Lebanese delegation head blocks Israeli athletes from boarding bus to Olympics opening ceremony in Rio, says it was because “Israelis were looking for trouble” • In interview with Army Radio, Culture Minister Miri Regev says IOC must issue condemnation.
Adi Rubinstein, Mickey Sagi, Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff
The Israeli delegation at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Friday
Israeli officials were outraged after the Lebanese delegation to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro prevented Israeli athletes from joining them on a bus to the opening ceremony on Friday.
“I am shocked by the incident in which the Israeli delegation was humiliated …. because the Lebanese delegation refused to share a bus with Israeli Jews. This is pure anti-Semitism and racism of the worst kind,” said Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev in an interview with Army Radio Sunday.
The head of the Lebanese Olympic team, Salim al-Haj Nicola, physically blocked the entrance to the bus when the Israeli team tried to board the vehicle that was assigned to both sets of athletes.
“The International Olympic Committee, which champions the separation of sports and politics, must condemn this incident and act to prevent this type of behavior from recurring,” Regev said.
Regev spoke with Igal Carmi, the president of Israel’s Olympic Committee and clarified that Israel must not remain silent about the incident because doing so would reinforce the delegitimization of Israeli athletes. Regev noted that the subject would be raised at the next joint meeting of worldwide Olympic committee heads in an attempt to prompt an official condemnation of the incident and to prevent its recurrence.
“I am sending a warm embrace to all of our athletes who were humiliated on what was such an emotional and important day for them,” Regev said. “I support coach Udi Gal for talking about the anti-Semitic and unsportsmanlike incident. We all have a responsibility to not let this issue slip from the agenda until this phenomenon ceases to exist.”
Israel’s Olympic sailing coach Udi Gal described the incident on his Facebook page: “Disgraceful! The Israeli Olympic team prepares to board the bus to the opening ceremony. It turns out we are sharing the bus with the Lebanese team. As soon as they realized they would be together with the Israeli team, members of the Lebanese team, led by the head of their team, turned to the driver and demanded he close the door. The organizers tried to split us up onto other buses, something that simply cannot be done for security and symbolic reasons. I insisted, we all insisted, on boarding our designated bus and if the Lebanese don’t want us, they’re welcome to get off. The bus driver opened the door, but this time the head of the Lebanese delegation stood at the entrance, blocking both the entrance and the aisle …. The organizers tried to prevent a physical altercation and an international incident and took us aside to a special shuttle.”
Gal told Israel Hayom on Saturday, “It’s a shame that we’re bringing problems from the Middle East, which is tens of thousands of kilometers away from here, to the world’s largest sporting event. The Brazilians are doing an excellent job of hosting us, and on Friday they found themselves in what can only be described as a shameful incident. It doesn’t matter right now what your political views are, what happened contradicts the Olympic spirit. We could have gotten dragged in by the provocation, but we chose not to resort to hooliganism. Unlike them, we decided to abide by the Olympic spirit, which is the most important thing in these games. We will not let anyone ruin this experience.”
Gili Lustig, CEO of Israel’s Olympic Committee and one of the heads of the Israeli Olympic delegation said, “When we arrived at the bus area, we found we had accidentally been assigned the same bus as the Lebanese delegation. It wasn’t like there wasn’t enough room, but the organizing committee asked us to not make a big deal out of it. They apologized to us and sent us another bus.”
According to Lustig, “The hostile behavior of the head of the Lebanese delegation contradicts the Olympic charter. We will appeal to the international [Olympic] committee about what took place so that occurrences such as this do not happen again. Now the matter is behind us and we are preparing for the events.”
Danny Oren, sport director of the Israeli delegation, said, “It didn’t get to the point of pushing or physical altercation because they were inside the bus and we were outside, but it’s a shameful event for the Lebanese.”
Even More Motivated to Succeed
One of the athletes described the incident as “really unpleasant.” He said, “We, like all the athletes from the other delegations around us, were looking forward to one of the highlights of the Olympics, but this incident brought us back to reality. It was a reminder of the routine treatment our country faces, and you could say it might even motivate all of us to achieve better results.”
The Israeli team had another unpleasant encounter when they entered the stadium, during the opening ceremony in Rio. As Israel’s delegation was announced, and gymnast Neta Rivkin led the athletes holding the flag, both applause and boos could be heard.
