"This Is About Jew Hatred": A Resounding Condemnation Of The Leftist & Islamist War On Israel (video)

Bravo, Canadian broadcaster Michael Coren! This is stupendous!

(Hat tip: reader Ian)

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Rogge

How odious the International Olympic Committee's refusal to commemorate the eleven Israeli Olympians massacred 40 years ago is was brought home to me when I watched part of the opening ceremony, and saw that other victims were commemorated.

Outrage at the double standards involved has been well expressed by Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who states on Facebook:

'We were deeply disappointed that the IOC did not see fit to remember during the Opening Ceremony the eleven Israeli athletes murdered during the Munich Olympic Games 40 years ago. Only a few days we were told by IOC President Jacques Rogge that "the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident". However, the Opening Ceremony did include moments of silence and respect for those British citizens who died during terror attacks. We can only conclude that Rogge meant that the opening ceremony was not fit to remember a tragic incident involving Israelis.

On Friday night, Rogge finally ran out of excuses. He said a minute silence was not part of the protocol, yet many previous Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies held a minute silence. It was claimed that it was too political, yet many political causes have been remembered and utilized during opening ceremonies. Finally, he used this his card, that it was not an atmosphere fit to remember such a tragic incident, yet other tragic incidents were remembered.

On Friday night, Rogge lost our respect and lost his ability to legitimately represent the Olympic ideal that all are equal in the international family of nations. He was exposed as a hypocrite and as someone who was led by political interests and not the interests of the Olympic Games whose darkest moment saw eleven Israeli athletes tortured and murdered in the Olympic Village, during the Olympic Games under the auspices and supposed protection of the IOC.'

And as Tom Gross (in the course of a series of most illuminating pieces about the IOC, Jews, and Israel) points out:

'For 40 years, the IOC has refused to commemorate the Israeli victims with a minute of silence.It claims it is “not a political organization”. But the IOC president spoke about the Bosnian war at the opening ceremony of the 1996 games. And the 2002 Winter Olympic games opened with a minute of silence for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Yet when it comes to honoring Olympic athletes murdered at the Olympics itself, it is a different story.

"There is only one explanation for it,” said the widow of the one those murdered. “It is because they are Israeli."

The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. Congress also said last week: "We know why the IOC has refused our request for a minute’s silence: Because the murdered Olympians were Israeli."

 At the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, a minute’s silence was held for a Georgian athlete who had died in a luge sled training accident before the games. Jacques Rogge, the IOC president who has refused to hold a minute’s silence for the murdered Israeli athletes, officiated."'

Further evidence that the Olympic spirit does not extend to Israelis has been seen not only in the refusal of the Lebanese judo team to train alongside Israelis, but in the fact that (despite all the blather about "The Olympic Family" made by Olympic organisers at press conferences), Olympic officials willingly obliged tby screening the Israelis from the Lebanese team's view: "they can't see us, but they will smell us," observed an Israeli archly.

And a Tunisian swimmer withdrew from a race in which an Israeli competed, provoking whoos of delight from Israel-demonising westerners like this piece of ignorant prejudice from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Facebook:

"Congratulations to Tunisian swimmer Taqi Murabit who refused to compete today in the pool at London 2012 due to the presence of an Israeli competitor in his heat who is a member of the Israeli Air Force which routinely bombs occupied Palestine."

Stand & Deliver For Israel's Slain Olympians

The London Jewish Chronicle reveals the substance of a distressing meeting that the widows of two of the eleven murdered members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team have had in London with Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee.

The widows of Andrei Spitzer,who was the team's fencing coach, and of Yossef Romano, who was a weightlifter, handed Rogge  a petition, signed by 105,000 people, that requested a minute's silence for the Israeli victims 40 years after their deaths in Munich at the hands of terrorists.

But despite the widows' heart-wrenching pleas Rogge remained adamant that there will be no such mark of respect at the opening of this year's games.
Inter alia, Mrs Spitzer told the Jewish Chronicle:

"I asked him 'is it because they were Israelis?' and he didn't answer."

A reaction from the IOU president that is eloquent in its silence.

Earlier, Mrs Spitzer said regarding the IOC's stance:

"In London we are told that it is not in the protocol of the opening ceremony. I'm sure it is not in the protocol that our husbands went home in coffins.  We just want them to be remembered as athletes, they don't have to say Israelis. As members of the Olympic family they should be honoured at the Olympics."

She called on ticketholders to mark the anniversary by rising to their feet for a moment when Rogge speaks at the Opening Ceremony.

