If athletes die while playing sport in the Olympics, they can be
memorialized during the games, but if they die through violence it
seems that they can’t.
I have to admit I normally ignore the various calls to action that
fly around the Jewish blogosphere. Every few weeks I am asked to
change my status, share a video or sign a petition about some plight
to someone somewhere.
Yet over the past few months there has been one campaign that has
caught my attention and as a born and bred Jewish Londoner I felt it
my duty to join. “Just One Minute” is a campaign to get the
International Olympic Committee to give one minute’s silence to the
victims of the 1972 Munich attack on the Israeli Olympic team. Though
every four years the widows of the victims have tried to petition the
IOC, this year their campaign went viral thanks to social media.
Started by Ankie Spitzer through a change.org petition, the simple
ask was that the Olympics give one minute to remember the victims of
the Olympic family who were slain. With just under 100,000
signatures, promotion in various international news sources, and a
video from Danny Ayalon one would assume that the IOC would agree.
Yet, back in May, the IOC turned down the request, stating that they
have paid their respects to the tragedy and that it is not
appropriate to mix politics into the games. And on Sunday, the
committee announced that it would not mark the anniversary of the
Munich Massacre at the London 2012 opening ceremony.
Now, if the IOC never had a minute of silence during the games that
would show consistency. Yet, as Professor Deborah Lipstadt points
out, the games held a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11 and
another when athletes died during a training accident in 2010.
So what is behind the IOC’s rejection? How can one turn down the
victims’ families over such a simple request? Throughout the history
of the games, those in Munich in 1972 clearly represented the worst
violation of the spirit of the Olympics. One only needs to look at
the first point in the Olympic charter on the role of the
IOC: “Support the promotion of ethics in sport as well as education
of youth through sport and to dedicate its efforts to ensuring that,
in sport, the spirit of fair play prevails and violence is banned.”
If athletes die while playing sport in the Olympics, they can be
memorialized during the games, but if they die through violence it
seems that they can’t.
So what to do now? An Early Day Motion (petition) has been
circulating around the British House of Commons calling on the IOC to
give just one minute. Sadly only 55 MP’s have signed it. That number
needs to increase. If we can get the host nation to recognize just
one minute, we might go some way in ensuring that the IOC cannot
behave like cowards, while basking on the international stage.
The other thing that I will be doing, and I encourage everyone else
to do as well, is to hold a minute of silence at 11 A.M. on Friday
July 27, the morning of the Opening Ceremony.
