Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Olympians, take a stand


Olympians, take a stand


Eli Sahar




I will not be watching the Olympics opening ceremony due to the sanctity of Shabbat (and kudos to our president for deciding to stay in Israel rather than attend the ceremony for precisely that reason). Come Saturday night, I would really like to hear that there was a scandal at the ceremony: that the Israeli delegation waved flags bearing the photos of the victims of the 1972 terror attack at the Munich Olympics, and that when the delegation passed by the stage, the entire delegation stood in place for at least 30 seconds in memory of that terrible massacre. That is what I would like to hear.


My dream scenario could be an appropriate Zionist response to the miserable decision by International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge not to hold a minute of silence to commemorate 40 years after that terrible murder. If Tommie Smith was able to raise the Black Power salute on the podium in the 1968 Mexico Games, then our athletes Shahar Tzuberi, Arik Ze'evi and Alexander Shatilov should also take a stand.


But let us not delude ourselves. It won't happen. The Chairman of Israel's Olympic Committee Zvi Varshaviak and his cohorts won't let it happen because they are afraid of Alex Giladi (Israel's representative on the International Olympic Committee), who is in turn afraid of Rogge, who is in turn afraid that the Muslim countries will boycott the opening ceremony and then the games themselves, and that the so-called unity of the Olympic movement will collapse. Bullshit at its best.


After all, we are not talking about a criminal terror attack on a tourist attraction or in an Israeli city — this happened in the Olympic village in Munich! If that is something they are afraid to commemorate, is it any wonder that the one thing that the committee fears most is a terror attack during the London Games?


To Giladi, who saw the Munich attack with his own eyes as an Israeli sports reporter and is now refusing to fight to have the victims remembered (insisting that it is not the right time), I would like to quote Mordechai's words to Queen Esther in the Book of Esther: "For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then will relief and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father's house will perish; and who knoweth whether thou art not come to royal estate for such a time as this?"

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2283

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