Rewind - The Munich Massacre of 1972

It was 4:30 in the morning on Sept. 5, 1972, when five Arab terrorists wearing track sweat suits climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village. Although they were seen by several people, no one thought anything was unusual since athletes routinely hopped the fence; moreover, the terrorists' weapons were hidden in athletic bags. These five were met by three more men who are presumed to have obtained credentials to enter the village.
The Palestinians then used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystrabe. Israeli wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a faint scratching noise at the door of the first apartment. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted “Hevre tistalku!” ( — Guys, get out of here!) and threw his nearly 300-lb. (135-kg) weight against the door to try to stop the Palestinians from forcing their way in. In the confusion, Coach Tuvia Sokolovsky and race-walker Dr. Shaul Ladany escaped and another four athletes, plus the two team doctors and delegation head Shmuel Lalkin, managed to hide.
Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, attacked the kidnappers as the hostages were being moved from one apartment to another, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape. The burly Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death. Weightlifter and father of three Yossef Romano, 31, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being killed. The Arabs then succeeded in rounding up nine Israelis to hold as hostages.
At 9:30, the terrorists announced that they were Palestinians and demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the terrorists be given safe passage out of Germany. The Palestinians were led by Luttif Afif (“Issa”), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal (“Tony”), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid (“Paolo”), Khalid Jawad (“Salah”), Ahmed Chic Thaa (“Abu Halla”), Mohammed Safady (“Badran”), Adnan Al-Gashey (“Denawi”), and his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey (“Samir”).
After hours of tense negotiations, the Palestinians, who it was later learned belonged to a Palestenian Liberation Organisation’s(PLO) faction called Black September, agreed to a plan whereby they were to be taken by helicopter to the NATO air base at Firstenfeldbruck where they would be given an airplane to fly them and their hostages to Cairo. The Israelis were then taken by bus to the helicopters and flown to the airfield. In the course of the transfer, the Germans discovered that there were eight terrorists instead of the five they expected and realized that they had not assigned enough marksmen to carry out the plan to kill the terrorists at the airport.
After the helicopters landed at the air base around 10:30 p.m., the German sharpshooters attempted to kill the terrorists and a bloody fire fight ensued. At 11, the media was mistakenly informed that the hostages had been saved and the news was announced to a relieved Israeli public. Almost an hour later, however, new fighting broke out and one of the helicopters holding the Israelis was blown up by a terrorist grenade. The remaining nine hostages in the second helicopter were shot to death by one of the surviving terrorists.

Hostages killed at the airport

(middle row, L-R) wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, age 40; American-born weightlifter David Berger, 28; wrestler Mark Slavin, 18; and weightlifting judge Yacov Springer, 51.

(bottom row, L-R) weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman, 28; track coach Amitzur Shapira, 40; wrestler Eliezer Halfin, 24; shooting coach Kehat Shorr, 53; and fencing coach Andre Spitzer, 27.

At 3 a.m., a drawn and teary-eyed Jim McKay, who had been reporting the drama throughout the day as part of ABC's Olympic coverage, announced: “They're all gone.”
Five of the terrorists were killed along with one policeman, and three were captured. A little over a month later, on Oct. 29, a Lufthansa jet was hijacked by terrorists demanding that the Munich killers be released.
The Germans capitulated and the terrorists were let go, but an Israeli assassination squad was assigned to track them down along with those responsible for planning the massacre. According to George Jonas in “Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team”, eight of the 11 men targeted for death were killed. Of the remaining three, one died of natural causes and the other two were assassinated, but it is not known for sure if they were killed by Israeli agents. The 11 on the list were:

Adwan, Kamal - Chief of sabotage operations for Al Fatah in the disputed territories
Al-Chir, Hussein Abad - PLO contact with KGB in Cyprus
Al-Kubaisi, Dr. Basil Paoud - Responsible for logistics within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
Boudia, Mohammed - Linked with European PLO
Daoud, Abu - Admitted member of the Black September Organization
Haddad, Dr. Wadi - Chief terrorist linked with Dr. George Habash
Mahshari, Mohmoud - PLO member and coordinator of Munich incident
Nassir, Kamal - Official PLO spokesman and member of the PLO Executive Committee
Salameh, Ali Hassan - Developed and executed the Munich operation
Yussuf, Abu - High ranking PLO official
Zwaiter, Wael - Cousin to Yasser Arafat, organizer of PLO terrorism in Europe

The Jonas book was the basis for two movies about Munich, “The Sword of Gideon” and Steven Spielberg's 2006 Oscar nominee, “Munich.” In the subsequent publicity about Spielberg's film, reports have discredited the account in Jonas, which was largely based on what the author was told by a former self-described ‘Mossad’ agent, Juval Aviv, who claimed he was the leader of the assassination team. In fact, journalists Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov found that “Aviv never served in Mossad, or any Israeli intelligence organization. He had failed basic training as an Israeli Defence Force commando, and his nearest approximation to spy work was as a lowly gate guard for the airline El Al in New York in the early 70s.”

