Thinking back to the summer of 1976 elicits a wave of memories that have nothing at all to do with reaching the adolescent milestone of making out with my first boyfriend. Rather, what I remember so nostalgically about that summer is the feeling of excitement as Montreal — my city! — hosted the Olympic Games.
Throughout the previous school year, lessons had been crafted around Olympics content. I still remember learning the Games’ motto, “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” which remains the extent of my knowledge of Latin. Fifty years later, I still have my official Olympic photo albums, in which I carefully arranged programs, ticket stubs and blurry Kodak Instamatic photos of the events I attended.
It’s these memories that led me online to view the McCord Stewart Museum’s virtual exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Olympics, “ Beyond the Games: Montreal’s Olympic Story .” Funded by Digital Museums Canada, which is managed by the Canadian Museum of History, a federal Crown corporation, this virtual exhibition is “designed for youth aged 12 to 17” and “offers a unique opportunity to pass down memories, stories and knowledge from one generation to the next.”
The exhibition is a delightful trip down memory lane. For me, the highlight was an interview with a jovial senior, seated next to his oh-so-’70s polyester Olympics uniform on a mannequin, reminiscing about his unforgettable teenage experience working as a stadium host.
The exhibition tells the Montreal Olympics story, warts and all, including the rampant corruption, skyrocketing costs, construction strikes and the mayor’s “Olympic clean-up campaign” that saw the arrest of some 200 gay Montrealers.
Nor does it shy away from controversies related to foreign conflicts. Over a full page, it describes in intricate detail two political issues at the Games: that 32 countries, mostly African states, boycotted the Games due to the presence of New Zealand, whose rugby team had toured South Africa, which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 because of apartheid; and that Canada, because it had officially recognized the People’s Republic of China, refused to allow Taiwan to compete under its usual name, Republic of China.
But that degree of detail abruptly disappeared several pages later, when it came to the subject of security at the Games. The entire security operation was distilled into one vague sentence: “The tragedy that had occurred at the preceding 1972 Games in Munich led Montreal to implement extensive security measures; as a result, there were no incidents of violence.”
No explanation of what that tragedy was: a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team.
The online exhibition is an abridged version of the McCord’s onsite exhibition called, “Montreal 1976: An Olympic Feat,” which has been running since late March. In the museum version, the panel about security defines “the tragedy” to which the virtual version refers: “Munich 1972 marked Olympic history because of the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 17 people and led to a 36-hour suspension of the Games.”
No mention that 11 of those “people” were not random victims from random countries, but all Israelis, and that the only non-Israeli victim was a West German police officer. No specification that the remaining five people whose lives “were claimed” were not victims, but the terrorists themselves. This basic information appears in the first sentences of a Google search overview.
In both the online and onsite exhibitions, given the intricate details about virtually all aspects of the Games, including the foreign politics, omitting the most essential facts of the 1972 Munich Massacre could not possibly have been an oversight. At best, it was incompetent curation. At worst, the museum was trying to pre-empt a backlash from anti-Israel activists, should it dare identify the perpetrators and the victims, lest Jewish victimhood undermine Palestinian victimhood, the cause du jour. Either way, it was a gold-medal performance in Jewish history erasure.
Erasing modern Jewish history seems to be a trend of Olympic proportions these days. Even erasing ancient Jewish history. In his June article in the Free Press, Roy K. Altman — a U.S. federal judge, author and ancient history buff — provided several examples of artifacts at the British Museum whose descriptions strangely neglect to mention their major significance in connection with documenting the ancient Jewish presence in the Levant. Given that the anti-Israel propaganda machine has been cranking out the false narrative that Jews are not indigenous to the region, this matters.
Closer to home, there is the “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” exhibit at the federally funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights. In an appalling example of activist-hijacked content, it presents a one-sided, it’s-all-the-Jews’-fault story of an unprovoked expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948 from the newly established State of Israel.
The narrative on display is devoid of critical historical context, such as the fact that this displacement occurred as a direct result of a war started by the Arab countries that invaded Israel after rejecting the two-state solution proposed by the United Nations, which — also not mentioned — the Jewish leadership had accepted. Conveniently absent, also, is the fact that Jewish leaders publicly implored Palestinian Arabs to remain in Israel, promising them safety and full civil rights, as declared in the state’s Declaration of Independence, and which the Arab-Israeli population exercises to this day.
My written complaint to the McCord two weeks ago went unanswered, so I tipped off a reporter and he emailed questions to museum administrators. Two days later, they finally replied to him, stating that they had just rectified the issue on the online exhibition. They said nothing about revising the panel at the onsite exhibition. Nor did they provide any explanation as to how and why this tragic event in Olympic and Jewish history had been whitewashed by the historians and curators behind these exhibitions in the first place.
National Post
