The lack of backbone in bowing to pressure from Arab and Muslim nations over a moment of the Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 games by Palestinians is nauseating.
While there was a moment of silence for British war dead (appropriate, no doubt), yesterday’s Opening Ceremonies were a perfect arena to have a commemoration for the victims of an attack perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists forty years ago, and to refocus on the fact that the Olympic Games, by definition, are supposed to supersede international conflict.
But no. The IOC predictably folded. And it gets worse. (Poll follows).
The IOC didn’t just deny a moment of silence, but went out of their way to placate and empower the Lebanese Judo team so they won’t get “Jew Cooties” (H/T Iowahawk).
The IOC, again, simply cannot make a decision based in actual justice, common sense, and morality as opposed to fear of threats from people who apparently still support the murder of these athletes in 1972.
According to several Hebrew sports sites, the two teams were scheduled to use the same gym and mats at London’s new ExCeL center for their final preparations. However, the delegation from Lebanon would not train in view of the Israeli team, and insisted some sort of barrier be placed between them.Organizers accepted the Lebanese coach’s demand to separate the teams, erecting a barrier so that the Lebanese team wouldn’t see the Israeli one.
Benjamin Weinthal over at NRO described this abomination quite well, and also gave a widow of an Israeli terror victim a chance to beautifully humiliate Jaques Rogge. Emphasis mine.
Why exactly is the IOC opposed to a rather modest attempt to commemorate the victims of terror? According to Ankie Spitzer, the widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who was murdered by the Palestinian Black September group in 1972, IOC president Jacques Rogge capitulated to the 46-member bloc of Arab and Muslim countries because of the threat of Arab countries to boycott participation in the Games.Spitzer, who jumpstarted an international campaign to garner a minute of silence at the London games, reported that Rogge told her that “his hands were tied” by the influence of the 46-member group.
Her rejoinder to Rogge: “No, my husband’s hands were tied, not yours.”
Spitzer claims that the IOC balked because 21 Arab delegations are prepared to leave the Games if a public commemoration event took place. Her response to the IOC: “Let them leave if they can’t understand what the Olympics are all about – a connection between people through sport.”
So, thanks, IOC for empowering absolute bullshit like this.
A moment of silence for Olympic athletes murdered in cold blood by Palestinan terrorists 40 years ago prompting a threat to leave the games?
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
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… why this year, given that the tragedy was 40 years ago? Were there other efforts to have a moment of silence at prior olympics, like the 20th anniversary? (This isn’t a rhetorical question – I actually don’t know what the answer is, in large part because I never follow the olympics much, thinking most of the sports involved are stupid ones like “luge” or ice frolicking.)
Hate to say it ellbee but this issue has way more to do with current world politics, the US Presidential elections, and rampant Islamaphobia, than it has to do with honoring the fallen athletes from 1972 . . . but, you knew that already, huh?
It’s a fantastic “gotcha,” though. Have fun.
Nope.
Who is asking to have (and receiving) a curtain put up between themselves and another group of athletes?
How many times have Iranian or other athletes refused to compete against Israelis?
When’s the last moment of silence for these athletes at an Olympic opening ceremony?
As a matter of fact, this request is nothing new. There has been an ongoing effort for 40 years, according to Andrei Spitzer’s wife.
You can read her full statement at change.org. There are over 110,000 signatures on their petition requesting a moment of silence at this year’s opening ceremonies.
From multiple sources that I have read, the Israeli families have made the same request at every summer Olympics and every request has been denied. Moments of silence have been honored at other events in past years, including an event earlier this week but never at opening ceremonies.
The Washington Post had this to say:
… because while I’m in favor, I’d be troubled if the effort had just been drummed up this year to make some sort of political point.
. . . shame on the IOC for not bowing to our demands.
If you can’t bring Mohammed to our implacable molehill, it must be because all Muslims “apparently still” (because they obviously once did, right?) support the murder of Israeli athletes . . . Did I get that right, ellbee?
They might just not accept Israel’s right to exist.
Nevertheless, either something’s abhorrent, or it’s not.
The IOC should have let them walk.
so much about remembering (better, or again) the 1972 athletes, but about recognizing Israel’s unilateral “right” to ever expanding settlements and borders?
PS – who’s “them,” specifically?
PPS — wouldn’t it make just about as much sense to blame the AFL-CIO for Britain’s “shameful” decision here, as the IOC?
On a positive note, I think the Olympics and the IOC do a fabulous job in keeping the games as non-political as possible, given all of the many political possibilities and concerns that are faced by nearly every competing country. I think it would be very easy for things to be much worse than you want to make us believe they are.
Obviously, I directly called for a moment of silence to honor Israel’s right to as much lebensraum as they would like to have.
To PS: Specifically refers to the countries that threatened to leave the Olympics over it.
To PPS: No. The IOC is in charge of the opening ceremonies.
The IOC bears some responsibility for the 1972 event, IMO.
for all the Palestinians who have been gunned down or bulldozed from their ancestral homes so that these illegal immigrants with US firepower can confiscate even more land than was originally granted to them?
