That warm/fuzzy feeling when the American and Israeli flags came marching past, during the parade of nations, dissolved awfully fast when seemingly out of nowhere, here came something called “Palestine.” Yes, “Palestine” came with a contingent at the Rio Olympics, except that there is no Palestine.
Yet somehow the “Palestinians” seem to show up wherever there’s a party. They dance at every wedding.
They can’t let anything go without their “cause.”
Around this point it’s tempting to try something humorous, like what events they might be good at – synchronized terror tunneling?
But there is no place for humor when we consider the Munich Olympics of 1972 and what the “Palestinians” did to us back then. I was ready to write more about this, but it is too brutal. If you are too young to know what happened, or if you still think that a “two-state solution” is a marvelous idea, I suggest you Google it up to get the awful truth.
Yet here they come again. You’d think they’d be ashamed to show their faces, but they have no shame.
The Olympic committee, I guess, had no choice but to bring them along since, after all, the “Palestinian people” are the world’s darlings.
They come with grievances wherever they go and already they’ve complained – something about being denied proper pool space, blamed, of course, on the Israelis. That’s about the only “event” they’ve got, since they make nothing and enrich nobody’s lives. Grievance is their game.
The 200-plus countries that came to participate had to fly in from airports that are tight with security, owing to the handiwork of their jihadist brothers.
I suppose that is something else the world would rather not mention.
We got a taste of living “side by side” with them in “peace and security” when days earlier their leader Mahmoud Abbas bragged that his Fatah “Palestinians” had murdered 11,000 Israelis. That did not bother anyone either as to the meaning of the Olympic Spirit. They were invited anyway.
Then we got a sample of their peace-loving fellowship when their Lebanese brothers and sisters refused to let Israel’s athletes get on the same bus. That is how it began for the Israelis in Rio and many of them must have thought Munich --and here we go again!
The Olympic committee, we learn, held a ceremony to memorialize the victims of the Munich massacre. I guess that’s something.
But “never again” rings hollow when the same people who literally skinned Jews alive back in 1972 are given a ticket to the civilized world.
It means that we’ve learned nothing.
So long as such monsters are given a platform, so much longer will the world face Islamic terror and Munich-style depravity. The Olympic games provide a pause from the real world. The games can be thrilling if only the jihadists will give us a breather. (But from those party crashers we must always expect the worst.)
We owe it to ourselves to root for the home team and to forget our travails. But we can never forgive.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. New from the novelist: “News Anchor Sweetheart,” a novelist’s version of Fox News and Megyn Kelly. Engelhard is the author of the international bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” He is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com