Steven Spielberg, Newspeak and the Definition of a Fundamentalist
In a Newsweek roundtable Steven Spielberg lambasted members of the Jewish community who came out against his film “Munich.”
"So many fundamentalists in my own community, the Jewish community, have grown very angry at me for allowing the Palestinians simply to have dialogue and for allowing Tony Kushner to be the author of that dialogue," Spielberg said.
Ah yes those pesky 'fundamentalists' again. A fundamentalist according to Spielberg being apparently anyone who feels that using a movie about the murder of Israeli Olympic atheletes to smear Israel, based on a discredited book by a fraud with a script by Tony Kushner who had stated that he wished Israel had never existed; is wrong. This is apparently a whole new definition of Fundamentalist, meaning anyone who doesn't like Spielberg's movie is now a 'Fundamentalist'
It's yet another demonstration of Liberal Newspeak. Newspeak was the fictional politically correct langauge of George Orwell's dystopia 1984, a langauge in which it was impossible to express politically incorrect ideas and which redefined and warped the meanings of words and created entirely new ones. So too liberals speak their own langauge redefining the actual meanings of words into a specialized terminology recontextualized to their own values.
The literal meaning of fundamentalist, would be someone who holds to the fundamentals. That is indeed what Spielberg and other liberals find offensive. Someone who holds to objective values, rather than liberal relativist morality. And so 'Fundamentalist' has become a term of derision and abiding by values has become a negative quality while being prepeared to toss values aside in the name of dialogue has become praiseworthy.
How is a fundamentalist therefore defined to a liberal? A fundamentalist is anyone who holds more closely to values than the liberal does. To Spielberg that is anyone who does not believe as he does in the futility of fighting terrorism.
Tonight is Munich's Oscar night. Unfortunately for Spielberg compared to the moral relativism of such movies as Paradise Now or Brokeback Mountain, his Munich is practically the work of a; fundamentalist.