In December 2005, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch, was invited to the premiere of Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich." Danoch disliked the film greatly and quickly dispatched a message to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem voicing his objections to Spielberg's equating of Palestinian terrorists ("freedom fighters" for the Black September organization) with the Mossad "hitmen" sent by Prime Minister Golda Meir to avenge the blood of the 11 murdered Israeli Olympic athletes. That month, The New York Times devoted a considerable amount of coverage to the Israeli consul's feud with Spielberg and his movie. Exactly 10 years later, in December 2015, the same New York Times has revisited the Munich tragedy. This time, too, the newspaper discusses a movie -- a documentary titled "Munich 1972 & Beyond" -- in which two of the victims' widows are interviewed; Ilana Romano, the wife of weightlifter Yossef Romano, and Ankie Spitzer, the widow of fencing coach Andre Spitzer. The women's testimonies are horrific, revealing previously unpublished and repugnant details of torture the terrorists inflicted on their victims, and illustrate the extent to which cruelty knows no bounds when it comes to terrorists. "What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him," Ilana Romano told the paper. For those who have forgotten, Yossef Romano's "crime" was confronting the murderers. The murders of the Israeli Olympians exposed Palestinian terrorism to the world, although it had already been well underway, with one example being the hijacking of the Sabena plane earlier that year. But the importance of the testimony provided by the two widows, who have lived with this terrible knowledge since September 1992, is that it reveals the malice of terrorists long before the jihadists from al-Qaida and Islamic State began appalling the world. "Abu Daoud," the leader of Black September and the planner of the Munich attack, wrote in his autobiography that Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority, was one of the few with prior knowledge of the attack and helped fund it. Abbas denies that he knew what the money was to be used for. We can assume he knew very well that it wasn't for promoting good sportsmanship in the Middle East. The news we received on Tuesday about the uninhibited brutality in Munich takes us back to what should have been "The Happy Olympics." There were several foul-ups, including the incomprehensible ease with which the Israelis were taken captive in the Olympic village; the failed rescue attempt by German security forces; and of course the fact that the games were allowed to continue after the massacre, after the president of the Olympic Committee at the time proclaimed that "the games must go on." The memory of the murdered Israeli Olympians will never be erased. The torture they endured before their deaths only serves to justify the Israeli government's decision to eliminate them. Please take note, Mr. Spielberg.
