Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority's Olympics Committee, is on record as having endorsed, in an interview on PA TV, the "slaughter of [Jewish] settlements."
A letter of protest has been sent to Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee. It was written by Dr. Hillel Appelbaum, on behalf of the terrorism-stricken Applebaum family, with assistance from Mattot Arim, an Israeli NGO that has long been working towards "peace for peace."
Dr. Hillel's cousin Dr. David Applebaum, together with his daughter Nava who was to have been married the next day, were brutally murdered in a Palestinian terror attack in Jerusalem, together with five others, in September 2003.
Rajoub is a former para-military security chief within Fatah who spent nearly 16 years in Israeli prison for terrorist activities. Israel bombed his headquarters in Bitunia, north of Jerusalem, in 2002, where many wanted terrorists were taking shelter and firing at IDF troops who demanded their surrender.
The letter of protest to Mr. Thoma Bach, President of the Lausanne-based International Olympics Committee, calls his attention to a video produced by Palestinian Media Watch, in which Rajoub is seen telling a TV interviewer this past August as follows: “Fatah has decided that our relations with the Israelis are relations between enemies. There is no kind of coordination between the Israelis and us… OK, brother, here is the occupation: Am I stopping you from slaughtering a settlement? No one is stopping anyone... Our political decision is resistance in the occupied territories in order to bring an end to the occupation [using] all forms of resistance.”
"Mr. Rajoub's public statement negates the most basic human morals," Dr. Appelbaum notes, as well as "the first paragraph of the Olympic code of ethics concerning human dignity," which states, "Safeguarding the dignity of the individual is a fundamental requirement of Olympism.
The letter requests that Mr. Bach "do the utmost you are able to do with the considerable powers of your position" to redress the situation. It then concludes: "After all, the Olympic spirit strives to build a world of brotherhood [as the Olympic hymn states]: Let all the flags of every land In brotherhood unfold, And let fraternity and fellowship surround the soul of every nation…"
Rajoub was long a close advisor and top officer under arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. Three years ago, when Israel requested a minute of silence to remember the 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists in 1972, Rajoub termed the request "racist."
The next Olympics will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August 2016, and the next Winter Olympics are set for February 2018 in PyeongChang, South Korea.