Rivlin slams Abbas’s Fatah for praising 1972 Munich Olympics attack

President Reuven Rivlin condemns Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s party for persistently praising the 1972 terror attack at the Munich Olympics that left 11 Israeli athletes and one German police officer dead.

“There are still those who see in the murder of sportsmen, a heroic deed,” Rivlin says in his speech unveiling a memorial to the slain athletes in Munich. “Just last year, Fatah marked the massacre of the sportsmen as an ‘act of heroism,'” he says.

“The center we are inaugurating today must be a message to the whole world: There can be no apologizing for terrorism. Terror must be unequivocally condemned, everywhere. In Barcelona, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, in Jerusalem, and everywhere else.”

Rivlin says Israel has been waiting nearly a half century for the Olympic Games to hold a moment of silence in honor of the slain Israelis.

“Our brothers who were murdered were not just the State of Israel’s sons,” he says. “They were the Olympic family’s sons. A family which for many years abandoned its commitment to them.”

— Sue Surkes