An organization named Avaaz has launched a campaign to ban Israel from the Olympics. Avaaz describes itself in carefully chosen terms that show it to be a staunch exponent of the left’s cultural agenda. It says it was “launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want. Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change.” Predictably, this supposedly high-minded focus leads the group to hate the Jewish state. The Avaaz has published an open letter addressed to the to the International Olympic Committee, stating that “as citizens from across the world, we call on you to ban Israel from the Olympic Games until their government ceases its assault on innocent civilians in Gaza." Avaaz doesn’t mention, of course, that the sole source for the claim that Israel is carrying out any assault on innocent civilians in Gaza is the jihad terror group Hamas, which doesn’t exactly have a reputation for honesty.
Instead, Avaaz goes on to retail more Hamas falsehoods: “36,000 of those who could be watching with us from Gaza are dead. Children who once dreamed of competing have had their limbs torn from them.” Avaaz made this claim despite the fact that in midMay, the UN cut in half the number of women and children it claimed that the Israelis have killed in Gaza. The Jerusalem Post reported that in the UN’s latest report on the number of casualties in Gaza, it added a disclaimer that should have been there from the very beginning: “The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures.” The 36,000 figure comes from Hamas, before the revision. It was still good enough for Avaaz.
The U.S. did not participate in 1980 as a protest
Avaaz wants swift action: “The Olympic committee meets on June 12: let's be one million voices demanding that Israel be banned until its government stops the assault on Palestinian lives!” To put this demand in context, it’s useful to recall that National Socialist Germany not only participated in, but actually hosted the 1936 Olympic Games. Despite the open antisemitism of Hitler’s regime and the fact that the systematic persecution of Jews and destruction of the Jewish community in Germany was already well underway, the National Socialists were still allowed to host the Olympics and even to try to turn them into a demonstration of the superiority of the Aryan “master race.”
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by withdrawing the United States from the Moscow Olympics, not by demanding that the Soviet Union be barred from participating. Nations have been barred from the Olympics for political reasons, but never for defending themselves against an aggressive force that, given the chance, would destroy them utterly and initiate a genocide of their populations.
Avaaz could succeed, and Israel could be barred from the Olympics. This would be just as absurd as hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice for doing what any state would do if it had been attacked in the way Israel was on Oct. 7, 2023, but the rules have always been diferent for the Jewish state from those that prevail for the other nations of the world.
The beginning of the new dark ages
The participants in the leftist/Islamic alliance are behaving increasingly like the National Socialists who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, laid waste to Europe, and murdered six million Jews, yet they still claim to hold the moral high ground. The claim was hollow to begin with it, and now it’s simply absurd.
Whether or not it succeeds, Avaaz’s call to ban Israel from the Olympics contains the seeds of the destruction of the modern Olympic games themselves. The whole idea of the Olympics is that nations put aside their difilculties and hostilities and compete in a friendly and collegial atmosphere. To ban Israel on the false pretenses of Hamas propaganda would strike a severe blow against the very idea of what the Olympics are supposed to be about, and advance the world down the path to the destruction of the post-World War II order and beginning of the new dark ages that increasingly appear inevitable. Still, it isn’t too late to preserve what is left of humane civilization — but only if groups such as Avaaz are thoroughly defeated, and not just defeated, but soundly rebuked and thoroughly repudiated.
This article was published with permission of the author.
