An Olympic official who debases the Olympic spirit

Jibril Rajoub is a notorious PLO chieftain with a long record of extolling terror. Don't Palestinian athletes deserve better?

JEFF JACOBY

An Olympic official who debases the Olympic spirit — The Boston Globe, 3 August 2016 — The Boston Globe · Boston, Massachusetts · 3 August 2016

Transcribed from the clipping

“THE GOAL of Olympism,” proclaims the Olympic Charter, “is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Well, that's one approach. Jibril Rajoub takes a somewhat different view.

Rajoub, a longtime senior official of Fatah, the militant Palestinian faction founded by Yasser Arafat, harshly condemns efforts to promote good will through athletics, at least when the athletes include Israelis. “Any activity of normalization in sports with the Zionist enemy,” he declares, “is a crime against humanity.”

When the Peres Center for Peace hosted a soccer match between Palestinian and Israeli kids in 2014, the children enjoyed themselves immensely — “I love it when we play together like this,” 11-year-old Qusay, a Palestinian boy, told an AFP reporter. But Rajoub was furious.

It was “a disgrace to use sports for this purpose,” he thundered, and issued a “demand that all individuals and institutions distance themselves from such activities.”

He was equally implacable when the president of the Barcelona Football Club, during a good-will tour of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, proposed a match between the renowned Spanish team and a squad of Israeli and Palestinian players. “Impossible, impossible!” exclaimed Rajoub in a Palestinian TV interview.

“Impossible that there be any sport-related contact with the Israeli side, in any situation.” Rajoub's unsleeping hostility toward Israel comes as no surprise — the man is a notorious PLO chieftain with a long record of extolling terror. Alas, he is also the chairman of the Palestine Olympic Committee.

And he has consistently exploited his position within the Olympic movement to glorify violence and to prevent attempts to connect Israelis and Palestinians through sports. Such behavior isn't only hateful and immoral. It's also an egregious violation of International Olympic Committee rules.

In a new report, Palestinian Media Watch, a private media watchdog, has documented multiple examples of Rajoub's praise for terrorism and incitement to murder. Like most ideals, the Olympic mission — the promotion of peace and dignity through sport — is an aspiration not yet achieved. The Olympic Games do not resolve international conflicts.

The Olympic charter hasn't deterred tyrants from abusing human rights. Nothing the International Olympic Committee does or doesn't do will establish peace in the Middle East. But Palestinian athletes deserve a better leader than Rajoub, a man so toxic with hatred that he applauds terror attacks and denounces games that bring Arab and Jewish kids together.

At the opening ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro this week, the Olympic Hymn will be sung: “Let all the flags of every land/in brotherhood unfold.” If the IOC cannot produce universal brotherhood, can't it at least insist on a decent chairman for the Palestine Olympic Committee?

Context added by this archive

Signed column. Photograph of Rajoub credited Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images. The column's documentary source is a 24-page dossier by Palestinian Media Watch.

Cite this item

"An Olympic official who debases the Olympic spirit," The Boston Globe, 3 August 2016. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2016-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2016-007