By contrast, the Palestinian delegation was welcomed into the stadium with enthusiastic applause.
The Lebanese Version
The incident has been covered extensively by Arab media outlets, and the head of the delegation has become a national hero in Lebanon.
Nicola told a different version to Lebanese media and insisted that he had the right to prevent another team’s athletes from joining them on the transport reserved for them.
“We boarded our bus, which was Number 22 out of 250 buses. On the bus was a sign that clearly indicated it was for the Lebanese delegation,” he said.
According to Nicola, as soon as he noticed that members of the Israeli delegation were planning to board the bus, “I asked the bus driver to close the door but the guide with the Israeli team prevented him from doing so,” Nicola told Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar.
“When I realized the Israelis were planning to board our bus, I had no choice but to block the entrance with my body,” he said. “Some of the Israelis immediately tried to cause provocations, trying to force their way inside, but I did not give in. It is clear to me that this was an intentional move by the Israelis. They have their own bus, just like all the other delegations. Why would they insist on boarding the Lebanese delegation’s bus? The Israelis were looking for trouble and they behaved rudely.”
Nicola told the Associated Press that it was “only a small problem.”
“This problem is finished,” he said by telephone. “We are here only for sports.”
Israel Hayom has learned that the entire incident was recorded by one of the Israeli athletes on his mobile phone.
Members of the Israeli delegation considered sharing the video online to show the world what really transpired, but the IOC prohibits the distribution of this type of footage on social media, citing “broadcast rights.”
As Israel Hayom reported ahead of the Olympic Games, the Israeli athletes signed a document that forbids them from distributing this material. Athletes were also instructed by the heads of the Israeli delegation not talk about the incident.
The bus incident joins a long list of incidents in which athletes from Muslim countries have resorted to a variety of means, including feigning illness, to avoid encounters with Israeli athletes. This year, Israeli judokas Gili Cohen and Or Sasson have been paired up with opponents from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who some have speculated will “sustain injuries” right before their judo matches to avoid competing with Israelis.
Economist Said:
good thing avoidance, what could be worse than the already daily libels against Jews propagated by liberal and leftist Jews. the stockholm syndrome jews live to avoid the disdain of their masters. But what their masters despise most is the whiny begging jew who fawns over their every dispensation. The only time the Jews have been respected is when they beat the arabs silly in 67
Economist Said:
a false premise which loses every time and keeps the whiny begging jew in a ghetto shtetle mentality… oooooh, what will our masters think of us, dear me…. Folks thinking like that rarely “win”… even if they factually win… as in 67…. their master will kick them back down for insufferable whining, begging and lack of pride. Oooops, that is exactly what has been happening, what the master lost in war, and the jews won, the master took back becuase they know the jews will fawn, beg and whine for their approval, trade and money… that the Jews will sell everything for a pittance including allowing them to libel Jews and fund jew killers. There is more muslim anti semitism, and abuse of Jews, in Israel than in France because the GOI has this same approach…. appeasement…. not to save ones life… but for approval and financial gain….. thereby reinforcing all the despicable steriotypes.
Economist Said:
😛 😛 😛
“hopefully be”…. this is the position of all the past shtetlists who went whining with begging bowl for 2 millenia…. hoping for a special dispensation from anti semites instead of standing up and beating the bastards down.
Economist Said:
It is interesting that you choose a metaphor symbolic of frantic and massive retreat. With that mentality Israel would have long been destroyed and the Jews of the diaspora would be where they were before 67. The overturning of the image of the whiny, begging Jew by 67 has benefited the diaspora more than they deserve. Much of the anti semitism today is propagated by leftist Jews whose smug ignorance will be the first to be “shocked” by the coming anti semitism wave in the USA.
this statement is humiliating because it depicts jews as whiny dependents on the good will of anti semites. Didn’t Israel bomb the shiiite out of lebanon…. now thats humiliation. A few smart ass words from an anti semite should get the suckers punch… followed by a humiliating bloody dripping nose for all to see. If you cant do it right then…. then do something else which will harm and damage them, but don’t whine to anti semites… which is basically all the international orgs.
ArnoldHarris Said:
agree 100%, I already see the anti semites posting on the internet about whiny jews.
