make a movie about any aspect of Israel with Tony Kushner as his screenwriter? Tony Kushner, who publicly proclaims that Israel is a “mistake,” and the greatest evil ever committed by the Jews. What could one expect would be the product of such an opinion let loose to do whatever damage to history it chose to do?

Who could have predicted that Spielberg was so childish and that his ideas are so uninformed and immature that he cannot distinguish between revenge and self-defense? Between vengeance and deterrence? Does he really know nothing at all about justice? Why has he made a movie that refuses to see the line between right and wrong?

Where does a movie-maker get the gall to think that he can take real people and make them say things on screen that they not only never said in real life but that they never would have said, things that they not only did not believe, but that are the opposite of what the public record proves they believed? Maybe there is a head of state somewhere, stupid enough to believe that tracking down and executing the people who have murdered innocent citizens of his country is to “compromise” what his nation stands for. But Golda Meir never thought that and she never said that. This is what Golda Meir really said, on September 13, 1972, from the podium in front of the Knesset assembly hall: “From the blood-drenched history of the Jewish nation, we learn that violence that begins with the murder of Jews, ends with the spread of violence and danger to all people, in all nations….We have no choice but to strike at terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfill that obligation without any hesitation whatsoever.”

Spielberg has his Israeli characters agonizing over the morality of killing terrorists. But that never happened. Only a moral idiot is unable to distinguish between killing an athlete because he happens to come from Israel and executing the murderer who killed the athlete. Spielberg claims that such tactics are not only immoral but that they are ineffective. But there is universal agreement among experts on terrorism and anti-terrorism that Israel’s methods of targeted assassination of known murderers is effective in reducing terror, something that has been proven yet again in Israel’s victory over the Intifada. It is not true, as the made-up character Avner whines in Munich that ten new terrorists spring up whenever one old terrorist is eliminated. The supply of people willing to waste their lives in that way is not endless.

It is also not true that some of the people fingered for elimination were not really “dirty” or guilty enough to have warranted such extreme measures. In fact, in every case in which the real Mossad named a terrorist for assassination, the head of the Mossad had to argue the merits of that decision before the Prime Minister and the members of Israel’s cabinet. In many instances, the Ministers would determine that the Mossad’s case was insufficient and the terrorist’s name would be removed from the list. Furthermore, the Prime Minister would only authorize the plan when certain that innocent civilians would not be harmed.

Why did Spielberg rely on a book that had been exposed as a phony more than twenty years ago? The self-styled Mossad agent who peddled his story to a criminally gullible writer turns out to have worked in security exactly once in his life; he was one of those kids at the airport who ask you if you packed your suitcase yourself. He had no more connection to the Mossad than Richard Pryer had to the Klan.

But this was well known; why did Spielberg go out of his way to pick the one “source” on the Mossad that everyone knows is an absolute fake? Why, in a scene that even Spielberg admits is a pure invention, does he have an Arab terrorist “explain” the history of Israel’s genesis as an immoral land grab, an opinion that is repeated throughout the film and is never once refuted? He even has Avner’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, explain how Israel came to be by saying, “nobody was going to give it to us, so we had to take it.”

Is Spielberg’s world completely ahistorical? What happened to the Jewish National Fund that paid more for swamp and desert than farmers in Iowa were asking for the best land in the world? What happened to the Balfour Declaration and the UN Partition Plan? Did those things happen or not? Wasn’t political Zionism already a half-century old before the Holocaust? Did the Arabs attack us in 1948 or not? What about 1967? Or 1973?

What exactly was the reason for throwing in that absurd scene with the Mossad - I guess he was supposed to be an accountant – reminding Avner to get receipts? Please, does anyone here think that ever happened or that it could have happened? Counter-terrorists go around the world creating a paper trail that any idiot could follow? Suppose Avner got arrested for j-walking and was discovered to have a receipt for plastic explosive or a machine gun in his pocket? Tony Kushner’s self-hatred is deep enough to try to get a laugh from the Jews’ well-known love of money. Why in Kushner’s world, Mossad agents even complain about how much they had to spend on each murderer they eliminated.

