The Olympics, an international affair, is a time when the entire world gets together and temporarily forgets past conflicts to enjoy seventeen days of competition. When Munich in West Germany hosted the Olympics in 1972, it started out like any other, with hundreds of athletes and a memorable opening ceremony. The events proceeded without any difficulty until the sixteenth day of the games. At a time when all strife was put on hold, no one would have thought that there would be such a catastrophic circumstance as the Olympic Massacre. As the world watched, the Palestinians and Israelis struggled to get what they desired through elaborate plans and arduous negotiations. The fragile relations between the Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians exacerbated the devastation, turning what would’ve been solely negotiations into a mass murder.
A key player in the Olympic Massacre, also known as the Munich Massacre, was a faction of Fatah, a subsection in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), called Black September. Black September, founded in the autumn of 1971, was named after the conflict between the Palestinians and Jordanian armed forces in September 1970. The conflict consisted in the expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan after the Jordanian Civil War in 1970 which pitted the PLO and native Jordanians who accused the former of a takeover of the Hashemite monarchy, lead by King Hussein. Thus, the Black September organization was founded for retribution on Jordan’s military and the Hashemite monarchy, specifically King Hussein. Their first significant act was the attack against and assassination of Jordan’s prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal on March 27, 1963 in Cairo, Egypt, whom they accused of personally torturing and executing a Fata...
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...by the snipers. The remaining five hostages were barraged with bullets from a machine gun. Three Palestinians were captured by the West German police. The failure to communicate throughout the West German system complicated the process and lost the possible opportunity to save the Israeli hostages.
The ambiguity of all the negotiations and the complications of the relations ruined the original plans and convoluted the original plans. These two aspects were the main, imminent (since the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a long-time factor) factors that resulted in the death of all of the hostages, five of the eight terrorists, and some West German officials. The inability to cooperate between the Israelis and Palestinians surrendered multiple chances to save the lives of some, if not all, the deceased and for the relations between the two to repair little by little.
In the midst of that catastrophe, many people took their own lives so they wouldn’t have to face conflict afterwards. This shows why many people think a conflict will never have a positive outcome.
...en were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. David Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship and Mark Slavin, the youngest of the hostages, had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union a few months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair whilst the rest were lined up on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's bullet-riddled body was left at his bound teammates’ feet as a warning, to show what would happen if any of them attempted to escape as their friends had.
The controversy in the Munich Olympic games was that there was a terrorist attack.During the Munich Games,security guards ignored what they thought were maintance works, but the eight men in warm-up suits were members of Black September, a terrorist group linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization. They entered the suite of the Israeli quarters in the Olympic Village and killed a coach and weight lifter and then took nine other Israelis hostage.The terrorists demanded the release of 200 Arabs from Israeli prisons and a
Israel was created as a haven for persecuted Jew as a result of the Holocaust, however, it was soon run by the military. “The new Israel seemed to be a nation where the military ruled ignoring the will of the countr...
The squads don't care how the Jews died, as long as it was cheap. There are also a few dates where a huge number of Jews died. This is important to the topic because it shows the devastation killing squads can cause. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the killing squads followed the German Army. Their orders were to destroy all Jews, Communists, and Gypsies.
Potts, Courtney. "1936: The 'Nazi Olympics': Adolf Hitler Tried to Turn the Berlin Games into a Showcase for 'Aryan Superiority.' but a Black American Track-and-field Star Spoiled His Party." New York Times Upfront 9 May 2011: 16. Student Resources in Context. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Genocide, the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. From 1992-1995 that was happening in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.
This marked the beginning of the Palestine armed conflict, one of its kinds to be witnessed in centuries since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War 1. Characterized by a chronology of endless confrontations, this conflict has since affected not only the Middle East relations, but also the gl...
