Munich 1972 and 2016 The long history of German incompetence in the face of Islamist terrorism. Howard Rotberg
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263616/munich-1972-and-2016-howard-rotberg
We all know about Germany under Angela Merkel deciding to admit about a million immigrants from lands where jihadism, Sharia law, terrorism and hatred of women, Jews and gays are endemic.
Most of know that on New Years’ Eve last, some 1000 of the recent immigrants, predominantly young males from a culture of rape, began sexually assaulting hundreds of German young women in Cologne.
Fewer know that German police took days to acknowledge the extent of the mass rapes and sexual attacks and in this they and the German media have been following the lead of Sweden whose police and media, according to a recent article in Britain’s The Spectator, have been actively covering up the facts on the nature and extent of Muslim sexual attacks on their women.
German police declared within one day that the German-Iranian shooter who killed 9, including children, in the Munich mall attack this week acted alone, and inferred that this was mental illness not terrorism.
This happened during a period where police and security services were on “high alert” due to information about a possible terrorist attack. Unlike most shooters who are killed on site as they continue to shoot, this shooter was found a kilometer away from the mall, and police quickly said that not only did he act alone but that it was suicide. He had been walking around with a Glock 17 semi-automatic handgun and 300 rounds of ammunition in his rucksack. I ask whether it is reasonable to accept such a fast conclusion from police that it was suicide and not terrorism.
I do not understand why the country that makes Mercedes cars that can drive themselves cannot, during a period of high alert, protect public gatherings, or find a shooter in a dense urban environment and must rely on the killer committing suicide a kilometer away – unless of course your ideology says all Muslims are culturally equal to all Western Europeans and that it is appropriate to accept a million mostly unvetted, mostly Muslim, migrants during wartime (radical Islam has declared war, and Hollande accepts this but not Obama and it would seem that Merkel does not accept it either). The ideology of tolerance (which I term “tolerism” in my book of that title) says that tolerance and compassion and empathy, and yes, “submission” to a million demographic soldiers of the Islamic retaking of Europe, will somehow ease the problem.
The perpetrator shouted, “Allahu Akbar” — the terrorist battle-cry. Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae, however, told a news conference there were no indications the gunman had links with ISIS, identifying the attack as a “classic shooting rampage” and not terrorism. Why do we insist that we are only worried about links to ISIS and not links to cultural jihadism and conquest?
Police were quick to emphasize that the shooter also shouted that he was a “German”, all but ignoring that he, or perhaps his parents, was, or were, from Iran, the major terrorist exporting nation in the world. Even if he was not directed by Iranian terrorists, one cannot say that he was not inspired by the constant anti-western propaganda and warlike statements coming out of Iran. One would think that Germany, in light of its crimes during the Nazi era but also due to its role in selling chemicals to Iraq and Syria for its chemical weapons program, and, as disclosed in a report by the World Nuclear Organization, providing 24% of the parts for the Iranian Busheir 1 nuclear plant, be more diligent in pursuing world peace by stopping its tolerance for Islamic warmongers.
The purpose of this article is to re-examine the 1972 terrorist attacks in Munich and reflect on the Munich mall Islamist terrorist attack . For it is my contention that a review of the facts will disclose that the undue tolerance and political correctness sweeping Europe has made it very difficult to protect Germans, as well as their visitors, from Islamist violence.
Let us examine the historical context of the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Eight Palestinians from a terrorist organization called Black September, a group within Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and PLO, took Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, and, in the course of the attack, 11 Israelis and one German police officer were killed.
While terrorist attacks have become very common, we must remember that the Munich massacre was something much more unique at the time. Author Steven Reeve, who did a 2001 study of the attack and its aftermath, writes that Munich was one of the most significant terror attacks of recent times, in that it “thrust the Palestinian cause into the world spotlight, set the tone for decades of conflict in the Middle East, and launched a new era of international terrorism.” And as Arab Muslims continued to find terrorism useful to attain the support of Europeans and the United Nations, then it was sure to follow that terrorism would be used against the West.
