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Joseph Nichol

How workers of a Brooklyn theatre are trying to hijack history

Entrance of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema / Credit: Lominsky. Free to use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language


The Alamo Drafthouse theatre in Brooklyn recently started screening
September 5, a historical drama thriller that depicts the 1972 Munich Massacre from the eyes of an ABC news crew that covered the events of that day.

On September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists broke into the Olympic Village in Munich and took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. They demanded the release of over 200 hundred Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails. The German security forces insisted on a swift rescue attempt, but they botched it. The final outcome of this bloody and tragic episode was the murder of all eleven hostages. Some were brutally tortured before being killed.

The film, September 5, received positive reviews; 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.1 on IMDB. But shortly after the Alamo started screening it, controversy arose from within the theatre’s own workforce. The worker’s group, NYC Alamo United, launched a petition, demanding that the Alamo stop screening the “Zionist propaganda film.”

The group wrote on X that it calls “…on all Alamo guests, community members & orgs of conscience to sign our petition. Condemn the [Alamo Drafthouse’s] complicity in the distribution of regressive media & demand that they immediately stop platforming film & media industry companies that spread genocidal rhetoric”

Original announcement of the petition / Credit: @nycalamounited / X

They circulated a Google Form to gather signatures. Above the list of names, there is a brief manifesto detailing the theatre workers’ grievances concerning the film. Upon reading this document, one quickly wades into a swamp of ahistorical distortions. As one X user put it, “Just an incredible specimen of historical revisionism. It gets the Goebbels Seal of Approval.” 

Near the beginning, the petition refers to the Munich Massacre as “Operation Iqrit and Biram,” euphemistically bypassing the true nature of the horror that transpired that day. This language is reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s “special operation,” his euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine or “Operation Al Aqsa Flood;” Hamas’s term for the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

The authors of the petition go on to lament the film characters’ use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe the members of the PLO team. But of course, the tragedy of that day is a prototypical example of a terrorist attack, which applies perfectly to the definition of the word: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Through what is probably a mix of ideological conviction and sheer ignorance, the authors have lost their grip on the meaning of the word ‘terrorism,’ and quite possibly on the words ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

They loosely suggest that the attack was a logical response to the 1967 Six Day War, which they view as an Israeli war of aggression with the objective of expanding its territory. Lost on them is the history, and the fact that the Israeli preemptive strike on Egypt’s air force was itself a response to a cascade of bellicose steps taken by its enemies, which set the stage for the war.

Excerpt from the petition / Credit: @nycalamounited

After justifying the terror attack and conveniently omitting any mention of the atrocities, the petition pivots to the Israeli response. “The aftermath of the Munich operation was the wanton assassination of Palestinian activists throughout Europe and the Levant…” Again with the euphemistic language, this time in the use of the word ‘activist’ to describe the PLO terrorists. In 2015, the New York Times reported disturbing new details that had recently emerged regarding the Munich Massacre. Among the grisly details, it came to light that at least one of the Israeli athletes had been castrated before he was murdered. To frame such atrocities as activism is not only an obscene distortion of reality but also an attempt to rewrite history in a way that hides the brutality of the perpetrators and the true suffering of the victims.

Following the Munich Massacre, Golda Meir authorized the killing of everyone involved in the attack. What ensued was a global campaign of assassinations against the planners and the financiers of the terror attack. One of the most notable operations of this campaign is “Operation Spring of Youth,” in which some Israeli commandos, including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, were dressed as women, on their way to target PLO members in downtown Beirut. Eventually, nearly all involved in the massacre were eliminated, showing the Israeli government’s unwavering commitment to ensuring that the perpetrators of such violence against innocent civilians would not go unpunished.

Authors of the petition condemn this Israeli response as “bloodletting,” repeating the trope that is all too common today that Israelis are uniquely murderous. As Brendan O’Neill rhetorically writes in After the Pogrom, “We do military operations, Israel does bloodletting.” He goes on to illustrate the ubiquity of this phenomenon. For example, in November 2023, an analyst at CNBC said, “The bloodletting in Gaza needs to stop.” The prime minister of Malaysia went viral among critics of Israel when he condemned Israel’s “relentless bloodletting.” An author at The Nation recalls “walking through blood” in Gaza, as a result of “the Jewish State’s savagery.” For any observer of the overlap between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, the mention of blood cannot be disregarded. Singling out the Jewish nation as uniquely bloodthirsty generates echoes of the medieval blood libel, in which Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to make matzot.

At the time of this writing, there are 973 names on the petition. Quite a few appear to be Jewish, such as ‘Sara Rubinstein’ and ‘Adam Katzman.’ Which is not surprising, since as we now know, post-October 7, that all too many of Israel’s most toxic critics are historically ignorant anti-Zionist Jews who have bought into the notion that Zionism has produced the worst settler colonialist oppressor entity in the world. 

This petition is a cynical attempt to rewrite history, twisting a brutal terrorist attack and tragic episode in Israel’s history into a noble and righteous act of resistance. It ignores the basic truth that terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians for political gain. Framing this massacre as “activism” insults the memory of the victims and those who sought justice in its wake. The authors’ revisionist narrative seeks to obscure the difference between righteous retaliation and murderous violence, and in doing so, the authors reveal their ignorance and/or exceptionally poorly calibrated moral compass. In commenting on this scandal, an author at Tablet Magazine wrote, “Petitioning a Brooklyn movie theater not to show a movie about the Munich Massacre because it doesn’t glorify the perpetrators.” They added, “What an absolutely deranged movement.”

About the Author
The writer is an independent journalist who focuses on Middle East history and politics and he is the co-host of the Lappin Assessment podcast. His work has appeared in The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, and Quillette, among others.
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