The scene was Munich, in what was then called West Germany, in 1972 for the Summer Olympics. It was the first time the Olympics had been held in Germany since 1936 during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. 120 nations and 7,134 athletes competed in 195 events, according to the official Olympic movement website.
The games opened Aug. 26 and ended Sept. 10, but most of what the Games of the 20th Olympiad will be remembered for are not the sports. They will be remembered for what happened on the night of Sept. 5 when 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and subsequently assassinated by the terrorist group Black September.
Black September was created in 1970 as a Palestinian terrorist organization in the aftermath of the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians by the King of Jordan, who they eventually assassinated in November 1971, so they claimed.
Now, 40 years since that Olympiad, the London Olympic Committee has failed to acknowledge what has come to be known as the Munich Massacre.
Jacques Rogge, International Olympic Committee head, just didn’t budge from his stance. He thought that there should not be a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies. He said, “We feel that the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident.”
That was amid calls from many sources. These calls came from places like the Washington Post newspaper to Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, to Al Arabiya, a leading newspaper catering to the whole Arab world.
The fact that no memorial was even held during this Olympiad is unsettling.
From memorials in Munich Olympic Park to a place of memory in Ben-Shemen Forest in Israel, the two countries have acknowledged and accepted the incident and have moved on.
Not only did men get murdered; it had a profound effect on the Games.
The massacre caused the first pause in Olympic competition ever in the history of the modern Olympics, dating back to 1896.
The whole delegations from Israel, the Philippines, Algeria and Egypt left those games, as well as parts of the delegations from Norway and the Netherlands.
Winston Churchill once said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
If a brilliant man who led Great Britain through the bloodiest war in history says something like that, then why would the country he hails from ignore it?
