Judith Miller
Tablet, Feb. 26, 2025
“For the first time, the whole world was watching Palestinian brutality unfold on camera and in real time.”
Dec. 7, as most members of the so-called “greatest generation” know, is the day that Franklin Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, belatedly drawing America into World War II. Similarly, most Americans, even those too young to have seen the Twin Towers collapse or smelled the stench of burning metal and flesh, know that Islamic terrorists changed history on Sept. 11 by killing over 3,000 people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within Israel and for Jews everywhere, Oct. 7 will long be remembered as the day that Hamas and other Palestinian enthusiasts slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 people hostage in coordinated incursions from Gaza.
What about Sept. 5? That date rings few memory bells, even for Americans who were able to watch television or follow the news in the fall of 1972. Some may dimly recall that on that day eight Palestinian terrorists from the militant Black September group infiltrated the Summer Olympics in Munich, killing two members of Israel’s national athletic team and taking nine others hostage. On Sept. 5, terrorism itself became a spectator sport.
That terrible event has now been rescued from obscurity by Tim Fehlbaum, the Swiss director and cowriter (with Moritz Binder and Alex David) whose film about ABC’s coverage of the attack more than deserves its sole Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Fehlbaum’s September 5 is a claustrophobic newsroom thriller. The film compresses the 22-hour-long ordeal into a taut, gripping 94 minutes. It not only chronicles an early terrorist milestone, but also explores with skill and subtlety the strengths and failures of broadcast journalism, the still evolving ethics of TV news, and the beginning of a new, harsher era of mass media…..SOURCE