Spare a prayer for Israel’s Olympic athletes

Here is a riddle for you:

What event warrants the employment of 45,000 police officers, surveillance flights, drones, fighter jets, and helicopters carrying sharpshooters?

If you guessed the Olympic games in Paris, sadly you are correct.

The Olympics commenced for Israel’s soccer team with a game against Mali, which was considered a success from a security standpoint. By success, I suppose they mean that no Israelis were killed because from most other standpoints that game was a complete failure.

The Israeli team arrived with a massive police presence including motorbike riders at the front of the team and a dozen riot police fighters behind them. Armed police patrolled the stadium throughout the game, creating an atmosphere of suspicion that is generally not found at a soccer game. If this had been any other event, one might have thought the Israelis had come to start a war.

But it was not the Israelis who came to fight, it was the pro-Palestinian protestors who loudly booed during Israel’s national anthem, giving us all a hint to what was to come. Every time an Israeli touched the ball, a chorus of boos followed. A group in the front row exposed their t-shirts, each shirt with a letter of the phrase “Free Palestine” boldly printed on the front.  Palestinian flags appeared as well, and one man wore a yellow sticker with the words, “Genocide is not a sport…Boycott Israel at the Paris Olympics.”

Security forced the man to remove his sticker, but that was pretty much the climate of the first Israeli game in the Paris Olympics. When the Israelis scored, the Israeli fans cheered loudly in the direction of the pro-Palestinians, and when Mali scored the pro-Palestinians followed suit in the direction of the Israelis. It was like being at a dog fight…only with far more potentially dangerous consequences hanging in limbo like a blimp above the stadium.  The game itself, which ended in a 1-1 tie, was secondary to the verbal altercations within the stadium.

Anyone following the news might expect this type of performance from pro-Palestinian protesters, especially because Palestinians have their own delegation of eight athletes at the Paris games who were told by a Palestinian Authority minister that they were symbols of the “resistance.” Coupled with the viral X video of a masked man with a Palestinian flag on his shirt threatening “rivers of blood” at the Paris Olympics, and the threats that individual Israeli athletes have been receiving, the Paris Games have become a war zone for the Israel delegation.

The Algerian wrestler Fat-Hi Nurin refused to fight against his Israeli opponent, Iranian hackers published personal information about Israeli athletes, and in the Israeli soccer game against Paraguay, a huge sign that read “Genocide Olympics” was waved among Palestinian flags. It is clear the Paris Olympics is being used to spread political lies and threats against Israel.  But it all got much more dangerous when the Paris high-speed trains were sabotaged in a coordinated attack that included arson, disrupting the train service and affecting more than 250,000 travelers on Friday.  Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack yet, but to anyone paying attention, the attackers’ motive is clear: they are reminding everybody that they are much more dangerous than just t-shirts, signs, and flags.

All this has struck a particularly bitter chord for Israelis who can’t help but remember the 1972 Munich games, AKA “Black September.” We have all learned about the 11 Israelis, who were kidnapped and then murdered by Palestinian militants who were trying to bring the “struggle” of the Palestinians to light. The terrorists murdered the first two Israelis immediately and then kidnapped and pummeled the other nine.  When their demands for the release of 200 political prisoners from Israeli prisons were not met, the terrorists demanded to be flown to an Arab country. Germany declined Israel’s offer to step in, insisting they knew how to handle the situation. They sent 14 police officers who lacked proper training and five sharpshooters to the airfield, setting up a trap for the terrorists. Their plan failed miserably, as the terrorists sensed their trap, and murdered the Israeli athletes. Later, the fact emerged that Germany had been pre-warned of the attack.

It took Germany 50 years to admit their mistake.

There will be a commemoration of the events of the Munich Olympics this year in Paris. But due to security threats that event will take place in a secret location at an undisclosed time.

A ceremony, like the one for the athletes who were murdered in the 1972 Munich games, is meant to be a living monument to a significant event and the people involved. But we all know how pro-Hamas protesters treat important historical monuments. They have vandalized monuments of America’s founding fathers in the most disgusting of ways. During Netanyahu’s speech in Congress, they sprayed a monument of Christopher Columbus with the words “Hamas is Comin.” The word “monument” comes from the Latin “monere,” which means “to remind,” but also “to admonish” and “to warn.” The question then becomes: has the world heeded the warning? And if not, why not?

Most of us pray daily for our cherished soldiers and hostage victims. I think it’s time to add an extra prayer for our athletes, coaches, their family members and fans, and Israeli and French security teams. They are all in danger, despite the fact that our athletes just went to Paris to represent their country and play some sports.