What is the World Trade Center doing in the movie’s last scene? Is it there to blame the murders of September 11 on Israel and on Israel’s insistence on justice? To get those towers on the screen, Spielberg had to invent a non-existent Mossad agent with a fictitious family who moved to Brooklyn for some nonsensical reason and then had a meeting with a made-up Mossad superior that just happened to take place with the World Trade Center in the background. All those machinations just to…just to what, exactly: just to blame Israel.

And why does the movie show the Israeli Olympians being massacred at the end of the film, after Avner and his buddies have spent two hours killing every Arab in sight? Isn’t that an inversion of cause and effect? Spielberg seems to be saying that the murder of the innocent Olympians – machine-gunned and grenaded to death while handcuffed to one another – was somehow a response to Israeli sins, such as stealing the Palestinians’ land. And why is that scene interspliced with an ugly and gratuitous scene of Avner having violent, almost rape-like sex with his wife? What happened to Steven Spielberg? Has he gone mad?

Then there’s the Mossad agent who announces, apropos of nothing, that the only blood he cares about is Jewish blood. Very typical of a country that sends emergency evacuation and medical teams to every earthquake, flood or storm disaster in the world. Very characteristic of a country whose scientific advances in medicine and drug therapy, in agriculture and irrigation have fed and saved the lives of millions of non-Jews throughout the world. Israel has more of its citizens planting, building, healing and caring for people in developing countries than any other nation in the world, including the United States. But, Steven Spielberg, who it seems impossible to believe doesn’t know better, gives the world a “typical” Israeli who cares only about “Jewish” blood.

Then there’s the explosives expert who finds the work of bringing terrorists to justice somehow “not Jewish.” Someone should tell Mr. Spielberg that “turn the other cheek” is the motto of a different religion, not of Judaism. Since when is it “not Jewish” to respond to murder by punishing the murderers? Throughout Jewish history, Jews have fought to preserve their lives and their way of life, from the Judges and Kings to Bar Kochba and the Maccabees to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Israel Defense Forces. Maybe in Tony Kushner’s fantasy world Jews are supposed to permit themselves to be slaughtered rather than defend themselves, but there is nothing Jewish about that. The recovery of the ability to defend ourselves is perhaps the greatest and most authentically Jewish development of the last fifty years.

In preparing for what I would say today I read a book called Striking Back, which tells what really happened at Munich and thereafter. I learned about the incompetence, the negligence and cowardice of the German government, army and police, who were not able even to get an accurate count of the number of terrorists and therefore did not bring enough sharpshooters to the airport where they planned to eliminate them. I learned that the German fire fighters were so afraid that they refused to extinguish the fires that engulfed the two helicopters where the Israeli Olympians might still have been alive and could perhaps have been saved. In fact, the autopsy of weightlifter David Berger, an American citizen from Cleveland showed that, although he had been shot twice in the foot and leg, neither wound was life threatening and that he in fact died from smoke inhalation while the German cowards watched in safety.

From the fictional film Munich, it is impossible to learn history. In fact, it is impossible to learn anything. This is a deeply dishonest and intentionally distorting film. It is not only anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, it is also anti-democratic and naively pacifist. If Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg really do want to turn the other cheek when the killers come for them, that’s their business. For me, self-defense is by far the better and more Jewish alternative. And should I become another victim of terrorist murder, I would expect my country and my people to bring my killer to justice.

Shame on Steven Spielberg for prostituting his art to the foolishness and faddism, to the defeatism and pessimism, to the anti-Semitism and self-hatred that infects Hollywood and that reduces its message to the worst and most dangerous kind of drivel. Thank God that the Jewish State has not been seduced into believing that its only redemption lies in self-immolation. Long live the Jewish and the human instinct for self-defense and for survival. Without it, the barbarians at the gate will destroy everything that is good in this world.