Olympics Opening Ceremony
George Weigel sums up my thoughts spot on.
I felt like I needed to take a shower after the adulation of the National Health Service (NHS), etc.
I particularly like the final salvo:
As the Games of the XXX Olympiad unfold over the next fortnight, and the likeliest moral arguments will have to do with doping and other forms of cheating, it will be well hold in our memories Munich 1972 and the names of the murdered Israelis: Moshe Weinberg; Yossef Romano; Ze’ev Friedman; David Berger; Yakov Springer; Eliezer Halfin; Yossef Gutfreund; Kehat Shorr; Mark Slavin; Andre Spitzer; Amitzur Shapira. The international fellowship and comity the Olympic movement claims to represent may never be much more than a charade celebrated in ersatz liturgy. Still, it would be a small and welcome step toward a more dignified conception of these biennial global gatherings if the IOC would recognize that remembering the victims of the Munich Massacre, and condemning their murderers, is not “politicizing” the Games. It’s a matter of reading the modern Olympic motto – Citius, Altius, Fortius (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) — as a summons to moral aspiration: to the human nobility that always characterizes true sport and true sportsmen.
UPDATE:
And, the scandalous, no, shameless refusal to remember the Israeli athletes who were killed by terrorists in 1972 at the Munich Olympics is simply bottom dwelling.
Sham and a scam indeed.
Read all of this and tell me this does not make you want to vomit (emphasis added).
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) flatly rejected a minute of silence at today’s opening ceremony in London to mark the 40th anniversary of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games.
Why exactly is the IOC opposed to a rather modest attempt to commemorate the victims of terror? According to Ankie Spitzer, the widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who was murdered by the Palestinian Black September group in 1972, IOC president Jacques Rogge capitulated to the 46-member bloc of Arab and Muslim countries because of the threat of Arab countries to boycott participation in the Games.
Spitzer, who jumpstarted an international campaign to garner a minute of silence at the London games, reported that Rogge told her that “his hands were tied” by the influence of the 46-member group.
Her rejoinder to Rogge: “No, my husband’s hands were tied, not yours.”
Spitzer claims that the IOC balked because 21 Arab delegations are prepared to leave the Games if a public commemoration event took place. Her response to the IOC: “Let them leave if they can’t understand what the Olympics are all about — a connection between people through sport.”
UPDATE II:
Paul Mirengoff calls the IOC President, Jacques Rogge, a liar:
Friday’s opening ceremony at the London Olympics proceeded without any moment of silence for, or other tribute to, the Israeli athletes who were murdered at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists 40 years ago. There was, however, a moment of silence for the victims of the two world wars and other international conflicts. Thus, IOC President Jacques Rogge was lying when he claimed that the decision not to honor the victims of the Munich attacks was based on the view that “the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident.”
Rogge was less dishonest, but equally loathsome, during a meeting with two widows of Munich victims. According to their account, when asked whether his decision was “because [the murder victims] were Israelis,” Rogge didn’t answer.
One of the widows says she told Rogge that “you didn’t hear the voice of the world.” The Frenchman responded, “Yes I did.”
He’s right, I fear — the “voice of the world” probably was, as ever, against Israel. But how deplorable of Rogge to rub the widows’ noses in it. Better not to have met with them than to add insult to injury.
It’s tempting to say that the widows’ plea fell on deaf ears. But it’s more accurate to say they fell on contaminated ones.
Rogge and the IOC have, however, performed a real service — they have reminded Americans why we should fiercely guard our sovereignty and resist further encroachments on it by international bodies. Rogge and the IOC have made it clear that they are either personally anti-Israeli or unwilling to stand up to the many nations that are (it comes down to the same thing). Rogge and the IOC have demonstrated the ability of anti-western Arab nations and their many sympathizers to control international bodies, even to the point of eschewing simple human decency. They have also shown, by banning the politically incorrect Greek twitterer, their unwillingness to tolerate free speech.
The IOC’s values are not the values of America, at least not yet. But they are the values of the many other international organizations that seek, with the help of American leftists, to take more and more control of our lives and our fate.
Unless we want one day to be in the position of those hapless Israeli widows, begging for favor before a French bureaucrat (or worse), we must cede nothing more to these bodies.
UPDATE III:
Being in Europe, I saw this.
It seems NBC ensured that Americans did not.
Why?