In contrast to the account of “Operation Wrath of God” offered by Jonas, Mossad agents have told reporters subsequently that no one team was sent to kill a specific list of terrorists.
Meanwhile, the mastermind of the massacre remains at large. Abu Daoud was shot thirteen times on July 27, 1981 in a Warsaw hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack. Daoud was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996 so he could go to a PLO meeting convened in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in its charter that called for Israel's eradication. In 1999, Abu Daoud admitted his role in the massacre in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.

Daoud, who lives with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, claims his commandos never intended to harm the athletes and blamed their deaths on the German police and the stubbornness of then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. On December 27, 2005, Daoud reiterated that he had no regrets about his involvement in the Munich attack, and that Steven Spielberg's new film about the incident would not deliver reconciliation.

Bassam Abu Sharif, a member of the PFLP at the time, said the motive for the operation in Munich was to attract publicity for the Palestinian cause and to win the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes was not considered sufficiently serious to merit canceling or postponing the Olympics. “Incredibly, they're going on with it,” Jim Murray of theLos Angeles Times wrote at the time. “It's almost like having a dance at Dachau.”

What I want to highlight here more than the attack is the way Israel took revenge against the attackers. And Israel, following the same ideology, assassinated Hamas leader in Dubai last month by dispatching a team of 11 men. They went to other countries, killing them in their own den. And what we do here, talk and talk and expect other countries to help. Be it Dawood in Dubai or terror leaders in Pakistan and around the world. I feel that they all will die naturally and never from an Indian bullet>>


Get more info at- Complete Book on Munich Massacre
                              The Jewish Library

Rewind - Bhopal Gas Tragedy

Written By- Rahul Bansal

Bhopal Gas Tragedy: On the night of 3^rd December, 1984 the biggest industrial disaster in the corporate history struck at Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. A deadly poisonous gas Methyl Iso-cyanate (MIC) leaked from a tank in the production premises of Union Carbide India Limited (UBIL), Union Carbide being among the biggest producers of chemical products in the world at that time. According to govt. estimates 3000 died that night, others saying the toll to be above 8000 and more than 20,000 died since due to diseases and ailments caused by MIC and 1, 70,000 severely affected. The area around the plant was densely populated and the moon was full, thousands died in their sleeps and many were trampled in the panic.

At that time, the plant was making losses due to declined demand and the management of the company had ordered to reduce the “unnecessary” expenditures. This meant that the plant was sacrificing on many of the safety precautions taken when handling such volatile and dangerous gases as was MIC. Kamal Pareek, former assistant manager of safety at Bhopal plant had resigned in 1982 following this as the company was not ready to listen to his requests of not cutting the safety nets. SEVIN, a carbaryl pesticide, was being produced using MIC instead of less dangerous but more expensive substitutes and was stored in underground tank No.610 at that plant. At around midnight between 2^nd and 3^rd December, around 27 tons of MIC with 61 other hazardous gases escaped from the tank and because all the safety features to contain the escaping gases including a chimney to burn all the gases were dysfunctional or removed due to ‘cost constraints’, the gas quickly started spreading in the air towards the nearby villages with a population of more than 5,00,000.

The emergency alarm bells to warn the people was not activated because “it would have caused panic and stampede in the villages” according to the company officials, but what has happened without warning the people, when they were given no chance of escape, where many died in their sleep due to cardiac arrest and suffocation, the company didn’t want to explain.

The then CEO and chairman of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson was in India at the time of the event. The police arrested him and soon released him within 24 hours without giving any rational reason, soon after which he flew outside India. Subsequent efforts to bring him back proved futile.

The Indian government passed a legislation which made it a legal representative of the victims in the US courts. The government moved to the US court demanding $3.3 billion for the victims in compensation but it settled for $417 million in 1989 which comes roughly to $500 per victim. But when the victims appealed in Indian courts against the order as no one was held guilty and too little a compensation, the Indian court issued summons to the company to which the company openly refused to respond.

In 2001, the Union Carbide was taken over by DOW Chemicals (third largest chemical company in the world in terms of market capitalization) which refused to take over the Bhopal Disaster liabilities, stating that it were not part of their purchase. The Union Carbide India Ltd. was not in their purchase agreement which was taken over by B.M. Khaitan group, renamed as Eveready Industries Ltd., the same companies whose AA batteries we use in toys and remote sets. The Union Carbide has totally refused to take over the responsibility to even clean up the mess it has left behind, including the thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals still left unclaimed in the plant. Till today, not even at the time of the tragedy had the company provided with any information about the exact gases and their quantity which had escaped the plant, nor the methods by which its harmful effects can be contained and people could be saved. They just went away. The official company stand is that “it was an external sabotage” but who is the culprit it can’t say.

"We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life."
-- Rashida Bee, Bhopal gas leak survivor

On 3^rd December,2009 it will be the 25^th year since that tragedy had struck. But till now the victims are waiting for compensation, for some genuine medical help, waiting that the deadly effects of the gases will wear out, hoping that their next generation will be without any ailments or cancer, waiting for someone to come forward to help them. And god knows that their wait is long.

Compassion wherever there is suffering, Conviction that the compassion is strong enough to eliminate suffering, Courage to make this conviction a reality. This is AID.