In an interview with the German newspaper Spiegel linked on Drudge, Steven Spielberg denies the obvious implication of the closing shot of “Munich”:

SPIEGEL: In a long closing sequence you show the — then still standing — Twin Towers of Manhattan, implying that you see a link between September 5, 1972 in Munich and September 11, 2001 in New York.

SPIELBERG: I don’t think that these acts can be compared in terms of their perpetrators. There is no connection between the Palestinian terror of that time and the al-Qaida terror of today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jihadism have nothing to do with each other.

So why does the film make the implicit — and facile — comparison? Spielberg told Time that he had to show the World Trade Center because it was still standing during the period portrayed in the movie, but the camera lingers on the towers in a closing shot that was obviously meant to have some larger meaning. Denying it now won’t change that fact.