Munich

Some peopel have beencomplaining about how Speilburg's new movie seems to make hte israelis look god and the palistinians look bad (I expect the israelis say hte opposite) but I see this as people just admiting their own gullibility.

But You can take what you want from what the world presents you.

A movie will always tend to paint the subjects as fairly human because we tend to support the people we understand and we tend to understand the subjects - just like lord of the rings would be different if we were to follow a elephant rider trying to support his family or king Kong would be different if we had focused on the people king Kong kept squishing as opposed to his eyes.

It shows a certain gullibility to be fooled by this and to think that you should support the side that has a human face - because the other side has one too but the movie shouldn't have to show that because it is obvious. (on a depressive note - Maybe humans are gulable....)

Similarly there is no need to have a problem with the following

The question is asked - “why do “we” call Israeli terrorists commandos, and we call Palestinian commandos terrorists?”

Those who think Israeli terrorists are not commandos probably don’t like commandos anyway. What they want to do is equate terrorists and commandos in the minds of others - or better yet swap the connotations.

In the minds of another side Israelis are right and Palestinians are wrong so they take the opposite position for the same sort of reasons.

But this is a battle detached from reality because commandos and terrorists have definitions and these are understood by those unattached to the debate, a dstinction that only becomes meaningless to those with vested interests.

A commando is an agent of the state like a police man or a soldier for the interests of their state generally to secure its boarders and create some sort of order - someone who may well be hated but is in a sense predictable and not an immediate cause for fear for ordinary civilians in most countries.

A terrorist is someone who acts on faith generally as part of a small group for some ideal that may never have been sound enough to gain power in a country - they are challengers to stability and see harm as a strategy for achieving very indirect aims. They are very hard to predict and understand and thy have nothing to lose unlike the agents of hte state who have at very least their state itself. Thus are something that could be dangerous to a random person from another country.

Swapping the worlds would only temporarily change the definitions and it would only achieve that via deception and confusion.