Our memories of the 1972 Munich Olympics should be of Mark Spitz swimming his way to seven gold medals, a bashful Mary Peters on the winners’ podium and Olga Korbut charming us on the gym floor. Instead, we recall the media coverage of the siege that ended with 11 members of the Israeli team dead after being taken hostage by members of the Palestinian terror group Black September. Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, released today, portrays the aftermath. Headed by Israel ‘s unflinching Prime Minister, Golda Meir, a secret committee ordered Mossad, the country’s secret service, to track down and kill those they thought responsible for the massacre.
Tom Whitter’s Munich: Mossad’s Revenge (Channel 4) also told the story of Operation Wrath of God, showing how Israeli hit squads trawled Europe and the Middle East. “We tried not to do things just by shooting a guy in the street, that’s easy,” said David Kimche, the former deputy head of Mossad. They wanted to send a message that nothing could stop Israel’s retribution. Victims were coolly shot in lobbies. Explosives were packed into tables. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, described how his hit team dressed in drag to get into Beirut.
One operation claimed the life of a Moroccan waiter, working in Norway, who was mistaken for Black September’s leader. Spielberg’s film has been criticised for not mentioning this tragic mistake, but Whitter’s programme also seemed limited. Its fondness for ballistic detail made it a bit too Frederick Forsyth at times, a grim masterclass in assassination techniques. There was little political context and scant analysis of the impact that Mossad’s actions had on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Amid the unrepentantly defiant testimonies of Israeli and Palestinian officials, we also saw the killings using hackneyed “reconstructions” shot in grainy slow-motion. The notion seems now so entrenched among documentary makers that we cannot grasp even the simplest fact about, say, Henry VIII unless we also see a plump actor in tights with a stuck-on ginger beard gnawing on a chicken bone. In Whitter’s film, as Anka Spitzer, the widow of a murdered athlete, described how a phone call would inform her of another successful kill, guess what we saw an actress pick up?
“We didn’t ask for people to be killed,” Spitzer told Whitter, “just to be put on trial.” She said the same in Ron Maiberg’s Munich/Mossad documentary for This World (BBC Two) on Tuesday. Here again we had Kimche, Barak and former Israeli agents in shadow identified only by an initial. We even had the same expert on Mossad matters. But Maiberg told the story without Crimewatch-like re-creations that always jar with the archive footage. Recent history surely doesn’t need fabricated visual aids. And Spitzer was able to tell Maiberg how she had taken the orphans of the Munich victims to Atlanta to discover the “joy” of the Olympics — and was heartened to see them showing no ill will as the Palestinian team arrived for the opening ceremony. Whitter’s film could have done with a broader perspective like that.
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Horizon (BBC Two) displayed its customary even-handedness as it detailed the American tussle over evolutionary theory. Creationists believe that God created the world in seven days. Darwinism argues that evolution is governed by chance and time through natural selection. Intelligent design (ID) proposes that our complex world couldn’t possibly be formed by randomness but a supernatural designer. I sometimes think that nature isn’t so wonderfully designed — just look at the giraffe or our own knees: they’re rubbish.
ID, backed by George Bush and pushed hard by evangelical Christians in America, is seen by its opponents as camouflaged creationism, a way to sneak it on to the school curriculum. US news footage highlighted a recent court case in Pennsylvania that found ID to be religious based and so unconstitutional if taught in publicly funded schools. Round one to the Darwinists. But the programme suggested that ID will resurface, probably in a rebranded form. Now that we’ve got used to the idea of America as a nation of believers — citizens who believe that the Rapture is coming, presidents who believe that they are guided by God — I don’t doubt it.
But is there a theory that explains why US news reporters have evolved into such plastic-looking creatures with all the gravitas of performing seals? Maybe Hugh Laurie’s cynical sawbones found the answer in House (Five) while attacking medics who suggested that a small margin of error was acceptable: “If your DNA was off by one percentage point, you’d be a dolphin.”