As José Maria Aznar observed in a crackerjack article in the London Times (24 July) that roundly denounced Israel's exclusion from the recent Global Counter-Terrorism Forum in Istanbul:

"Remembering is important, first, because of the victims, but also because many Europeans adopted the wrong attitude towards Palestinian terrorism after the Munich attack. The culprits who were arrested were later quietly released for fear of further attacks. And because of that initial fear the terrorists knew how to take advantage of the situation and to press for more rewards.

.... Terrorism is not a natural phenomenon; it doesn't happen spontaneously; it's not something ethereal. It can and must be fought using all the tools provided by the law and democracy - and most importantly, it can be defeated if there is the will to defeat it. Israel has provided ample proof that it possesses that will, since its own existence is at stake.

To marginalise or isolate Israel to avoid irritating Turkey is a big mistake. All of the Middle East, from Morocco to the Gulf, is undergoing profound, although not always peaceful, change, which is yielding very disturbing results. Although the elections in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are something new and promising for the region, Syria is immersed in civil war and there is a danger that the region's largest arsenal of chemical weapons will spin out of control and become available to anyone - as happened with Libya's portable anti-aircraft missiles, which disappeared after the fall of of Colonel Gaddafi.

 In Egypt, the rise of Islamism threatens economic and political stability. Hezbollah is still in Lebanon, keeping alive its goal of eliminating Israel –  just as members of Hamas do in Gaza. Despite sanctions, Iran is moving forward with the development of a nuclear bomb in its effort to become the regional leader and to export its Islamist and revolutionary ideology as widely as possible. There are also other areas in turmoil that directly affect Europe, such as the Sahel region of Africa, south of the Sahara, which is now becoming dominated by al-Qaeda.

Isolation not only renders Israel weaker against its enemies, but also makes all Westerners weaker.  And the practitioners of terrorism know all too well how to exploit our differences.

Remembering Munich 40 years on should be a useful reminder of our successes and failures. It should help us to enhance our collective abilities to fight terrorism. Israel is key in this fight.Israel is a part of the West. Israel is not the problem; it is part of the solution. We will become the problem if we continue to cold-shoulder Israel, the country most affected by terrorism and, possibly, the one that knows best how to defeat it...."

To quote the British Zionist Federation:

"As you are aware, there have been a number of campaigns urging the IOC to hold a minutes’ silence during the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. Unfortunately the IOC has decided against this commemoration. So, the Zionist Federation UK is inviting you to join us in remembering the 11 murdered Israeli Athletes.

On the morning of the Opening Ceremony, 27th July, we are asking people all over the world to stop for one minute and stand in silence as a personal tribute to those who lost their lives in the 1972 Munich Massacre. Wherever you may be and whatever you may be doing, please join us and stand in silence for one minute in silence as we remember.

We will also be holding a short memorial service that will be streamed live via a webcast from 10.45am. You will be able to view this at www.minuteformunich.org.."

See also

To The International Olympic Committee's Shame, No Minute's Silence For The Murdered Israeli Athletes

I'm impressed by this article, entitled "Stolen Lives, Stolen Minute," by Melbourne lawyer and Jewish communal figure Jack Chrapot, which comes courtesy of the antipodean J-Wire service,  and am taking the liberty of reproducing it in full.

Write Jack Chrapot:

'In less than two months, the Games of the XXX Olympiad will take place in London; a sporting pageant featuring athletes from over 200 nations competing in 26 sports and a total of 39 disciplines. The programme will cover nineteen days and hundreds of hours of competition and yet, the International Olympic Committee cannot find a minute to spare during the Games to honour the memory of the eleven Israeli athletes murdered by Palestinian terrorists forty years ago at Munich.

The organisers would no doubt insist that their refusal of such a request on behalf of relatives of the athletes has nothing to do with politics or the fact that Arab and Muslim countries make up more than a quarter of the participating nations or to avoid embarrassment to the Palestinian contingent which is competing at the games under its own flag and whose current president, Mahmoud Abbas, was responsible for the financing of the Munich attack.

IOC spokesman Andrew Mitchell says that "the victims are honored on a regular basis by the IOC and the Olympic movement, for instance, on the occasion of IOC sessions," but such sessions are not public and the victims and their relatives deserve more respect.

