When the Palestinian group Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich games, the head of the International Olympics Committee (IOC) at the time, Avery Brundage, gave a speech in which he said the games had been “subject to two savage attacks.” He was referring to the killings … and the fact that white-supremacist Rhodesia had been barred from the Olympics.
(For obvious reasons, the blow of the speech was not softened any by Mr. Brundage’s previous enthusiastic support of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, nor by Mr. Brundage’s old letters to German officials complaining about the “Jewish cabal.”)
At Friday’s opening ceremonies of this year’s Summer Games in London, there was no moment of silence to mark the anniversary of the Israeli athletes’ untimely death.
(Avery Brundage died in 1975, but it seems likely that were he still around he would approve of the rationale given by current IOC president Jacques Rogge for not taking time during Friday’s festivities to recognize the Munich murders: “We feel that the opening ceremony is an atmosphere that is not fit to remember such a tragic incident.”)
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Maybe that is why there are so many empty seats, boycott from sponsors etc.
Or maybe Mitt was right, London was not ready. Haven’t watched anything except a few minutes of the opening.
And this happened how long ago? At least the IOC didn’t call them race huslters.