Lives were taken, the happiness and peace was robbed from the town and the people within, and relationships saw their last day. The impacts of these sacrifices are results that we have no control over. We could all be thinking that a decision we made was vital to the situation, but it could actually just cause more hardship. In the grand scheme of things, the most crucial question is: what sacrifices are actually worth
Tensions were very high at these Olympics, mainly because that these were the first Olympic Games held in Germany since the Nazis hosted the Games in 1936 (Rosenberg). Though for some, it was never going to be easy to forget the recent, and quite frankly, horrific past. The Olympic Park had been built just six miles from the Dachau concentration camp, one of the largest concentration camps ever (Burnton). For all 42 representatives of Israel, these Olympics had a deeper meaning than everyone else. Citizens of Israel, many of them Holocaust survivors themselves, or their children, were returning to the Germany. Whose government had, only one generation ago, set out to wipe their people from the earth, and marching with pride...
Bourke, Dale Hanson. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Tough Questions, Direct Answers. Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity, 2013. N. pag. Print.
Genocide is the act of killing a lot of people depending on their race, ethnicity, and religion. There are 8 stages of genocide which include extermination and denial. The victims of the Bosnian genocide consists of elders, women, men, children, and even babies. The Bosnian genocide is a war between Bosnian Serbians and Bosnian Muslim to which republic can control Bosnia. Many Serbains deny the fact that his genocide even happened even though there is scientific proof that this genocide happened. The purpose of learning genocide is so we are informed and we won't let it happen again.
In 1935, the U.S. decided to attend the ‘36 Berlin games, even though the United States knew how Hitler was persecuting the Jews. By July 1933, at least 27,000 people had been placed in what Hitler liked to call “detention camps” (Hart-Davis 16). In early 1932 at an IOC meeting in Barcelona, the committee decided to grant Germany the right to the 1936 Olympic Games, which allowed Germany to restore their athletic reputation that they lost because of the outbreak of World War I. All over the world, there was an outcry to boycott or at least change the location of the ‘36 Olympics. The IOC’s first response was that they had granted Germany the Olympic site before the Nazis’ came to power. All over Germany before the Olympic Games were signs that read Juden Unerwunscht, or “Jews not wanted.” “The racial discrimination- so obvious and deliberate- was more than some foreign sports organizations could stomach. Apart from being offensive to normal human beings, the Nazi attitude was also diametrically opposed to the principle of free competition on which the Olympics were supposed to based” (Hart Davis 62).
However, this attack on the commander and launch sites came as an immediate response to heavy Palestinian rocket fire over the previous weeks and prevention of other “Palestinian factions from building up their arsenals further. In a statement made by the Israeli Defense Force spokesman, he justifies the assassination of Ahmed Jabari stating “The first aim of this operation is to br...
In 2005, the Palestinian director and writer, Hany Abu-Assad, released his award winning motion picture, “Paradise Now.” The film follows two Palestinian friends, over a period of two days, who are chosen by an extremist terrorist group to carry out a suicide mission in Tel-Aviv during the 2004 Intifada. The mission: to detonate a bomb strapped to their stomachs in the city. Because the film industry seldom portrays terrorists as people capable of having any sort of humanity, you would think the director of “Paradise Now” would also depict the two main characters as heartless fiends. Instead he makes an attempt to humanize the protagonists, Khaled and Said, by providing us with a glimpse into their psyches from the time they discover they’ve been recruited for a suicide bombing operation to the very last moments before Said executes the mission. The film explores how resistance, to the Israeli occupation, has taken on an identity characterized by violence, bloodshed, and revenge in Palestinian territories. Khaled and Said buy into the widely taught belief that acts of brutality against the Israeli people is the only tactic left that Palestinians have to combat the occupation. In an effort to expose the falsity of this belief, Hany Abu-Assad introduces a westernized character named Suha who plays the voice of reason and opposition. As a pacifist, she suggests a more peaceful alternative to using violence as a means to an end. Through the film “Paradise Now,” Abu-Assad not only puts a face on suicide bombers but also shows how the struggle for justice and equality must be nonviolent in order to make any significant headway in ending the cycle of oppression between the Israelis and the Palestinians.