Why I'm Boycotting the Olympics: IOC Admits Muslims Prevented the Honoring of Murdered Israeli Athletes (updated)

The Olympics are due to start in London.  But I will not be watching them, discussing them, or even thinking about them, and I urge anyone with a claim to human decency to do the same.

In 1972, at the Olympics in Munich, PLO terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes.  The games, of course, went on, and there has never been any effort to memorialize the victims.

On this, the 40 ^th anniversary of this barbarism, the families of the victims, led by Munich widow Ankie Spitzer, petitioned the International Olympic Committee to honor the memory of the murdered athletes with a minute of silence, something most Western countries were in favor of:

Munich widow Ankie Spitzer spearheaded the campaign by launching an online protest, which has since garnered support from across political spectrums in several countries including Israel, Canada, the UK, Australia, the US, Belgium and Germany.

In the latest development, some 140 Italian parliamentarians signed a letter to [IOC president] Rogge this week, calling for minute's silence to be instituted.

The appeal was driven by Italian Jewish MP Fianna Nirenstein, who is vice president of the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs, and who said the gesture would mark "a moment of pity for these murdered athletes and a firm condemnation of terror".

In a letter launching her campaign for an official silence to mark the 40th anniversary of the Munich Massacres, Spitzer wrote:

"Silence is a fitting tribute for athletes who lost their lives on the Olympic stage. Silence contains no statements, assumptions or beliefs and requires no understanding of language to interpret."

The Olympic Committee refused.  And the reason is illuminating.

According to Mrs. Spitzer, Jacques Rogge, the president of the IOC told her when they met that 'his hands were tied' by the 46 Arab and Muslim members of the IOC.

She replied, "My husband's hands were tied, not yours."

The BBC , of all places, lends credence to this by mentioning as a genteel aside that the Arab and Muslim members threatened a walk out if the Israeli athletes were memorialized.

Yes, as if you didn't know it before, a substantial number of Muslim are just fine with terrorism, barbarism, and murder if the targets are Jews.  In Britain itself, the first move by the Muslim Council of Britain after it was formed in 2001 was to call for a ban on the U.K.'s Holocaust Memorial Day.  And British schools are now routinely banning teaching anything about the Holocaust for fear of "contradicting versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

The IOC obviously concurs with this sort of pandering.  And it meets Natan Sharansky's 3D test of anti-Semitism.

So I'll be boycotting the Olympics this year, in thought, word, and deed, and I urge you to do likewise.

They are unworthy of attention by anyone who still values what the Olympic spirit is supposedly about.

Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit.  His work has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, American Thinker, Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace, and other publications.

Update from Jack Kemp:

In 1972, I was working on the public campgrounds of Kibbutz Neve Yam, on the Mediterranean coast just south of Haifa and Atlit, where Adolph Eichmann had been held in secret before his trial in Jerusalem over a decade earlier. My boss on the campsite, Eli, had a television set up in a small building on the grounds that served as his office. We would watch the games, mostly an American television highlights feed with Israeli commenters, and now recall the surprise and pride a young Israeli boy as he heard from us that Esther Shahamorov had qualified for the 100 meter high hurdles semifinals ("ha hetzi gemer?!"). Esther would leave Munich before that race because of the Munich Massacre of her male teammates. We watched reports of the negotiations and the botched rescue attempt. And we watched a funeral service in Munich where a rabbi intoned prayers in Hebrew.

Now the world "has changed" -- and not for the better. A group of Arab countries have denied a formal commemoration of the Munich Massacre at the London Olympics. Like Rob Miller, I, too will be boycotting them, not even watching them on television.

The 1981 British film Chariots of Fire portrayed the true story the 1924 British Olympic team's Jewish member, Harold Abrams, was coached to a gold medal victory by Sam Mussabini, a man of mixed Arab and European heritage. Those days are gone, as indeed, they were in 1981 when they were so beautifully portrayed on the screen. The current video screen shows a much grimmer and starker vision of contemporary history.