STEYN ONLINE
by Mark Steyn
January 10, 2015

At the end of a week of bloodbaths and hostage sieges, I went looking for something appropriate for our Saturday movie date, and settled on a nine-year-old Spielberg movie about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The death toll in Munich was, in fact, one less than at Charlie Hebdo. I don’t know what significance to attach to that statistic, but I have the vague feeling that Europe, for want of any alternative policy, has decided to live with what British government officials used to call, apropos Northern Ireland, an “acceptable level of violence”. Certainly, murdered Jews seem far more routine – and thus “acceptable” – on the Continent of 2015 than they were in 1972. There were four more on Friday – still lying in their blood on the floor of a kosher grocery store, as around the world TV and radio commentators preferred to focus on the as yet non-existent victims of a hypothetical anti-Muslim “backlash”. That’s the other reason Spielberg’s film seems timely. It takes a story propelled by righteous anger, and marinates it in moral equivalence – the default mode of our age. READ MORE