Tears, Anger 40 Years After Munich Olympics Killings (Guest Voice)
Tears, anger 40 years after Munich Olympics killings (via AFP)
Survivors, relatives and officials paid solemn tribute on Wednesday to 11 Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre at the site of their killings 40 years ago. About 600 guests passed tight security checks to attend a ceremony at Fuerstenfeldbruck air base, west of Munich, where a hostage…
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What a tragedy. It’s my earliest memory of what terrorism means, later I would learn that the 70′s were truly horrible in that regard, with plane hijackings, mass kidnappings, and car bombings spreading all over the world.
My own recollection of the aftermath was the Germans were simply unprepared for such an event and didn’t know how to handle it. Botched terrorist response operations were actually quite common, adequate terrorist response tactics hadn’t been invented yet, much less implemented (except in Israel itself).
The mistakes in Munich and elsewhere provided the bitter learning experiences that now form the heart of an entire science of anti-terror operations. It is a different world today, therefore I think it’s a little unfair to judge Germany’s actions 40 years later.
Having said that, I am a BIG fan of government openness, so by all means if there’s anything there that needs to see the light of day, let it be seen.
ditto what Barky said. Having a law enforcement family and a military family, it isnt as armchair opiners like to say, ‘if I’d been there with my rifle, all the bad guys would be dead.’ Easy to say, much harder to do. Luck plays a part, as does timing, and bedrock training. But even with best of best, all can turn out well, or not. Sudden twists of impulse in any number of people, weather, sudden additional players can make outcomes swing either way. The history that brings this home are any of the ancient writings of Pliny or Plato or other escritoros of many hundreds of years ago. Just to see how weather affects or afflicts outcome is notable.