I get tired of evenhandedness with scum. There is no maral equivalence between those who would kill old ladies and helpless civilians and those who would rescue them.

I'm sorry, but terrorists are slime. Take Nidal Hassan, for example. I was hired to work at the Fort Hood Darnell Medical Center as a psychiatrist before I took my other job, so I would be dead today except for luck.

Hasan lectured about cutting off the heads of infidels, he frequented exotic dancer bars, and he was, by all accounts, a very subpar clinician.

Yeah, most terrorists have limited worldviews and limited fashion and behavioral sense.

My chief problem with "Operation Thunderbolt" was with its propagandistic tone.

I knew the basic facts about the hijacking, but I've no idea if all the political insinuations/accusations/portrayals found in Golan and Reynolds' screenplay are true. The film's tone had me wondering. I believe a more sober, detached account of the events would have worked in the film's favor.

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A group of idealistic militants took a vessel by force, and threatened the lives of over one hundred randomly selected passengers, except for one common thread: all the passengers they earmarked for execution unless certain demands were met were of Jewish heritage.

Andreas intimates that there is some factual context missing from the movie. He implies that the threat by these hijackers to murder these people of Jewish ancestry could somehow be justified (just a little, just a little bit, with these words:

"Thus, Jews are either poor victims or brave warriors, while terrorists are mean, grenade-carrying people with neither raison d'être nor taste in clothes or sunglasses".

Therefore, if we knew a little about the "raison d'être" we could sympathise more with the threat to murder these Jews? The movie is deficient in this respect?

I wonder, at what point can we not just draw a line and say, group punishment of innocent civilians is just wrong, treating the matter on a case by case basis.

Andreas, if you have a moral story to tell and think you can do better, let us know when the film is finished.

In the meantime, this was an excellent relaying of the essential events of a horrifying criminal act where astonishingly the victims were spared from harm by an decisive and bold government instructing an amazingly well-trained and organised military unit.

True that not everything Israel does is beyond condemnation, but this is a nation of people who since World War II and prior have struggled to survive against some incredibly hostile actions. There are others who in turn have suffered at the hands of Israelis in their struggle to survive. Andreas, go and tell that story. But this one is a complete and neatly wrapped package, not too ambitious for the time and attention span of a mainstream cinema going audience.