The ''Klinghoffer'' opera, of course, predated the terrorist attacks, but the British director Penny Woolcock turns it into an almost realist film, complete with historical film clips as well as 9/11-inspired scenes showing the recent spread of Islamic fundamentalism. The terror attacks may also have tempered the opera's impulse to treat the Jewish characters as banal materialists (in contrast with the more ''authentic'' Palestinians). One offensive episode from the original opera, in which a bourgeois Jewish family squabbles over souvenirs, bowel movements and matchmaking, was deleted from the 1993 Nonesuch recording and is omitted here.

But ''Klinghoffer,'' a more serious example than ''24,'' looks far worse in the light of 9/11, which makes its skewed perspective (regularly hailed as even-handed) even more obvious. The opera is based on the idea that the ''root cause'' of Palestinian terrorism is Jewish sins; it accepts the terrorists' account of grievance and offers no alternative. The opening Palestinian chorus displays an elegiac historical consciousness; the opening Jewish chorus displays nothing more than the perspective of a sentimental tourist and reveals no compelling claims on our attention or sympathy.

The film, affected perhaps by 9/11, makes the terrorists seem more misguided, but paradoxically, it also amplifies their grievances. As the Palestinians sing, a group of young Jews chase innocent Palestinians from a pastoral village on the day after the founding of Israel in 1948, clubbing innocents, shooting rifles. The Achille Lauro terrorists, Ms. Woolcock suggests, have their origins in those brutalized families. Meanwhile the Jews, as victims of the Nazis, are given their own historical vignette in which they are similarly chased from their homes, only to arrive in Palestine. In Ms. Woolcock's invented scenario, a survivor, a tattooed camp number on his arm, viciously attacks the Arabs.

Thus the film affirms two ideas now commonplace among radical critics of Israel: that Jews acted like Nazis, and that refugees from the Holocaust were instrumental in the founding of the state, visiting upon Palestinians the sins of others.

But these ideas are both grotesque and mistaken. The Holocaust provided just the final spur in the creation of Israel. Major Jewish immigrations and land purchases in Palestine took place during the preceding half-century. (The majority of Jerusalem's population had been Jewish for hundreds of years.)

As for Palestinian refugees, historians have shown that after Arab countries rejected the United Nations' partition of Palestine, during months of intense battles in 1947 and 1948, life became difficult for the intermingled populations and for Arab villages. Most of the 700,000 or so refugees left, as refugees have in wars immemorial, because of fear and economic disruption; many left with the encouragement of Arab leaders, many in the midst of war, and some, yes, at Israeli gunpoint.

But Ms. Woolcock and the opera's creators unquestioningly accept the injustice theory of terrorism: the idea that it is a response to a grievous wrong. But 9/11 showed what should have been clear long before: religious delusion, cultivated hatred and totalitarian ambitions create a terrorist culture; the perception of injustice may or may not be justified. The film resists seeing such complications.

In comparison with this, of course, ''24'' seems a romp; its ideas must be taken less seriously because of its pop culture ''Perils of Pauline'' cliff-hanger absurdities. But it is still remarkably telling how uncomfortable the series becomes with the burdens of 9/11: no sooner is the Islamic bomb found and safely exploded, than Americans become the bad guys.

Regardless of what twists have taken place in the final two episodes, the die has already been cast. Americans have rioted, assaulting Arabs. And it is revealed that a conspiracy of right-wing Americans lurks behind the terrorists. These conspirators, who capture and torture Bauer, include a wealthy oil man who wants a war in the Middle East to increase his profits. They forge evidence implicating three Arab countries in the atomic bomb plot. And when the president begins to waffle on war because he thinks that the evidence is indeed fake, the vice president stages a constitutional coup.

Absurd, yes, but the charge is familiar: the war on terror is a corrupt war waged for oil, in which Americans are the terrorists. The plot of ''24,'' a pop-thriller version of power-drunk war mongers, resembles Noam Chomsky's nightmare version of America. Its origins are also similar: the country's flaws are transformed into exaggerated evils, inspiring sweeping indictments. So recent examples of American fallibility, at most -- a large deal with Halliburton, a document that an intelligence agency faked, scattered incidents of prejudice -- inspire self-disgust, melodrama and apocalyptic warnings of systemic rot. And terrorist guilt is mitigated.

In such a world Jack Bauer would do little good on the deck of the Achille Lauro unless he eliminated such fantastical ''root causes.'' Not likely. But as these works of culture high and low demonstrate, whatever happens now in the war on terror, the war about terror is bound to continue.