September 05, 2002

At 5:00 AM, September 5th, 1972, a seminal event in the development of modern terrorism took place.
Eight Palestinian terrorists invaded the site of the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. They killed and took hostage eleven Israeli athletes competing in the Games, demanding the release of over 200 imprisoned Arabs and 2 German terrorists. Over the next few tension-filled days, all the hostages and some of the terrorists were killed, and the remaining terrorists escaped, mostly due to incompetence and perfidy of the German government. The Olympic Committee made a controversial decision to continue the Games, and has never participated in any memorial for the slain athletes. Eventually almost all of the remaining terrorists were hunted down and killed by Israeli agents, directed by then Prime Minister Golda Meir.

The massacre was the "birth" of modern and--I must qualify it further by adding the words "radical Islamic"-- terrorism. While September 5 is almost over, I don't want it to pass without marking the 30th Anniversary of that "Black September" massacre at the Munich Olympics and certainly neither does Judith Kesher, who wrote the passage above, and a group of her blogging friends who have done a Blogburst on the event ("a simultaneous and cross-linked posting of many blogs on the same theme") and with whom I now join in solidarity by linking. While I have some memories of the event--I was just beginning my junior year in high school at the time--I was a typical self-absorbed teenager, although I remembered the nightmarish horror of it unfolding on TV instead of Olympic coverage. I watched the movie One Day in September, which is a powerful documentary film about that day made in 2000, on DVD early this summer and all the events of the last year (9/11 as well as the numerous attacks on Israelis and Jews throughout Europe and the world) came surging back and into my soul--nothing had changed. Even the IslamoFacist terrorists looked and acted the same. And Jews were targeted and murdered just the same. What was particularly shocking in the film to me was that the German police pretty much "allowed" the massacre to happen and never stood up to the terrorists once in the whole long ordeal. In fact, they seemed to shrug and say "What can we do?" instead of taking decisive action against kidnappers and murderers...Perhaps I shouldn't have been shocked, but here were these people who less than 30 years before had made war on most of Europe and part of Asia and Africa, now afraid to confront a few guys and none of the Germans wanted to give an order or take charge where only a few short years before they were ready to set up and run the "Reich." Or had everything but their Anti-Semitism faded? Apparently so. Just appalling to watch, but see it you must! The story of the Munich Israeli athletes is now our story. Go to Kesher Talk for the Index of the Munich Olympic Massacre Blogburst and to read more.
*One Day in September will be shown on HBO on 9/11 or you can rent it at Netflix as I did.