Accordingly, it must be understood how incompetent was the response of the German authorities and how mild was the response of the International Olympic movement.
Two of the Israelis were killed immediately upon the hostage-taking. The hostage-takers then demanded the release and transfer to Egypt of a large number of Palestinians and others jailed in Israel. Israel’s response was absolute – no negotiations with terrorist murderers. Israel offered to send a special forces unit to Germany to try to free the hostages, but Germany refused. Instead Germany undertook an operation which was so incompetent that it would be laughable if the consequences hadn’t been so tragic. (We must credit the Germans, however, with the moral step of offering to the Palestinians a substitution of some high-ranking Germans in place of the Israelis, which the Palestinians refused.)
First, the Germans dispatched to the Olympic village some members of the border-police, completely untrained in any sort of counter-terrorist response, and without any plan of attack. They took up positions, awaiting orders that never came. Second, German television camera crews starting filming the police squad on the roof of a building, and once the terrorists saw the footage on television, and showed they knew where the police were, the operation was abandoned.
The German authorities pretended to give in to the terrorists’ demand for transportation to Cairo; but instead of taking them to the international airport, the Germans transported them to a military airbase, where they planned to attack them.
The Germans selected five snipers, but none of them had any special training and were only chosen because they shot competitively on weekends. A Boeing jet was positioned on the tarmac, and the Germans placed five or six armed police, dressed as flight crew, in the plane. They were to overpower the terrorists who would be inspecting the plane, and the other snipers were to kill the remainder of the terrorists who would be in the helicopters which delivered them from the Olympic site. The armed police, however, again had no counter-terrorism training, and at the last moment just as the helicopters arrived, the police panicked and voted among themselves to abandon their mission, which they did, without even contacting their central command. When the terrorist leaders inspected the empty jet, they knew they had been duped, and a chaotic scene ensued. But the German snipers, who had no radio contact with each other, and hence no coordination of their efforts, were not even equipped with steel helmets or bullet-proof vests. In the end all of the hostages were killed, and all but three of the terrorists.
After a one-day suspension, the Games continued. At a memorial service, IOC President Avery Brundage spoke about the strength of the Olympic movement, but chose not to refer to the slain Israeli athletes! And the Arab nations objected to a plan to fly flags at half mast!
The bodies of the five Palestinians who were killed were, for some reason, delivered to Libya, where they received heroes’ funerals with full military honors. The three surviving terrorists were jailed, but less than two months later, a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked and the Germans quickly traded two of the terrorists for release of the hijacked plane.
We should understand that 9/11 and the various terrorist attacks in Europe are part of the same problem that Israel faces. Sadly, the European Left (and increasingly the American Left) seeks to distinguish the two and continues to work to sacrifice Israel to the Islamist beast, in the hopes that it will be sated and not come after them.
The tolerant elites of Europe have ignored all history, and welcomed some one million migrants into Germany alone, from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and other dysfunctional Muslim countries. Britain’s Express newspaper (consisting of the Daily Express and the Sunday Express) reported in February on a leaked government report that the refugees to Germany (numbering some one million people) committed some 200,000 crimes last year! Most were minor crimes, but some were murders, assaults, thefts, sexual assaults, etc. It takes a special kind of ideology of naïve faith in tolerance (which I term tolerism) to destroy the safety of your own people in favor of some notion of “rights” of migrants, most of whom were inadequately vetted.
Significantly, German security forces have been on alert since a teenage migrant stabbed and injured five people on a train in Bavaria on Monday, in an attack claimed by so-called Islamic State.
The authorities had warned of the danger of further incidents. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, German authorities are not implementing what Israel did way back in 2001, where those entering malls are checked for weapons by highly trained security guards. Not checking, not understanding the difference between mental illness and cultural incitement, 24 hour conclusions ruling out “terrorism”, are all signs of incompetence. Incompetence to save Israeli athletes in 1972 and incompetence to save their own people in 2016. And the reason for the incompetence is the foolish ideology adopted by the children and grandchildren of Nazi murderers that the problem of terrorism was a deserved problem of the Israeli Jews and that it wasn’t their problem.
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