WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of Palestinian Arab terrorists’ hostage-taking and murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Among all the terrorist attacks on Israelis, this Munich massacre and its aftermath stand out for world failure, indeed refusal, to stand against murderous attacks upon Jews. In world nonfeasance and malfeasance, if not in absolute number of victims, it was a Holocaust sequel.
A Fiftieth Anniversary To Remember: 6,000,011
This past week, the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israelis, British Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp wrote in a Gatestone article, There We Will Strike Them: The Munich Massacre and Its Aftermath, about the “eight Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists, using the cover name ‘Black September,’” who “tortured and murdered 11 Israeli athletes” at the 1972 Munich Olympics, “emasculating one of them as he lay dying in front of his team-mates.”
Numerous Palestinian Arab attacks on Israelis have claimed more innocent victims, but what makes this particular attack vividly stand out as a unique symbol, an icon, of world disregard for Jews’ right to be free from terrorists’ attacks is the especially egregious disregard displayed for that right, and craven caving to Jew-murdering terrorists, not just by Germany but by much of the world during and after this murderous Munich Olympics assault. Kemp’s “I accuse” article enumerated point after point:
*** Israel refused to bow to the terrorists’ demand that it release 234 terrorist prisoners, “branding it blackmail,” but Germany “offered safe passage and unlimited cash to the terrorists, which they turned down.”
*** “Even as the attack unfolded, Avery Brundage, chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), insisted that the games must go on. While two Israelis lay dead and nine were held at gunpoint, the first athletic event of the day began on schedule, with German precision, at 8:15 AM. Brundage only agreed to a suspension 12 hours after the assault began, and following a brief pause, the sports proceeded as though nothing had happened.” Israelis’ distress in witnessing the arrival of 11 coffins in Israel was “heightened by the decision to continue with the games, as though the massacre of Jews in Europe could again be simply brushed aside.”
*** “The IDF special forces unit … had been poised to mount a rescue operation, but the German government refused to allow them into the country and hubristically rejected advice from the chiefs of Mossad and Shin Bet who had flown in,” while the Germans’ own rescue effort was “a disastrously botched German attempt to ambush the killers.”
*** “Addressing a memorial service the day after the murders, Brundage, who had successfully fought against a US boycott of the Nazi Berlin Olympics in 1936 over persecution of Jews, outrageously belittled the murder of the 11 Israelis. A request by the German chancellor to half-mast national flags at the games was rescinded after Arab countries refused to comply.”
*** Following immediate responsive Israeli action against PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon, “a resolution at the UN Security Council on 10th September calling on Israel to halt its military operations in Syria and Lebanon, while pointedly making no mention of the Munich massacre, was vetoed by the US against strong protests from the Soviet Union and China.” The US delegate “said the resolution ignored realities and ‘looked to effect not cause.’”
*** Less than two months after the Olympics, “a Lufthansa flight from Beirut to Frankfort was hijacked by Palestinians demanding the release of the three terrorists who had survived in Munich. The German government immediately paid a $9 million ransom and released the men,” who were flown to Libya, “where they received a hero’s welcome.” Some experts, including the Mossad chief at the time, “accused the German government of paying the PLO to stage the hijacking to give cover for release of the terrorists. That version was also confirmed in an interview with the self-confessed leader of the Munich massacre, Abu Daoud.”
*** An April 1973 Israeli raid in Lebanon killed three PLO leaders and around 50 other terrorists. “The next day, Walter Nowak, German ambassador in Beirut, condemned the assault. Scandalously, just six months after Munich, he had been meeting with one of the Black September leaders killed in the IDF raid, Abu Youssef, himself an organizer of the massacre, to offer the prospect of creating ‘a new basis of trust’ between the PLO and the German government.”
*** “In 1977, French authorities arrested Abu Daoud, the terrorist leader. They asked whether Germany wanted him extradited but the Germans declined. The French government, worried about the potential for attacks on their own soil as a result of holding him allowed Daoud to fly to Algeria a few days later in the face of strong protests from Israel and the US and praise from the Soviet Union. Until his death, he boasted about the massacre he had organized.”
Kemp summed up:
“Munich is sometimes thought of as Israel’s 9/11. Fifty years on, the trauma of the 1972 massacre remains etched deep into the minds of every Israeli and of many beyond who had watched it unfold with heart-breaking anguish.”
I’d push Kemp’s conclusion a little step further. Munich’s a telling sequel to the world’s utter failure, indeed refusal, to come to the aid of the Jews during the Holocaust. By the numbers, 6,000,011.