While I try not to respond to letters published in response to my columns, I feel today that it would be helpful to explain – to those who missed it – why the 1972 Olympics wasn’t included in my most recent column on Western double-standards and hypocrisy on sportsmanship – a column challenging conventional American points of view with regard to privilege, athletics and politics (Sunday Monitor Forum, Aug. 21).
The Palestinian terror organization guilty of the Munich attack that massacred Israeli athletes, Black September, was an offshoot of Fatah that from 1970-1973 attacked targets of convenience, mostly soft targets, primarily in Europe and the Middle East. They killed civilians, athletes and diplomats. They killed Arabs, Israelis and third-party nationals. They killed Jews, Muslims, Christians and anyone else they believed was their enemy. While some Palestinians and Arabs celebrated their terrorism as resistance, their actions against innocent civilians were unlawful, illegitimate, inhuman and in the case of Munich, had nothing to do with athletics, athletes or sportsmanship.
That attack had no relationship to any of the issues I wrote about – except to those readers who, uncomfortable with facing post-colonial realities of ongoing oppression, occupation and exploitation, refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of dissent and protest and deliberately try to obfuscate reality by introducing straw-man arguments.
The responding letter writers, clearly more offended by an athlete’s refusal to shake hands or share a bus than they are offended by both Israel’s and most of the world’s treatment of Palestinians, illustrated well my column’s major points.
Robert Azzi
Exeter