50 Years On, Remembering The Munich Olympics Massacre
Palestinian leadership continues to hail Munich massacre as “heroic operation” and Black September terrorists as “martyrs.”
September 5, 1972, has gone down as one of the darkest days in the history of world sports. Eight Palestinian terrorists from the Black September group, a terror outfit affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), broke into Munich’s Olympic village, where the Israeli team was staying.
The world watched in horror as they murdered and mutilated Israeli athletes. The image of the hooded Palestinian gunman standing on the balcony of the Israeli team’s apartment became the symbolic face of international terrorism that will engulf the world in decades.
This week, the families of the Israeli victims gathered in Munich to mark the 50th anniversary of the massacre. On Monday, the presidents of Israel and Germany took part in the commemorations marking 50 years since Arab terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
"𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙮'𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙜𝙤𝙣𝙚."
Those immortal, jarring words echoed around the world #OTD 50 years ago, by legendary ABC presenter Jim McKay, confirming all 11 Israeli hostages were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. #MunichMassacre#München72 pic.twitter.com/oMXptfG0VE
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) September 5, 2022
The Associated Press recalled the events surrounding the Munich massacre:
Before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972, eight members of a Palestinian group called Black September clambered over the unguarded fence of the Olympic village. They burst into the building where the Israeli team was staying, killing wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossi Romano.
Some Israeli athletes managed to escape but nine were seized. The captors demanded the release of more than 200 Palestinians held by Israel and two German left-wing extremists in West German prisons.
The attackers demanded a plane and safe passage to Cairo. After a day of tense negotiations, the assailants and their hostages were allowed to leave aboard two helicopters for Fuerstenfeldbruck.
Sharpshooters at the airfield opened fire. The attackers threw a grenade into one of the helicopters carrying hostages, which exploded, and shot the hostages in the other helicopter.
The Black September group closely coordinated the plot with the German Communist terror group, the Baader-Meinhof gang. “The attackers demanded the release of more than 200 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons as well as that of the German Red Army Faction radicals Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and a plane to the Middle East,” the news agency Reuters noted.
ABC News’s coverage of the massacre:
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir will authorize the “Operation Wrath of God” to avenge the murder of Israeli team members. Though many operatives and masterminds of the terror plot will be eliminated, many details surrounding the incident may never come to light. The Israeli counter-terrorism operation will become the stuff of legend to be fictionalized for TV and cinema, including in the 2005 movie Munich.
But the main culprit, PLO chief Yasser Arafat, lived to 75 and received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
The noted Israeli blogger Elder of Ziyon compiled some of the inconvenient truths connected to the Munich massacre:
Here are seven inconvenient and under-reported facts about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre that everyone should know: (thread based on this post:)https://t.co/UPGycgFJIS
— Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 (@elderofziyon) September 5, 2022
Arafat’s PLO, which now controls the Palestinian Authority, continues celebrating the 1972 massacre and honoring the Black September terrorists.
On PLO’s official website, the killing of Israeli athletes is celebrated as a “heroic operation” and “one of the most important actions in modern history.” In 2020, Palestinian Authority President and PLO-Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Facebook page honored the slain terrorists involved in the Munich attack, mourning their “deaths as martyrs.”
1972
In an event that shocked the world, Palestinian terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, castrating, murdering and dismembering them.2022
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to apologize or even condemn this massacre. pic.twitter.com/Xa6nSaTFhu— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) September 5, 2022
Not just Palestinian terrorist groups, left-wing pro-Palestinian activists in the West also hail the murderers of Munich as their heroes.
In 2014, UK’s Labour Party leader and prime ministerial candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, was caught taking part in a wreath-laying ceremony on the graves of Black September terrorists in the North African country of Tunisia.
After repeated denials, the leader of the British opposition confessed his presence at the event. “Jeremy Corbyn has admitted for the first time being present as a wreath was laid for members of the terrorist group who carried out the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre,” The Times of London reported in August 2018.
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Comments
I didn’t watch in horror, or at all. I also ignored the assassination of JFK though they closed work because the mailgirls were crying. I went flying.
