That Horrible Day in September: The Munich Olympic Massacre 39 Years ago Today

(Note: There are two videos in this post one at the beginning and one at the end, If you cannot see them, please click here)

Thirty-nine years ago. Yassir Arafat sent five Palestinian Terrorists into an Olympic Village dedicated to peace and international cooperation. Their successful mission was to shock the world by kidnapping and killing the Israeli Olympic team. This was the first terrorist tragedy played out live and worldwide on TV. We all remember the picture of the Ski-masked terrorist on the balcony.

Eleven innocents died that day. And the terrorist's won. Sure Golda Meir sent out a hit squad and killed most of the murderers behind the attack. But it was followed up by a world-wide effort to legitimize the terrorist Arafat which directly lead to the Oslo Accords and the second intifada. They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. That is an apt description of the most of the governments of the western world, they have returned to appeasing terrorists as if nothing ever happened.  Below is an account and a video of that horrible September day to help ensure that we don't forget:

The Munich Massacre By Mitchell Bard


It was 4:30 in the morning on Sept. 5, 1972, when five Arab terrorists wearing track sweat suits climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village. Although they were seen by several people, no one thought anything was unusual since athletes routinely hopped the fence; moreover, the terrorists' weapons were hidden in athletic bags. These five were met by three more men who are presumed to have obtained credentials to enter the village.


The Palestinians then used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystraße.Israeli wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a faint scratching noise at the door of the first apartment. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted “Hevre tistalku!” (Hebrew — Guys, get out of here!) and threw his nearly 300-lb. (135-kg) weight against the door to try to stop the Palestinians from forcing their way in. In the confusion, coach Tuvia Sokolovsky and race-walker Dr. Shaul Ladany escaped and another four athletes, plus the two team doctors and delegation head Shmuel Lalkin, managed to hide.

Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, attacked the kidnappers as the hostages were being moved from one apartment to another, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape. The burly Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death. Weightlifter and father of three Yossef Romano, 31, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being killed. The Arabs then succeeded in rounding up nine Israelis to hold as hostages.


At 9:30, the terrorists announced that they were Palestinians and demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the terrorists be given safe passage out of Germany. The Palestinians were led by Luttif Afif (“Issa”), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal (“Tony”), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid (“Paolo”), Khalid Jawad (“Salah”), Ahmed Chic Thaa (“Abu Halla”), Mohammed Safady (“Badran”), Adnan Al-Gashey (“Denawi”), and his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey (“Samir”).

After hours of tense negotiations, the Palestinians, who it was later learned belonged to a PLO faction called Black September, agreed to a plan whereby they were to be taken by helicopter to the NATO air base at Firstenfeldbruck where they would be given an airplane to fly them and their hostages to Cairo. The Israelis were then taken by bus to the helicopters and flown to the airfield. In the course of the transfer, the Germans discovered that there were eight terrorists instead of the five they expected and realized that they had not assigned enough marksmen to carry out the plan to kill the terrorists at the airport.

After the helicopters landed at the air base around 10:30 p.m., the German sharpshooters attempted to kill the terrorists and a bloody firefight ensued. At 11, the media was mistakenly informed that the hostages had been saved and the news was announced to a relieved Israeli public. Almost an hour later, however, new fighting broke out and one of the helicopters holding the Israelis was blown up by a terrorist grenade. The remaining nine hostages in the second helicopter were shot to death by one of the surviving terrorists.

Hostages killed at the airport

(middle row, L-R) wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, age 40; American-born weightlifter David Berger, 28; wrestler Mark Slavin, 18; and weightlifting judge Yacov Springer, 51.

(bottom row, L-R) weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman, 28; track coach Amitzur Shapira, 40; wrestler Eliezer Halfin, 24; shooting coach Kehat Shorr, 53; and fencing coach Andre Spitzer, 27.


At 3 a.m., a drawn and teary-eyed Jim McKay, who had been reporting the drama throughout the day as part of ABC's Olympic coverage, announced: “They're all gone.”


Five of the terrorists were killed along with one policeman, and three were captured. A little over a month later, on Oct. 29, a Lufthansa jet was hijacked by terrorists demanding that the Munich killers be released.


The Germans capitulated and the terrorists were let go, but an Israeli assassination squad was assigned to track them down along with those responsible for planning the massacre. According to George Jonas in Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, eight of the 11 men targeted for death were killed. Of the remaining three, one died of natural causes and the other two were assassinated, but it is not known for sure if they were killed by Israeli agents

Meanwhile, the mastermind of the massacre remains at large.Abu Daoud was shot thirteen times on July 27, 1981 in a Warsaw hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack. Daoud was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996 so he could go to a PLO meeting convened in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in its charter that called for Israel's eradication. In 1999, Abu Daoud admitted his role in the massacre in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.

Daoud, who lives with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, claims his commandos never intended to harm the athletes and blamed their deaths on the German police and the stubbornness of then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. On December 27, 2005, Daoud reiterated that he had no regrets about his involvement in the Munich attack.


Bassam Abu Sharif, a member of the PFLP at the time, said the motive for the operation in Munich was to attract publicity for the Palestinian cause and to win the release of Palestinian prisoners.

The Olympic committee did not feel the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes were important enough to cancel or even delay the Olympic games, after all, they were only Jews.

“Incredibly, they're going on with it,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time. “It's almost like having a dance at Dachau.”

The mastermind of the Munich attack Abu Daoud, claims that the future Palestinian President  Mahmoud Abbas provided the funds to carry out the Black September attack. Yes the same Mahmoud Abbas who is considered a "moderate" terrorist. Daoud made that charge in his 1999 French language memoir, "Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich," and again in an interview last August with Don Yaeger of Sports Illustrated magazine.

Abu Daoud said he was angered by the dozens of Palestinian terrorists allowed to return to the Palestinian territories as a result of the Oslo process while he remained persona non grata to Israel and the United States. Abu Mazen, Daoud complained, is now considered "respectable" even though he also was involved in the Munich attack.

In his book Abu Daoud states:

"After Oslo in 1993, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] went to the White House Rose Garden for a photo op with Arafat, President Bill Clinton and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.


"Do you think that ... would have been possible if the Israelis had known that Abu Mazen was the financier of our operation? I doubt it."

When Abu Daoud died last year, Abbas has eulogized Abu Dauod, the mastermind of the massacre  at the Munich Olympics “He is missed. He was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people's just causes,” said Abbas.

This is the man Obama wants Israel to spend time negotiating with.

Even more than ever the words of  Ze'ev Jabotinsky ring true:

It is incredible what political simpletons Jews are. They shut their eyes to one of the most elementary rules of life, that you must not "meet halfway" those who do not want to meet you.


--Ze'ev Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall November 4, 1923