Fun editorial on statesmanship and the Olympics in ‘The Forward’
A sampling from the brief editorial:
When the Olympic torch is formally lit August 8 in the Bird’s Nest, China’s odd-looking new Olympic stadium, and the sky above Beijing explodes with what officials promise will be a “spectacular” fireworks display (in the very “birthplace of gunpowder,” as a government press release artlessly points out), a few key figures will be conspicuously absent. Truants will include the presidents of Poland and the Czech Republic and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. They plan to boycott the opening ceremony to protest China’s poor human rights record and its ongoing occupation of Tibet…In Canada, a furious debate is raging over the planned absence of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and whether it will even be noticed — that is, assuming he is actually boycotting rather than simply detained by other commitments. His office won’t say one way or the other…Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, had been planning to skip the ceremony, but not because of child labor, Tibet’s agony or China’s appalling role in Darfur. Peres intended to stay home because the accommodations were too far from the stadium and he didn’t want to ride on the Sabbath. Instead, China found him a hotel on stadium grounds in the Olympic village, allowing Peres to uphold the Israeli political tradition of pretending to be Sabbath-observant when traveling abroad. Now he’s good to go.
If all this sounds silly, that’s because it is. The political gamesmanship surrounding the games this year is making fools of just about everyone involved…
The editorial then makes a kind of strange comparison at the end of Jewish community center basketball teams with the Warsaw ghetto uprising,
A century ago, movements arose among the Jews of Europe to reclaim Jewish destiny by teaching Jews to reclaim themselves, physically as well as spiritually. Polish yeshiva students reinvented themselves as Israeli farmers. Jewish soccer leagues were created in Vienna and Budapest, and Jewish basketball teams at community centers in Cleveland and Philadelphia helped spawn the National Basketball Association. Jewish scouting and Zionist pioneering clubs in Nazi-occupied Warsaw taught themselves to shoot and staged an uprising. A spirit of Jewish self-reliance was reborn, and it gave Jews the strength to carry on after the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, with new generations of Jews returning in droves to their pallid desks and study halls, that spirit is needed more than ever.
I mean, I’m all for athletes (who don’t get paid exorbitant amounts of money), and Jewish athletes are fun, mainly because at sports, well, we’re much better at being the commissioner or team president. But why does a general look at the weak state of international moral staturing played poorly have to turn into, ‘Jews invented the NBA, that spirit caused the Warsaw ghetto uprising, now Jews are becoming weak again because they study, Jewish Olympians are the answer.’ Personally, what would make me proud to be Jewish would be a series of editorials in the Forward on what the Jewish community has to say about the issues with China’s policies and why the Jewish world should pay more attention to them.
Anyways, aside from the “proud Jews hate gemara and love to kill nazis and play basketball” thing at the end, most of the editorial drives home a pretty good point. Even if the Olympics is used as a place for political statements and jockeying (whether or not is should be is a completely different issue, this year it has been done in particularly poor form.
