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- Peter Martino: Olympic Gold Medal for Lying and Sanctimony Goes to...
- Raymond Ibrahim: Salafi Sex Scandals
Olympic Gold Medal for Lying and Sanctimony Goes to...
by Peter Martino
June 13, 2012 at 5:00 am
June 13, 2012 at 5:00 am
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And so,
then years later, instead of being remembered and mourned, the Israeli athletes
who were killed for political reasons are being shoved aside for political
reasons by the very people who claim to put sports before politics.
Europe has temporarily forgotten its financial
problems. This is the summer of sports. In June the European football (soccer)
championships are being held in Poland and Ukraine. In July, there will be
three weeks of the Tour de France, the world's most famous cycling race. And by
August, Europeans will be watching this year's Summer Olympics in London.
As usual, however, the Olympics are tarnished
by ugly politics. Forty years ago, the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich were
marred by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terror group
Black September. As the London Olympics are the tenth Olympic games since the
Munich Olympics, relatives of the murdered Israeli athletes believe it would be
appropriate if, during the ceremonies in London, a moment of silence were held
for the eleven athletes massacred in Munich. Up till now the Olympic Games have
never officially commemorated the murdered athletes with such a moment.
Normally, when an athlete dies, the
International Olympic Committee honors him with a minute of silence. Two years
ago, the 21-year old Georgian athlete, the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, suffered
a fatal crash during a training run for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
The President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge expressed
his condolences on behalf of the entire Olympic community during his opening
speech, while the Canadian and Olympic flags were flown at half-staff.
The same Jacques Rogge, a Count from Belgium,
refuses to include such a moment of remembrance for the eleven murdered Israeli
athletes, despite the fact that Rogge himself was present at the Munich
Olympics as a member of the Belgian sailing team.
In 2004, Ankie Rekhess, a Dutch-born Israeli
journalist and the widow of Andrei Spitzer, one of the athletes murdered in
Munich, confronted Rogge during a press conference in Athens. "You
yourself are an Olympic athlete," she said. "Hence, you are a brother
of the eleven murdered athletes. Why don't you remember them in front of all
other athletes? This concerns the entire Olympic family." Rekhess received
a standing ovation from the 300 people present in the room. However, in his
reply, Rogge rejected the request, referring instead to friendship, sportivity
and the necessity to keep politics out of sports.
For forty years, Ankie Rekhess has been working
her way through the hierarchy of the Olympic Games, seeking to obtain a moment
of silence for her husband and his colleagues. In 1996, she was interviewed
by the Los Angeles Times after the rejection of her request for a similar
moment during the Atlanta Olympics, the first one in which Palestine took part.
"I don't want to condemn anyone," she said. "I simply want
recognition for 11 athletes who came home in coffins 24 years ago." Today,
another 16 years later, Rekhess still has has not managed to persuade the
Olympic Committee to honor those who were killed because they believed in the
Olympic ideals
After the Munich massacre in 1972, Rekhess saw
the room where the athletes had been tortured and mutilated. "I saw
pictures of what they had done to them and vowed no one would ever forget. That
is why I want the moment of silence… to remember them all."
In Simon Reeve's 2001 book One Day in
September, Ankie Rekhess recalls her husband's idealism and attitude
towards the Olympics: "[While strolling in the Olympic Village] he spotted
members of the Lebanese team, and told [me] he was going to go and say hello to
them… I said to him, 'Are you out of your mind? They're from Lebanon!' Israel
was at war with Lebanon at the time. 'Ankie,' Andre said calmly, 'that's
exactly what the Olympics are all about. Here I can go to them, I can talk to
them, I can ask them how they are. That is exactly what the Olympics are all
about.' So he went… towards this Lebanese team, and… asked them, 'How were the
results? I'm from Israel and how did it go?' And to my amazement, I saw that
the [Lebanese] responded and they shook hands with him and they talked to him
and they asked him about his results. I'll never forget, when he turned around
and came back towards me with this huge smile on his face. 'You see!' said
Andre excitedly. 'This is what I was dreaming about. I knew it was going to
happen!'"
Unfortunately, the Olympic spirit that drove
Andre Spitzer does not drive Count Rogge or the Olympic Committee. Rogge says
that it is necessary to keep politics out of sports. The latter comment is all
the more shocking, as the Israeli athletes, like all Olympic athletes, were
attending an international meeting for sportsmen from all nations regardless of
their countries' politics. There was nothing political about the victims. They
were murdered simply for being Israelis.
