We’re all thrilled by Mossad the movie

Of course we should condemn extrajudicial murder, but I still can’t help admiring Israel’s nerve


Melanie Reid
Timesonline.co.uk
18 February '10

(While misunderstanding some key points, this is not exactly what one normally hears from the U.K. and evidently she's not alone this time. A good read. Y.)

Steven Soderbergh, evidently, was only kidding when he said that there would be no Ocean’s 14. He’s plainly been hard at work filming in a hotel in Dubai, as we can see from the trailers running on News at Ten. With Mossad operatives filling in as movie extras.

Now I know we really, really shouldn’t joke about these things. I should be wearing black and have a long face and be uttering pieties about the disgraceful “extrajudicial” killing of the Hamas military chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, apparently by Israeli agents.

All nice people, quite rightly, are adopting the proper moral stance and expressing outrage and disgust at this affront to international law and justice. But the rest of us ... well, we simply can’t wait until the movie comes out. Largely thanks to the blurry CCTV pictures, there is an element to the assassination in Dubai that is appallingly irresistible. What the secret agents did — and, critically, what we saw them do — was compelling and breathtaking in its cleverness.

Box office, in other words.

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