Participation in public thoughts and prayers rituals used to be optional. It always seemed to me to be useless virtue signalling, a form of self-entertainment.
I probably got it from my father. He reported watching RFK’s funeral train making its way to somewhere hitting a pedestrian somewhere in NJ. The Kennedys are killing off everybody, he said.
Variation: I was in a campground near Linz Austria on the (there) evening of the moon landing. The owner of the campground had set up two television sets in the picnic shelter. Virtually everybody in the campground was there watching the show, oohing and ahhing.
I was back at my camping spot, reading. I just didn’t care. To this day, I still don’t.
Sad
Perhaps so, but, it was of no interest. TelStar was of interest. Watching Echo pass by in the night sky while on vacation at Laguna Beach was of interest.
Watching the moon landing was not.
Sue me.
Why bother expressing your crap?
Restoring normal sensibilities against media hype reflex. Clicks and sell eyeballs to advertisers, but it ruins politics when pols free ride on it. People enjoy watching other people’s misfortunes, it’s entertainment, as the media know. It’s good for your soul to decline.
Credit the authors of the Steve Prefontaine book “Pre” for putting this event in.
It’s a part of history that will be erased elsewhere by the new world order. Pre is considered a demi-god in the running world- and that biographic will live on forever.
Thanks, Vijeta, for your reporting that consistently includes very important context.
And, regarding this information,
there really ought to be serious consequences for such celebration.
We must never forget the nature of the evil we face. Today’s PLO/PA, PIJ and Hamas follow the same ideology as the Black September. .
Yes, thanks, Vijeta, for keeping this memory alive.
Thank you!
watched these events in real time–was perplexed as to why israeli ci units were not allowed to intervene to rescue the athletes as israelis were generally considered the most professional, highly-trained sf guys on the planet
regardless, at least the germans tried–alas, the airfield stage went south–terrible
the plo has never had any qualms about murdering civilians/innocents–never–is their time-honored tradition–sick bastards indeed
Germans couldn’t be showed up by the Jews!!!
Didn’t the Israeli Mossad hunt down as many of these terrorists as they could and execute them?
I seem to remember at one point that in a case of mistaken identity they killed a Norwegian waiter
My family had just returned from living in France the previous month. We had visited Germany several times, and who knows if we would have gone to see an Olympic that September if we were still there. My Mother refused to go overseas again after that massacre.
Why go overseas when you can be murdered right here in America so easily
Why the downvotes? Gonzotx is completely right.
Arab terrorists
Muslim terrorists. In this case they are both.
Fifty years after the Munich attacks, during which interval innumerable, horrific atrocities and barbarism have been committed by Muslim terrorists against non-Muslims, worldwide, and, European, Leftist dhimmis and American Dhimmi-crats — useful idiots, moral disgraces and cowards, both — still proudly traffic in irrational and despicable Jew-hate and anti-Israel venom, while giving undeserved deference and legitimacy to Muslim supremacists’/terrorists’ contrived and fallacious propaganda mythologies of alleged victimhood.
I’d say that Muslim supremacists/terrorists have held out better than I would have expected. The story would be different if western states possessed the backbone and the willpower to deal with Islamic supremacism, belligerence and totalitarianism with anything remotely resembling a serious approach.
The Black September group closely coordinated the plot with the German Communist terror group, the Baader-Meinhof gang. KGB’s point man with the Baader-Meinhof gang was Vladimir Putin who delivered money and weapons to them.
The Soviet hand in propping up PLO and German Red Army (RAF) is an often ignored aspect of the Cold War history. Current PA president Abbas was trained in Moscow.
As the Elder of Ziyon post linked from here shows, the CIA concluded that there was no such organization as “Black September”. It was simply an alias that Fatah used when it didn’t want its name on an operation.
I agree. That’s why I called Arafat the main culprit. He blessed the operation. Black September gave Arafat/PLO the plausible deniability they needed to keep receiving financial and diplomatic support from the West.
I wish Mossad or JDL (re-formed) or a similar group would be far more proactive in removing people who commit or celebrate such attacks on Israelis and Jews.
Omar’s moslems did something.
Imagine if Trump was president during this? There’d be no killing, lest the leaders of the killers be vaporized.