view from central park: tehilla r. goldberg

Racism won’t spoil Israel’s Olympic cheer: Bronze is as good as Gold

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Every time the Olympics rolls around, I want to believe in it. I want to partake in it from afar and cheer this idea of humanity coming together in the spirit of sportsmanship.

When it’s the Winter Olympics, I can watch the graceful ice skating for hours. Sasha Cohen is poetry in motion, her gentle elegance and poise poetry for the eyes. In the Summer Olympics, gymnasts, whose moves seem to defy physics and straddle a line between gravity and magic, are simply breathtaking. And those Olympic swimmers, flashing by like fish in the sea, are a wonder.

Although the Olympics are tinged by the morally depraved 1936 Nazi propaganda, and by the Munich Massacre in 1972 — let alone by commercialization and profit — each time, I want to believe. But too often, it seems that it can’t just be a “regular” Olympics experience when it comes to Israeli teams and to Jewish people.

This year, the Lebanese team wouldn’t ride join the Israeli team on a bus to the opening ceremony; disturbingly, the IOC acquiesced to the Lebanese and had the Israelis moved to a separate bus, like ghettoized guests. This was simply astounding.

It’s now acceptable to remove Israelis from a bus altogether, so as not to cause the Lebanese to sit with Jews? According to this logic, Rosa Parks should have been removed from the bus to avoid a ruckus. With Jews, however, it seems that racism and discrimination is acceptable. The Lebanese team refuses to ride with the Israeli team — let them be the ones to travel in a different bus. Although honestly, this kind of behavior ought to be automatically disqualifying for participation in the IOC games.

What prompted the Lebanese action? Was it the primitive Muslim concept of najes (impure or unclean), of not making physical contact with a non-believer or even with the sweat of a non-believer? Najes is a concept that traumatized many a Jew on rainy days in Arab lands — to the point where they often stayed sequestered, locked indoors, lest a drop of rain that splashed a Jew bounce off and touch a Muslim.

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