If you want to honor innocents murdered by terrorists, you should include the whole list.
You shouldn’t expect other people to pay tribute to your cause.
If Christian Bale had never gone to visit shooting victims like the social media posts wanted, it wouldn’t have meant he didn’t care about them.
I would never expect someone else to memorialize someone I cared about. I would ask, and I have asked, and it’s understandable when people say, “No thanks.”
The IOC is all about international sports and that’s all it wants to be about.
If elbee, iowahawk, Weinthal or Spitzer want to memorialize the victims of the Munich attacks then it’s up to them to do it, not the IOC.
So can you elaborate?
Who is it, in the international community that doesn’t care about what happened in 1972 that would being forced to observe a moment of silence? Is a moment of silence a lot to ask someone to participate in to mark the butchering of 11 amateur athletes, coaches, and a German policeman?
Hey, they commemorated the British NHS at the opening ceremonies. Is that “all about international sports”?
The tributes to the British war dead and the NHS were done by the British. That was the host country showing off and celebrating their culture. It was not the IOC that did it.
And again, if you are asking someone to do something they can say “No.”
If I ask you to wear a blue and black rubber bracelet and you say, “No.” does that mean you don’t care about cops? Of course not.
If I ask you to donate $5 to the USO and you say, “No.” does that mean you don’t care about the troops? Of course not.
I could come up with examples like that all day. If you ask someone to support your cause, they can say “No.” and still be decent people.
What would hypothetical opposition be to taking a moment of silence to honor the dead Israelis? Who would be opposed to something like that, and why, hypothetically?
It seems to be a pretty enormous common-sense divide between a moment of silence and asking for financial support of a cause, no?
Here’s what the IOC contributes to the opening ceremony:
-Head of state declares the beginning of the Olympics.
-Parade of Nations
-Olympic flag
-There should be a torch
That’s it. Nothing else. If the host country wants to do stuff, they can do that, but the IOC will ask for nothing more.
…That would be my answer.
BTW, I also don’t participate in the “Retweet for a cause” on Twitter or the “Like this for a cause” on Facebook because I don’t want to. It doesn’t mean I’m against supporting those causes, I just don’t want to do it that way.
Hold it, you mean all them Anglo-Saxons that Willard’s so tight with?. . . now we’re getting to the root of this slighting.
Shame on Willard for not exerting more effort, charm, and personal influence to pressure his peers. If he hadn’t botched himself so badly earlier, maybe they would have listened to him on this. I guess it’s this kind of weak, apologetic, handling of important foreign affairs that we could expect from a Willard Presiduncey.
Really?
You’re one of the smartest, most trenchant posters on here. When did you start with the names?
Y’know, because Israel keeps INVADING them for various illegal reasons? And when they’re not sending their military across the border, the random bombings and artillery shelling just might be another reason?
I think the IOC kept the peace by keeping two sides separated. Otherwise it might have been an UFC rumble prior to
That would only happen if the Lebanese allowed the Iranian judo team to come to their practice side, sneaking over to the Israeli side and start doing balls kicks on the Israeli team’s waterboys.
Didn’t Lebanon used to be peaceful and beautiful? What happened?
Didn’t Lebanon used to be peaceful and beautiful? What happened?
I dunno, maybe they got tired of Israel blowing the shit out of their country every time they feel like it?
Maybe they’ll get pissed again when Israel invades because (in retaliation for an attack in Bulgaria)(when the Syrian revolution happens they need some more real estate)(because if Iran does something they don’t like)(other). Choose your insane and senseless reason.
They just hate having people get kidnapped, rockets falling in civilian areas, etc.
So unreasonable.
WTF are you doing posting on Pols on a beautiful weekend day? Wait….what am I doing post….
Have a good one, Dan. I’m out to plan the big Buff creek ride tomorrow.
…and I’m off to get ready for a brief trip to the mountains. And I have been outside, to work on a dropped gate in the back yard…
Yes, when someone gets kidnapped, the totally appropriate thing to do is drop cluster bombs and artillery barrages on neighborhoods that have the diabolical link to Hamas of being in between them and the Israeli border.
In fact, maybe the US should adopt these tactics! The next time someone gets carjacked in Montbello, let’s call in an airstrike and fire mission on the whole neighborhood, and flatten it to teach those evil criminals a lesson.
… if Montbello were in another country whose government was unable/unwilling to do anything about long-term bombings (not carjacking). I’m against most wars, but when your country is actually attacked from neighboring soil, that basically bears no resemblance to a domestic carjacking.
..if Hezbollah were the government of Lebanon.
Instead, they’re a terrorist group that operates among the population in the southern part of Lebanon, and most of the time they set themselves up in the civilian population that wants nothing to do with them.
Kinda tough to tell the goons to leave when they’re armed and your not. And it’s even harder to survive when the Israeli Army decides that you’re a collaborator when you don’t fight back, and carpet-bombs your neighborhood.
I mean, Lebanon is entitled to boycott like the U.S. and USSR used to do to each other; but if you show up, you accept that you’re competing against each other in the same room without a DMZ. That’s kind of the whole point of the olympics.
