Those old enough to have seen this horror played out live and worldwide on Television will always remember the vivid image of a Ski-masked terrorist on the balcony as the horror played out. It was 45 years ago when Jim McKay, looking every bit the man who has been reporting without sleep for more than a day, making the horrible announcement, “they are all gone.”
“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.”
Eleven innocents died that day. And the terrorists won. Sure Golda Meir sent out a hit squad and killed most of the murderers behind the attack. But that was followed up by a worldwide effort to legitimize the terrorist Arafat and the Oslo Accords, the second intifada, three wars with Hamas, one with Hezbollah.
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 quickly returned to appeasing terrorists as if nothing ever happened. That same appeasement led to groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS. Make no mistake about it all of those terrorist groups were suckled at the teat of the appeasement of Palestinian terrorism
In his book Abu Daoud, who was the mastermind behind the Munich attack stated:
“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, Abbas has eulogized him as he has done with many terrorists since:
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.
“European governments have no alternative but to decide what they are going to do. To every one which upholds the rule of law I suggest there is but only one answer – no deals with terrorists, no truck with terrorism. Any government which strikes a deal with these killers does so at its own peril. What happened in Vienna is that a democratic government, a European government, came to an agreement with terrorists. In so doing it has brought shame upon itself. In so doing it has breached a basic principle of the rule of law, the basic principle of the freedom of the movement of peoples – or should I just say the basic freedom of the movement of Jews fleeing Russia? Oh, what a victory for terrorism this is!”
After 9/11 until the 2006 mid term elections, the United States stood up to all terror, but after the lost of his congressional majority Bush’s anti-terror resolve began to wane especially with regards to Palestinian
Terror.
The Obama Administration didn’t identify our enemy for what they were Islamist terrorists. We no longer say that jihad is a threat to the country. Obama attempted outreach to terrorists and those who support terrorists. When Israel faced rocket attacks from a terrorist group that purposely put innocents in the line of fire, Obama slammed Israel instead of the terrorists causing the civilian deaths. He negotiated with the despots in Iran but ignored those who try to overthrow the terrorist supporting regime. And when ISIS came along he ignored the threat until they became a super cell of terrorists. In short, Obama appeased terrorists to a level that hadn’t been seen since the days of Jimmy Carter.
Thankfully it seems that the new President Donald Trump is changing the policy of appeasement.
