Hopefully for Steven Spielberg, future projects will not cause him so much grief due to lunatic actors and hardline critics as his movies in 2005. Tom Cruise, the star in the director's updated version of War of the Worlds, dominated idle summertime headlines after jumping on Oprah Winfrey's furniture and shrieking at the Today anchor Matt Lauer.Spielberg was rather detached from Cruise's ramblings, but he has come under direct fire from the right wing recently with the release of Munich, his excellent visualization of Israel's response to the execution of 11 of its athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich.

There have always been conflicting accounts of the steps Israel took after Munich. Spielberg's source material is Vengeance, a widely-criticized book by the Canadian journalist George Jonas. It is well-known, however, that the retribution against the terrorist group Black September, which carried out the Munich massacre, was fierce and sometimes ruthless.

Revenge is often a bloodsport, and Munich's right-wing critics are incapable of acknowledging the possibility that counterterrorist spies are capable of nastily violent actions, no matter what the provocation.

Spielberg's detractors want to see his movie as a political treatise rather than entertainment. Although Munich is provocative and thoughtful, it remains at least a partially fictionalized account of what happened after the 1972 Olympic Games. The leader of the Mossad team, Avner, adroitly played by Eric Bana, is pensive and uneasy in his execution of Black September leaders.

That detail, however, is a rallying point for Munich's critics, the more extreme of which often say any less-than-rosy depiction of Israel is tantamount to comfort for terrorists and treason against the Jewish faith. Shortly after the release of Munich, David Horowitz, the right-wing nut who spoke at Brandeis in March 2004, filled his Web site with screeds against Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner for making the Mossad characters something other than Palestinian-killing automatons.

Debbie Schlussel, a svelte blonde who sits just to the left of Ann Coulter on the political spectrum, complained in a screeching review that some of the Black September leaders in Munich were shown to be fathers and husbands. Much to Schlussel's contempt, Spielberg showed the human side of the Israeli assassins by making them wrought with worry over the proximity of a target's wife and daughter to a bomb. Perhaps she would have preferred a movie in which the non-combatant families of terrorists were not a point of concern and blown up all the same.

Critics of Munich have also pointed out that Avner is too concerned for his family's safety. In the film, he has his family move to Brooklyn to avoid retribution for his mission. In real life, there were retaliations at embassies and aboard airplanes for the assassinations Israel carried out in the wake of Munich. Why wouldn't Avner move his family out of the line of fire?

Munich is not a paean to the Palestinian cause, despite what Horowitz, Schlussel and the rest of the right-wing hate machine think. The murders of the 11 Israeli athletes, woven throughout the film, are as vivid and gory as the Omaha Beach landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan. The athletes are appropriately shown as unwitting, albeit resistant, victims, and their murderers as bloodthirsty terrorists. Maybe the critics missed these scenes, but they do not establish Munich as an anti-Israel work. If anything, this movie is pro-Israel, but without being hyper-nationalistic.

Dennis Ross, the former U.S. envoy to the Middle East and a former visiting professor at Brandeis, gave his sober analysis of Munich to a round-table discussion hosted by the magazine Foreign Policy. Ross does not disagree with targeted killings-they have been effective in taking down leaders of Hamas and Chechnyan rebels-but says Spielberg's film gives rise to important debate on the topic.

The most forceful part of Munich was its humanity, on both sides of the fight. Some of the Black September leaders, terrible as their deeds were, were well-manicured and cultured, while the Israelis were sometimes hesitant, nervous, even regretful. It is simply an attempt to humanize the chaos in the wake of a horrid event.