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LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY IAN V. MACDONALD

To: lettertoed@thestar.ca

Subject: Mitt Romney and the Munich "massacre"

Note to Editor: Here is yet another example of Israeli propagandists trying to gain sympathy from the death of their athletes at Munich which they themselves precipitated. They have absolutely no shame!

IVM

August 8, 2012

Editor TORONTO STAR

Dear Sir

Israeli athletes remembered wrongly by Romney

Mitt Romney, in describing as "murder" the death of the 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, echoes the hypocritical Israeli request for an Olympic Games tribute to the athletes purportedly "massacred" at the 1972 Munich Games.

The claim is deceitful and stunningly audacious, given that the facts are easily ascertained.

Unlike the murderous goal of typical Mossad missions, the purpose of the Black September foray at the 1972 Munich Olympics was to take the Israeli athletes hostage and exchange them for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, that is, to take them alive, not to "murder" them as Israeli propagandists would have us believe.

Once the hostages had been taken, to ensure the athletes' safety (and to avoid the horror of spilling Jewish blood on German soil), the West German authorities agreed to guaranty safe passage for the hostages and their captors out of the country to a neutral destination, thought to be Tunisia.

Unexpectedly, however, the Israeli Government put furious, high-level political pressure on the shocked, reluctant West Germans to abrogate the safe-conduct agreement and to kill the Palestinian hostage-takers. The German Police rejected the frenzied appeals out of hand, pointing to the safe-conduct agreement and to the fact that the hostages almost certainly would not survive a shoot-out.

Unfortunately, for the athletes and their families, the police were overruled by the more easily intimidated (if not wholly-compromised) German Federal Government who ordered the police to open fire.

As predicted, the Palestinians reacted violently to the betrayal and the athletes all died in the resulting exchange of fire, which clearly would not have taken place had the Israeli Government not strenuously intervened. It is an ironic paradox that the Palestinian Black September militants wanted, indeed desperately needed, to keep the hostages alive, while the infinitely more diabolical Israeli political strategists insisted, in effect, that they should die!

Apparently the creation of 11 Jewish "martyrs" was seen, correctly, by cynical Israeli politicians as a major public relations coup and potentially-lucrative fund-raiser, whereas negotiations for release of the 10 hostages (one had been shot resisting capture) would have been seen as both politically-demeaning and a dangerous precedent.

Yours sincerely,

Ian V. Macdonald

455 Wilbrod Street

Ottawa ON K1N 6M7

613 241 5389

Canadian Foreign Service rtd,

Ex-RCAF, RN Fleet Air Arm

Author, "OTTAWA - the Golden Years", "The Star Weekly at War"

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