Because of my connection to 1972 Olympians, and my ignorance of Palestine
then, I had no desire to understand motives for the deplorable attack on
Israeli athletes, but Saturday, September 16, two contrasting events stimulated
different feelings.
As the first competition in Australia stirred memories of my friends
who chased after gold, the Palestinian Refugee Return Marches in Washington,
London and the Middle East aroused my passion for justice for friends who
seek simple truth in a world determined to deny their dignity.
In 1972 I was the primary coordinator for the Olympic canoe/kayak trials
and training camp in Rockford, Illinois, where I became well acquainted
with athletes and coaches.
The day the hostage drama unfolded in Munich my paddling friends were
competing, and I was challenged emotionally while delivering a speech about
our trials to sponsors.
Ironically, my son who was born later in 1972 became the catalyst to
change me from a naive Hoosier touched by Olympic ideals to an informed
American angry at my government for complicity in fraud.
I grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, and graduated from Garfield High
School, which also produced Olympic Gold Medalists Clyde Lovellette, Greg
Bell and Terry Dischinger.
As Clyde played basketball in 1952, I was a nine-year-old being taught
to swim at the YMCA by Joseph Qutub, a college student from Palestine.
I was too young to comprehend his story.
When Greg Bell won the 1956 long jump in Melbourne I had no idea the
poverty he escaped from on the other side of Lost Creek was a "piece
of cake" compared to oppression of Palestinians.
While schoolmate Terry Dischinger was playing toward 1960 basketball
gold, I applauded Sal Mineo's film role as Dov Landau in "Exodus,"
not knowing the storyline was more fiction than fact.
Fast forward to 1994. My son who was born in 1972 started an education
and career path that included living three years in the Middle East and
learning to speak and write Arabic fluently. Now he is nearing completion
of a Master's Degree in Arab Studies.
In the land of cobblestones and camels among technology and power politics,
our son became a committed student of history and a proponent of social
justice.
When we visited him in Palestine we stayed two nights in a refugee camp
with a gracious Muslim family he had lived with for three months prior
to his junior year in college.
We visited the site of the village where they lived until 1948, a village
where they were entitled, according to a United Nations ruling accepted
by Israel, to remain and live as they had before the war.
But as soon as Egyptian soldiers who had defended their village went
home, Israeli occupation forces loaded villagers on trucks and took them
to a refugee camp, then built Kiryat Gat, a prosperous industrial city,
where Iraq al Manshiyya had been.
We were converted to the cause. Inspired first by our son's research,
then wanting to help our new friends, we came home, started typing "Palestine"
into search engines on the Internet, and were astounded by what we learned.
My wife now has a library that would have been the envy of Indiana State
when Joe Qutub studied there in 1952, and we have our own web site, www.cactus48.com,
to share what we discovered.
We have learned the truth. The early Zionist movement was a political
and economic invasion by Europeans to exploit the vulnerability of Palestinian
villagers.
Guilt-stricken by the horrible Holocaust, America jumped on the UN bandwagon,
accepted Zionist lies about Palestine, and since 1948 has punished Palestinians
for what Germans did to Jews.
I grew up being told native Americans were savages, the wagon drive
West was heroic, blacks were inferior intellectually and morally, and the
founding of Israel was a modern miracle.
Garfield history teachers should have told us about Wounded Knee, Rosewood,
the Amistad, and Palestinians displaced from more than 500 villages, starting
with the massacre at Deir Yassin.
I would have learned, if America held fast to its proclaimed ideal of
"liberty and justice for all" as fitting for all people around
the world, that truth is more precious than Olympic gold.
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