Will Paris Be Remembered as the Genocide Olympics? My April 9 Essay Republished
The Transition of the Olympic Movement from Its Reckoning with South African Apartheid in the 1960s to Its Complacent Accommodation of Israeli Genocide in 2024?
Note: 23 July, 2024. Eighty-eight Israeli athletes and 8 Palestinians athletes are participating in the Paris Olympics.
The President of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, has refused many interventions calling for the exclusion of the Israeli “genocidaires” from the Paris Olympics. As discussed below, this refusal should invoke memories of the active ejection of apartheid South Africa from the Olympic movement. One response to Bach is that that he is giving Israel a medal for the tradition of impunity the country has long been granted for its harsh and persistent war crimes. Most of these Crimes against Humanity have been aimed at marginalizing, torturing and eliminating Palestinians in ways that go far beyond the apartheid of the White minority regime in South Africa.
Original essay, 9 April, 2024. The distance between organized sport and organized genocide seems large. Most often the gap is wide. But not when it comes to the Olympics Movement.
When I see images of large numbers of people paying such avid attention to sports contests that have very little meaningful effect on the condition of the world, it riles me. It makes me think of all the topics requiring the urgent attention of large numbers of people, most of whom fail to find sufficient time to inform themselves adequately even on the really big public issues of our time.
It riles me when I see full grown men being idolized and paid big money because they have devoted themselves to developing deep into their adulthood, a high level of expertise in children’s games. I riles me when hockey games come to resemble wrestling matches and football games mimic hand-to-hand combat in territorial warfare.
It riles me to see the culture of beer swigging, junk food obesity as well the commodification of female sexual flaunting placed on such open display for mass consumption, including by young folks during the most impressionable years of their lives.
But sports has many facets. Some of them of do express the wonderful agility of human strength combined with discipline, training, plus surges of sudden spontaneity. Sometimes the Olympics do present a showcase for demonstrations of the mastery of human exertion in perfectly coordinated motion. At other times, the Olympics exemplify crass exploitation of sporting prowess.
From what I am seeing from paying close attention to the ongoing massacre of penned-in Palestinians, it is entirely possible that the Paris Olympics this summer will be accompanied by an even more hideous stage in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is entirely possible that by then, the scope and scale of the debacle of warring violence will have grown considerably.
Based on a wrongheaded view of Russia’s necessary intervention to hold back NATO and US-backed aggressions in Ukraine, the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has already excluded Russia and Belarus from the Paris Games. As it now stands, however, the IOC will permit individual athletes and teams from those countries to compete independently.
Generally-speaking the IOC’s identification with the Ukrainian crime regime of fraudster Zelensky is in line with the very criminal operations negating the legitimacy of the UN’s notoriously biased International Criminal Court. The ICC should not be confused with the UN’s International Criminal Court which is presently engaged in arbitrating various charges concerning the US-Israel genocide currently underway in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Assault on Sport and on Athletes in Gaza as Part of the Israel-US Massacre of Palestinians Lives, Wellbeing, Culture, and Community Life
The IOC, so far at least, is sticking to the position that the genocide— a genocide already subject to a host of judicial interventions at the World Court— will welcome Israel to the Paris Olympic Games.
In the process of Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, the IDF has killed 100s of the Strip’s top athletes including the Coach of the Palestinian Olympic Team, Hani Al-Mossader. As with many aspects of the genocide, however, the genocidaires have made a concerted effort with the solid backing of most Jewish Israelis to exterminate the leaders and role models in the community life of Palestinians.
Israeli Soldiers in the West Bank also murdered Palestinian soccer star Ahmed Daraghmeh.
Besides destroying all the universities, hospitals, mosques, housing, churches, businesses, and infrastructures in the quest to make human life impossible to sustain in Gaza, the IDF has also obliterated dozens of playing fields. It has transformed the Yarmouk Soccer Stadium in Gaza into a military camp for internment, interrogation, and torture
The Olympic Movement is a very politicized phenomenon characterized by big league commercialization involving some of the world’s main corporate leviathans. These cartels have major involvement in many aspects of the military-industrial-surveillance branches of the corporate culture so deeply integrated into the genocidal web running throughout the Israel-US partnership in mass murder.
South Africa, Israel and the Olympics
Because of its embrace of the institution of racial apartheid, the White minority regime in South Africa was expelled from the International Olympic Committee in 1970. This came after SA was excluded from the Olympic Games of 1964 and 1968.
After 1970 the apartheid regimes of Israel and South Africa became very close, even working together on developing nuclear weapons. On its way to multiracial equality, still a work-in-progress, South Africa returned to the Olympic movement in 1992 at the Barcelona Olympics. Meanwhile Israel retains its apartheid-like nature although its government’s ruthless genocidal treatment of Palestinians goes far beyond anything ever delivered on the oppressed Blacks made to inhabit the South African Bantustans.
South Africa is no longer Israel’s ally. In fact post-apartheid South Africa successfully brought the government of Israel before the International Court of Justice to face the charge of violating the UN’s Genocide Convention. The ICJ has already ordered Israel to adhere to provisional measures in order to restrain itself from “plausible genocide.”
In fact, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is obvious and undeniable. Israel’s mass murderers have taken the weapon of forced starvation to new levels of barbarity. The massacre is directed at the population at large but particularly at Palestinian academics, artists, journalists, medical practitioners, humanitarian aid workers and leading athletes as well.
Will the International Olympic movement risk making itself liable for the international crime of complicity in genocide? Will the corporate sponsors of the Olympics want to risk associating their precious brand images with the genocidal associations that would clearly clearly walk into the Olympic stadium in Paris along with the now-defiled image on the Israeli flag?
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