As a recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post noted:

“a moment of silence does not seem to be too much to ask, especially considering the brutality of the murders and the fact that the victims were killed not on the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but rather inside the Olympic village as participants in the Games" 

It should be remembered that when Baron Pierre de Coubertin established the modern Olympic movement at the end of the 19th century, his goal was to use the Games to build a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sports. He wanted to create opportunities for sport to be practiced without discrimination.

Regrettably, while the IOC’s insensitive stand in not honouring the slain victims of the Munich massacre runs counter to the ideal of the Olympic spirit, this is nothing new when it comes to the Jewish People and the Olympics.

The Games of the XI Olympiad which were held in Berlin in 1936 were a propaganda triumph for the Nazi regime after an IOC edict that "in principle the German Jews would not be excluded from the Games of the XI Olympiad" went unheeded.

For more than three years after his accession to the Chancellorship, Adolph Hitler waged a relentless war against the Jews. Their stores, businesses and professionals were subjected to a State-sponsored boycott and they were systematically purged from the public service and later from the arts, theatre, media and sports.

Julius Streicher wrote in Der Sturmer: "We need waste no words here. Jews are Jews and there is no place for them in German sports".  One young Jewish sportsman, Fritz Rosenfelder, took his life after he was expelled from his Wurtemburg athletics club.

By the summer of 1936 when the Games were held, half of the Jewish workforce was unemployed. It was only a matter of time before Jews would not only be deprived of the amenities of life but also of its necessities. The seeds of the Endlosung ("Final Solution") were being sown.

Still, the propaganda value of the Games was far too valuable for the Nazis who engaged Josef Goebbels to ensure that the facade of German grandeur would overshadow the degradation to which the Jews were being subjected.

Their cause was not helped by an investigation by Avery Brundage, then president of the United States Olympic Committee, into the position of the Jewish athlete in Germany. Brundage interviewed German Jewish leaders (heavily chaperoned by Nazis) and concluded there was no cause for concern. It should be noted that Brundage had a share in Montecito Country Club in Santa Barbara, California – a club that admitted no Jews and no blacks to the ranks of its members.

The Berlin Games opened on 1 August, 1936 with the Greek, Spiridon Louis who won the first modern Olympic Marathon race, presenting the Fuehrer with an olive branch from the sacred grove at Olympia – the symbol of peace.

Of course, the boycotts and the oppression led to something far more sinister but the world was more consumed with happier days and with getting itself out of economic depression than with the Nazis and their threats against the Jewish people.

The Berlin Games were the world’s first major sporting tragedy and the irony was not lost when Jewish athletes were massacred again on German soil 36 years later in Munich.

The world has changed again since Munich and there are those who would prefer us to forget the lessons of the two Olympic tragedies. There are those who would revive the boycott in business, the arts, the theatre and in sports but this time they call for a boycott of the Jewish State. Some of them would prefer not to let the world know that their objectives are to deligitimise and ultimately destroy that State while others still, attempt to make light of the nature of the threats posed by those who fire missiles at Israeli citizens or threaten it with nuclear annihilation.

There are those who even seek to downplay the horrors of the past and to airbrush out of existence the murders such as those committed in Munich in 1972 in front of the world and in the eyes of those who gathered at a sporting event convened in the name of peace.

This is a report from the Guardian (whose sports journalists put its political writers to shame these days) and it covers the event well: Stunning Olympic Moments: Munich 1972.

By 1972, Avery Brundage had risen to the presidency of the IOC and I have often wondered what thoughts must have gone through his mind when he sat stone faced as the orchestra played Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the Munich Olympic Stadium, a matter of a few kilometres away from the ovens of Dachau.

But even under Brundage’s reign at the IOC, they put the Games on hold for a few hours in memory of athletes whose lives were stolen in Munich. Today, to their everlasting shame, they won’t spare a minute for them.'

(Jack Chrapot is a Melbourne lawyer and a member of the Zionist Council of Victoria's Executive. He is also a Maccabi Hall of Famer and served on the Executive of Maccabi Victoria, the Ajax Football Club, the Ajax Junior Football Club (AJFC) and the Ajax Maccabi Athletics Club and is a life member of the AJFC and the South Metro Junior Football League. The views expressed are his own.) 

Cross-posted from here

Please Urge A Minute's Silence At The Olympics For Israel's Murdered Athletes (video)

Here is an eloquent plea from Israel's personable deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, calling for a minute's silence at this summer's Olympics in commemoration of the Israeli team so brutally done to death in Munich 40 years ago.

To sign the petition please press on this link:

To go to the JustOneMinute Facebook page press here:

 (Hat tip: reader Ian)