Where I Stand — Hank Greenspun: World views terrorists’ acts

Friday, June 8, 2001 | 9:17 a.m.

Note to readers: Sun founder Hank Greenspun's last Where I Stand column was written in 1989, the year he passed away. In the following weeks Classic Sun will feature columns written by Hank that still relate to today's headlines. In this column, written on Sept. 7, 1972, Hank examines ongoing violence between Arabs and Israelis and the murder of 11 Olympic athletes by Arab terrorists at the Summer Games in Munich.

The world is shocked by the savagery of the Arab terrorists.

The international community saw the whole thing on television.

Otherwise, it wouldn't even rate a paragraph in the world press. Because it happens continually and few blood pressures are raised other than the survivors of the victims.

Terror is a way of life to the Israelis. They live with it every waking and sleeping hour never knowing where or when until it strikes.

A hand grenade in a bus kills and maims little school children -- a bomb in a market place decapitates housewives -- and the world little knows or long cares.

It is tragedy at a distance and doesn't affect lives anywhere else so the Israelis are forced to live with it.

But the moment the small state of Israel takes preventive measures against the nests of terrorists who constantly raid across her borders, the world comes alive and the United Nations springs to the defense of the guerrillas with a thundering denunciation of Israel.

This is something the Israelis do not understand.

All acts of terrorism on her borders are so monstrously and obviously evil that she cannot comprehend why the rest of the world cannot see it.

It is not enough to dismiss calmly and simply a sadistic act of violence by a psychopathic mob, because it is carried out under the protection and patronage of governments that are members of the United Nations -- an organization supposedly organized to keep the peace.

What the Sun sports section, in a black bordered page, described as the "Blackest Day in History of Sports" is just another black day -- another tragic remembrance for Jewish history.

This time it was 11 stalwart, beautiful Israeli Olympians who were massacred at what should have been the most peaceful event of mankind.

But what of all the other times that didn't appear on television?

What is Israel supposed to do when its citizens are cruelly and baselessly murdered by predatory enemies 50 times her own size? Is she supposed to again turn the other cheek?

The state has never known surcease from this kind of plundering and ravaging of her civilian population.

No one person can speak for Israel but the thinking there is that the discriminatory attitude of the world -- the one-sidedness of the United Nations, leaves her no alternative but to take protective measures and make the raids across her frontiers costly to the perpetrators.

Israel will stand a far better chance of survival and the world will have a better chance for peace if all the fomenters of genocide will know that their violent methods do not have the condonation of the United Nations.

Maybe television and terror at the Olympic games will bring this lesson home to the whole world.