We can love our home country, wave the flag, disagree with others leaders and the policies of others governments, but extraordinary athletes can come together in a spirit of nonviolent competition and grow together.
The 1972 Munich games are a blight on that spirit and should be acknowledged as such. This is not about Lebanon claims against Israel, the Palestinian homeland or Hezbollah rocket attacks. This is about what happened to athletes who came to compete, not to make war, at an Olympics 40 years ago. It wasn’t just a crime against Israel or the athletes, it was a crime against the spirit of the Olympics and it needs to be acknowledged.
I think having a moment of silence once for athletes who were murdered during the Olympics is a reasonable request. If it had been American athletes killed there would have been one well before now.
And yes, there are a lot of points raised above on both sides. But this really should just be about athletes killed in a previous game. Because bringing the rest in then is basically opening the question – were the murders an acceptable response. And the answer to that should be absolutely no.
20 minutes in more a moment of silence? Can we pause “Happy Birthday” songs at Chuck E Cheese in commemoration of that dude’s victims in Aurora?
A moment of silence is an essentially meaningless thing. How is any victim’s family supposed to be helped by it? If the IOC wants to do it, fine. But what would it accomplish?
Let’s have a moment of silence on the blog. Nobody post anything Monday morning between 9:00 am and 9:01 am. Now it’s a thing; are you going to get pissed when National Review fails to follow suit?
It’s strange how people invent things to worry about when we have real problems. Comfort the victims, prosecute the attackers, and move on. Don’t waste time with stunts.
at 5:30 p.m. on every July 28th from now on, to commemorate your comment. And if the Muslim Brotherhood wants to stop me, I’ll expect elbee to get upset about that.
TO continue your analogy, it would be like Pols then enforcing the moment of silence because I told them I’d leave if they didn’t.
like Pols not allowing the moment of silence because you told them you’d leave if they did?
Let’s just say that the analogy would be Pols standing in the way of not allowing a moment of no one saying anything unless someone didn’t threaten to not post if they didn’t. Or did … one or the other.
Meaningless gestures that help no one. Not the victims. Not the relatives. Not the antagonists. Not the world. It offers no absolution or reconciliation. Just more victimization outrage by assholes who don’t have any perspective other than their own hatreds. This isn’t about healing the world. It’s about one asshole being an asshole. The Olympic movement survived Munich. It will survive this asshole’s victimization outrage.
Let it be.
Pretty sure the Broncos don’t train on the same field as the Iggles, which is obviously evidence of extreme anti-Philly bias in Colorado. I think I’ll go occupy the stadium in protest.
The fact that ellbee equates these two stories suggests he doesn’t really believe either is terribly important.
Since it seems this has been an ongoing issue at each Olympics do we know if Mitt appeased the pan-Arab demands or did he stand up for Israel then … kinda pertinent given his gaffe-mania tour.
The Olympics had a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11 in 2002.
Unfortunately, that must have been a
I’m sure there were many at that time who were offended to have been asked for a moment of silence for those victims, as well.
http://articles.chicagotribune…
Now that it has the potential to hurt Romney a tiny bit, can you agree that it’s not important?
(quoting you, ellie)
What part of the word “refocus” did you mean not to include? Which word in “supersede international conflict” did you include by mistake? Do you read your own shit?
All this mandatory moment of silence would have done would have been to refocus on international conflict to the detriment of the spirit of sport competition. The way to supersede a 40-year old event is to move on. The time for your mandated moment of silence was 36 or 38 years ago, the proximate appropriate Olympic meeting. Ok, the next summer Olympics, we should have a moment of silence in memory of not having a moment of silence this year? This “refocusing” could go on forever.
But feel free, ellie, to keep your own, voluntary silence for whatever you feel is warranted whenever you wish.
not ellie…correct? I don’t see a post by ellie on this thread.
There’s also no reason to get up in arms that they didn’t. There was no moment of silence on the 30th anniversary.
A decision was made not to acquiesce to a clearly politically motivated request. To confirm that it was politically motivated, one has only to look (as I just did) at Israel’s news coverage of the IOC’s refusal. They make clear that Israel feels the moment of silence was an honor Israel was entitled to request in order to remind the world of Palestinian violence, and that denying their request was, in effect, choosing sides against Israel. It’s nothing to do with the murdered athletes or their families; it’s just another demand for a Western nation to pay tribute to Israel.
I’m not unsympathetic to Israel, by the way. As someone of Jewish heritage myself, I feel very empathetic toward their position as the world’s only Jewish nation, surrounded by countries that would like to see Israel “wiped off the map.” They’re in a tough position. However, their government’s unending demands for recognition by other nations became excessive years ago. Israel has begun to remind me of a child who needs constant praise and validation. Why should every presidential candidate in the US have to prove to the nation that they’re supportive “enough” of Israel? Israel is just one of our many allies.
This is much ado about nothing–and that’s exactly what Israel wanted when they made an issue of this. Turn the Olympics into another occasion to talk about poor, downtrodden Israel. Yawn.