Palestinians praise killers of Israeli Olympic athletes

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

The Fatah organization headed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday marked the 48th anniversary of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by posting a memorial praising the terrorists who carried out the brutal attack that shocked the world.

“On this day, the fighters of Fatah’s ‘Black September’ movement carried out Operation Munich, which embodied the meaning of courage and boldness of the Palestinian resistance and his self-sacrifice for the homeland and the cause,” Fatah said in the post on their Facebook page.

On September 5, 1972, a day before the Olympic Games were to begin in Munich, eight Palestinian terrorists killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine others hostage.

The terrorists, members of Black September, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), demanded the release of 234 Palestinians being held in Israeli prison and safe passage out of Germany.

The attack began just after 4 a.m., when the terrorists jumped over the six-foot-high fence that surrounded the Olympic Village, where the athletes were sound asleep, and headed straight for the Israelis dorms. Some fought back and others escaped.

An hour later, police were alerted and the news made headlines around the world. By 5 p.m., after a day of negotiations, the Germans organized a plan to rescue the hostages, but the operation failed. In the gunfight that ensued, five terrorists and all of the hostages died.

Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Yossef Gutfreund, Amitzur Shapira, Ze’ev Friedman, Eliezer Halfin, Andre Spitzer, Kehat Shorr, David Berger, Yakov Springer, and Mark Slavin were the six Israeli coaches and five athletes who were murdered by the terrorists. One German police officer was also killed.

The following day, a memorial service for the murdered Israeli athletes was held, but the games continued nonetheless.

“Incredibly, they’re going on with it,” commented Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. “It’s almost like having a dance at Dachau,” he wrote at the time, referring to the infamous Nazi concentration camp situated about 20 miles from Munich.

Although three of the terrorists were captured and jailed, a month later more Palestinian terrorists hijacked a German passenger plane and demanded their release. The German government caved into the demands and released the three murderers.