Rogge's refusal to honor the murdered athletes
has everything to do with politics. The International Olympic Committee
obviously fears that a number of Islamic countries would refuse to attend the
opening ceremony of the London Olympics if one minute of silence were observed
for the eleven men assassinated in Munich forty years ago. Jacques Rogge treats
their remembrance as political simply because they are Israeli; in doing so,
the OIC President himself is breaking a basic rule of the Olympic Games.
And so ten years later, instead of being
remembered and mourned, the Israeli athletes, who were killed for political
reasons in a place which should have been a safe haven for them, are being
shoved aside for political reasons by the very people who hypocritically claim
to put sports and sportspeople before politics.
Related Topics: Peter Martino
Salafi Sex Scandals
by Raymond Ibrahim
June 13, 2012 at 3:00 am
June 13, 2012 at 3:00 am
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Such piety
and morality is apparently something they strive to live by, but rather a
weapon to use against non-Islamists, who are always portrayed as immoral and
corrupt.
Sheikh Ali Wanis, an Egyptian parliament member
and prominent figure in the Nour Party—the Salafi party which preaches a return
to Islam's earliest practices based on Muhammad's practices—was recently caught
in a "compromising position" with a female other than his legal
spouse(s).
According to official reports, police found a
parked car on a dark, farm road, and went to investigate it. They found a man,
with the Salafi trademark beard, in an "indecent position" with a
"young girl," who later was reported 19-years-old.
First, the Salafi MP told police that she was
his fiancé; later he claimed the teenage girl was his niece. One video
clip shows Wanis immediately after he was arrested by police, imploring one
of the officers not to report him.
Now, however, that the police did expose him,
and now that it has been shown
that the girl is neither his fiancé nor his niece—Wanis' story has changed yet again:
according to him, this was all a set up by the ruling military and its security
apparatus, all meant to defame him and the Salafi Nour party (somewhat
reminiscent of when another Salafi politician told police that his face was
bandaged because he was injured in a carjacking—when in fact he had a cosmetic
nose job).
Still trying to maintain his aura of piety,
Wanis even quoted the Koran in a statement meant to exonerate him as falsely
accused: "O you who believe! If a wicked person comes to you with any
news, ascertain the truth, lest you harm people unwittingly, and afterwards
become full of repentance for what you have done" (Koran 49:6).
And what did his "ultraconservative"
and "upright" Salafi colleagues do—they who constantly preach
"morality," the need for the hijab, and the segregation of the
sexes"? Did they renounce him? Perhaps a bit of public whipping, to atone
for his sins? Did they, in "righteous indignation," do what two
Egyptian brothers recently did when they thought their sister was being
"immoral"—slaughter
her, the mother, and aunt?
Not at all. After Friday prayers, hundreds of
protesting Salafis marched out in the street with Wanis, shouting anti-police
slogans and conspiracy theories.
Just as Egyptian secularists have long argued,
Islamists like the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood hide behind a mantle of
piety and morality—yet, when it comes to it, such piety and morality is
apparently not something they strive to live by, but rather a weapon to use
against non-Islamists, who are always portrayed as immoral and corrupt. Quick
to grow beards and have a zibiba—the callous forehead mark produced by
head-banging on the floor during Muslim prayers—Islamists like Wanis are more
concerned with outer signs of morality, even as they engage in forbidden sexual
relations, which are banned on pain of death by their own Sharia.
Yet there is more to it than this. Operating
according to the Islamic notion of niyya, or "intention," no
doubt the Salafis have concluded that, even if Wanis is guilty, admitting it
only harms the Islamist movement's progress—hence, the best strategy is to deny
it. After all, in the words of their prophet Muhammad, "War is
deceit"—and the Islamists have certainly been treating
the elections as war.
Speaking of equivocation and sex, immediately
before this scandal, another prominent Egyptian Salafi, Osama
al-Qusi, declared that it is permissible to view sex scenes in
movies—"so long as the plot calls for it," concluding, in the words
of Muhammad, that "deeds are judged according to intentions."
Sex scandals can strike any politician's
career. What is important, here, however, is that a sex scandal has just struck
the one political party whose only appeal is that it stands for
morality, religion, and "family values." It has nothing else to
offer—and now it doesn't even have this, as its thin veneer of piety continues
to slip away.
Raymond
Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center
and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum
Related Topics: Egypt
| Raymond
Ibrahim
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