At least Rosa Parks was allowed onto the bus in Jim Crow Montgomery, Alabama circa 1955. That is more that can be said for the Israeli Olympians in Rio when they were blocked entry from getting on a bus heading to the opening ceremonies by a contingent of Lebanese athletes, in what has been described as an aggressive manner. The hatred, bigotry, and threats faced by the Israeli athletes on a daily basis by their fellow competitors at this summer’s Olympics is nothing short of repulsive. Other well documented slights include Egyptian wrestler Islam El Shehaby refusing to shake hands with Bronze medal winning Or Sasson after a judo match, and Saudi athlete Joud Fahmy forfeiting a judo match so she wouldn’t have to be matched up against Gili Cohen. Both Cohen and Sasson are from Israel.
Wasn’t it eighty years ago, during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, that Jesse Owens supposedly put to bed the notion that any race or ethnicity should have to suffer from the presumption of inferiority? The 2016 Rio games are proving to be the proverbial dead canary in the coal mine, warning us that in the early 21st century, not only is civilization not advancing, it is drifting backwards to barbarism.
The culprit of this descent into madness, to no one’s surprise unless you have your head in the sand, is radical Islam. Radical Islam, as much as Angela Merkel and Barack Obama scold us, is not just a handful of wayward individuals with mental issues. Instead it is a mighty force that has millions and millions of people under its sway, including leaders of several countries, some of which in the next decade will more than likely have nuclear weapons. With radical Islam, the mistreatment Jewish athletes have endured in Rio is small potatoes, and Olympic organizers will hold their breath until after the closing ceremonies that a massive terrorist attack doesn’t take place.
The world has been saddled with radical Islam for several decades now and has failed miserably in finding a strategy to reverse its growth. One of the more popular ways our elected leaders have dealt with the rise of radical Islam is to just ignore it and hope those who partake will someday stop doing horrible things, as if terrorists were children in their terrible twos or petulant adolescences and will outgrow their unruly behavior. The perfect illustration of this is after the killing of over 50 Americans in an Orlando nightclub this year that, when the 911 original tapes transcripts were released by officials to the public, they were edited to read, “I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].”
Another trendy strategy employed by democratically elected leaders is the bizarre notion that they can flatter the terrorists into submission. The theory being we are to say such nice things about Muslims that it will trickle down to the radical Islamists among them, and they will now become happy campers and stop blowing up people and things. Finally, a trickledown theory progressives can embrace. Think of it as radical Islam’s Sally Field Oscar moment, “You like me! You really like me!” In this we have to endure such nonsense as the Administrator of NASA, Charles Bolden, saying that his highest priority should be, “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.” Or that Hillary Clinton’s first tweet on the Olympics was a gosh ain’t it great that America has had its first Olympic athlete perform in a hijab! Does she not care that for millions of women around the world wearing a hijab isn’t a choice, but a have-to, and if you don’t, you’ll get the you-know-what beat out of you, or worse?
Maybe it is fitting that the Rio games take place in the shadows of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue, and perhaps Jacques Hamel had it right that this current global crisis is of Biblical proportions and only God’s intervention can save us now. Jacques Hamel, as a reminder, was a Catholic priest who was beheaded in July after two Muslim teenagers ran into his church in Normandy, France with knifes, interrupted his services, and proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State. Hamel’s last earthly words seem to sum up the situation perfectly, “Be gone, Satan!”
