Munich, September 5, 1972
The story is well known, this still scabrous, often bleeding wound, signifying, more than anything, the indifference of world citizenry to Jewish suffering.
The Iconoclast reminds us that "On this date, September 5th, in 1972, "Palestinian" terrorists attacked the Israeli team at the Olympics in Munich, Germany. When it was over, 11 Israeli athletes and one policeman were dead."
We don't need to retell this account of the PLO terrorists' boundless brutality and German criminal incompetence in dealing with it. What we need to remind ourselves of is the indifference:
" The Olympic games continued for 12 hours after the first shooting occurred, and as the hostages were being held in the Olympic village. Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage said "the games must go on". After the failed rescue attempt, Dutch runner Jos Hermens was quoted, “You give a party, and someone is killed at the party, you don’t continue the party. I'm going home,” but few shared his feelings. During a West German soccer game before an adulatory home crowd, Jewish-sympathizer protesters displayed a sign saying "17 dead, already forgotten?" They were quickly led away by suddenly-vigilant police.
For fear of upsetting "other members of the Olympic community", little mention was made of the murdered Israelis at the 1972 games. Any proposal to honor the murdered Israelis at subsequent Olympics has been met by threats of boycott by Muslim-majority nations. To date, the IOC has refused any memorial to the dead Israelis."
The IOC is hardly known for its universalist credentials, or its intolerance for human rights atrocities.
But the more chilling was the record of German cynical and cold self-interest in the aftermath of the massacre, as reported in the documentary "One day in September":
On October 29, hijackers of a German Lufthansa passenger jet demanded the release of the three surviving terrorists, who had been arrested after the Fürstenfeldbruck gunfight and were being held for trial. Safady and the Al-Gasheys were immediately released by Germany, receiving a tumultuous welcome when they touched down in Libya and giving their own firsthand account of their operation at a press conference broadcast worldwide. In both ESPN/ABC's documentary The Tragedy of the Munich Games and in Kevin Macdonald's Academy Award-winning documentary One Day in September, it is claimed that the whole Lufthansa hijacking episode was a sham, concocted by the West Germans and Black September so that the Germans could be rid of the three Munich perpetrators. The view is that the Germans were fearful that their mishandling of the rescue attempt would be exposed to the world if the three Fürstenfeldbruck survivors had ever stood trial."
posted by The Contentious Centrist @ Saturday, September 06, 2008
5 comments
5 Comments:
My good friend Georg, just moved back to Germany from South Africa.
He has a new place in Munich.
Mahmoud Abbas was involved in organizing the financing and logistics of the Munich attack. He should be punished for it.
German criminal incompetence
What about the incompetence of the Mossad hit team that undertook the task of assassinating the terrorists.
On July 21, 1973, those Israeli criminals machine-gunned Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter (and brother of Gipsy Kings founder Chico Bouchiki), in the Norwegian resort of Lillehammer, while he was waiting for a bus with his pregnant wife. They had mistaken him for Ali Salameh, one of the Munich terrorists.
That murder is equally monstruous, not less monstruous, than the ones perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorists in Munich. There is only one legitimate way of killing a criminal -- trial and death penalty. Any other means fatally leadsto innocents being killed.
And the same happens today in Gaza -- Israeli assassination attempts that kill civilians in addition to, or, in many cases, instead of the terrorists.
However, when Munich is brought up the whole world talks about the poor Israeli athletes, and nobody says a word about the equally poor Bouchiki. Which is most curious, given that the Zionists exert absolutely no control over the press!
There are a few arguments that can be made in rebuttal of the last comment, but I'm not taking the trouble to do that, since said commenter falsely presents himself as something he is not, by his own account:
"Do you understand your objections lack any logic? I’m using the screen name Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf to say things that someone actually called Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf would be expected to say — what’s the problem? I’m not using a pseudonym to legitimate my criticism."
In the comments, here:
http://blog.z-word.com/2008/08/the-candour-of-mahmoud-darwish/
As anyone with an IQ above 60 can see, the quote above does not imply by any means that I'm not what I present myself as being.
In that decontextualized quote, I stated that my name is not Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf (in accordance with the Internet tradition of not using one's real name); and I also stated that I say things someone called Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf would be expected to say.
The context of the quote is an argument I was making that whether I'm an Arab or not is a moot point, after the Contentious Centrist charged me with trying to gain moral authority by presenting myself as an Arab. My argument, which is quite logical, is that I can't be seeking moral authority, because no one confers moral authority on someone who defends the positions he's expected to defend as an interested party. An American defending the US's role in Iraq, for instance, does not gain credibility because he's an American. Quite on the contrary.
That said, and even if it's a moot point, I state that I'm an Argentinian of Arab descent. The Contentious Centrist's utterly undocumented insistence that I'm not is just proof that Internet provides ample room for people to make claims based on absolutely nothing.
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