Steven Spielberg's new movie, Munich, focuses on a small Israeli Mossad hit team whose assignment is to hunt and destroy the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre of 1972. In that horrible incident, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were held hostage and then killed. Spielberg's movie is “based upon” a book entitled Vengeance by George Jonas, which purports to be the true story of an Israeli counter-terrorist team.

The movie proceeds from an erroneous factual basis. It exploits for commercial value a human tragedy. Most important, its ethical message is wrong and its moral compass is faulty.

First, on the historical underpinnings for the movie, Spielberg's protagonist, “Avner” is portraying an Israeli named Uval Aviv, who represented himself to Jonas as the leader of the Mossad unit. Serious factual issues are raised because those in Israel having knowledge of these events claim that Aviv was not a Mossad agent and that he fabricated the stories that appear in the book. Even as I read Vengeance before studying the controversy about authenticity, I had serious questions about he accuracy of Jonas' account.

To start with, he claims to be a novice, a beginning Mossad agent without any real experience, who is suddenly and quite inexplicably summoned to Prime Minister Golda Meir's house and put in charge of this operation for which he is admittedly unqualified. It's hard to believe that the Mossad would entrust its most critical operation to such a neophyte. Even in his own account, Jonas presents himself as a disgruntled former employee of the Mossad, which immediately makes him suspect as well.

Then there is my own bias on so-called historical fiction. As far as I'm concerned, depiction of historical events in books or movies should be accurate, not fictionalized. Here the movie makes departures for dramatic effect from the suspect book it relied upon. All of this leaves the viewer wondering what is accurate and what is not. Using history in this way is disingenuous.

Second, recreations of the Munich massacre are inserted throughout the movie, climaxing in scenes at the end. The presentation of the killing of the Israeli athletes is done in a manner to achieve the most dramatic and suspenseful effect in order to pump life into this two hour and twenty minute movie. This may be Hollywood at its best, but it isn't respectful of those innocent athletes who were brutally assassinated. As a Washington Post reviewer stated: “A massacre of unarmed innocents that shocked the world should be more than just fodder for ginning up the tension at the end of a commercial movie.”

Which brings me to the third and most important point: The movie contains a contemporary political agenda dealing with the war against terror and portrays the terrorists who killed the Olympic athletes on the same moral plane as the Israeli Mossad agents who executed the terrorists. Failure to distinguish between these two is a serious error that is directly relevant to the United States as we fight the war against Al Quaeda and other Islamic Jihadists. There is a crucial difference between the people who fly airplanes into office buildings and Mossad agents or U.S. Special Force troops who are trying to hunt down terrorists. There is a difference between those who walk into a shopping mall and open fire with an automatic weapon and trained U.S. or Israeli snipers who kill one of the assassins.

Regardless of their perverted sense of the justice of their cause, we are not their ethical equivalent. If we as a civilized society cannot make judgments of this type, then we are truly lost. Yes, the cycle of unending violence in the Middle East is unfortunate. But there is no justification for killing athletes or igniting bombs on a Spanish or British train. The Israelis have it right. We have it right in not letting the perpetrators commit their crimes and escape. We must hunt them down, and we must eliminate them. If we are not prepared to do that, then we might as well hand over the keys to the White House and the Congress to the Islamic Jihadists.