ArnoldHarris Said:
this is a 100% trump one liner which says it all in a single simple sentence. This is the approach to be taken to the BDS folks,the pals, the euro libeling funders of Jew killer muslims…… decide accurately who are the enemies and then seek to bring chaos, disorder, suffering, poverty… everything negative to the enemy.
You dont build up your enemy and make him rich… you plunge him into misery and suffering and make him beg for mercy….. that is what is needed for gaza and the PA.
the only time Israel and jews got global respect was due to the 67 war…. that is what folks need to understand about the “other”.
@ Economist:
Chances are, you would disagree with lesser certainty and perhaps no fervor at all, if you had ever been compelled to fight your way though the halls of a Chicago high school, and sometimes on the street corners as well. Or maybe you would have sat there crying for your mother or father to show up and chase away the bad guys. Note that I purposely used subjunctive conditional here, because I cannot imagine you ever faced the need to physically defend yourself.
Sixty-eight years of my life have passed since that freshman year in that high school. Since then, I served a three-year enlistment in the US Army; earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications; then a master’s degree in urban and regional planning, with honors no less; traveled and studied abroad; built a small computer-age business to support my family; set myself up as a respectable and admittedly smug member of the exurban upper midwestern bourgoisie: and comported myself as befits all of the above.
But I never have forgotten the day that I learned how to keep actual or likely enemies at least four feet distant from me in the hallways of a tough Chicago high school. That was and still is the length of an arm with a claw hammer at the end of it. Even now, 68 years later, I still regard that incident as the day of the hammer.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
We disagree. Not every street corner is Dunkirk.
@ Economist:
Unless you also believe in the tooth fairy, you cannot seriously imagine that the IOC would ban the Lebanese athletes for unsportsmanlike behavior to Israeli Jews.
I am singularly uninterested in political correctness, both as an American nationalist and as a Jewish nationalist. I learned at a relatively young age that real power compares to pity as a .45 caliber M1911A1 semiautomatic pistol compares to a bunch of ping-pong balls.
@ ArnoldHarris:
In this case the Israelis avoided world headlines “Vicious attack by Israelis against innocent Lebanese at Olympics”. We must pick our behavior to win. In this case the win will hopefully be “IOC bans Lebanese athletes for unsportsmanlike behavior”
As Coln.Richard Meinerzhagen (Britains’s chief political officer in Palestine in 1919) observed in his diaries almost 100 years ago, the Arab countries will never amount to anything, but a contented Jewish Palestine will become a centre of prosperity and advancement benefitting the whole world. It came true!
The Arabs are furious because they see the truth of it and they can’t take it.
Let them fight over a stupid bus, but the world admires Israel, not their backward warring states.
I suppose “Ad_nai People” means us Jews. I never heard that expression before.
As for Lebanon and the Lebanese, I am glad of all the afflictions that have rained down upon them. Not because I hate them, but because I despise them.
The one thing that I want all those Arabs to learn from the Jews is self-hatred. That is the main Jewish social disease, and I am cruel enough to wish it to afflict all our enemies.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Hard not to notice the difference betwen Rio 2016 and Europe 1940. The satanic spirit of hate against Ad_nai People is the same, but now the agression is limited to a forced change of buses. Lebanon has become a sad shadow of what it was, partially destroyed, ocupied by evil factions, national identity lost; you name it. Certainly, the path to restitution and reconstruction is not hate.
I don’t really want to hear any more typical whining about anti-semitism. The only response to that incident that would have interested me would have been a blow by blow account of how a bunch of the male Israeli athletes grabbed hold of that Lebanese Arab rat who had been blocking their access to the bus, and had pitched him headlong out of the bus and hopefully landing on the roadway head-first.
I never ever have been interested in the fairness of it all, which doesn’t exist in any case. Ever since I was a kid on the streets of Chicago, I learned that the only thing that counts is to physically hurt the bastard who sets out to torment you.
That’s why I didn’t get treated as a typically whimpering Jew-boy. Instead, I gave them reason to treat me as the Jew-boy who went after them with a claw hammer.
Which is exactly what I actually did one magic day in October 1948, when three of them made the mistake of cornering me in a woodworking shop-class. I keep thinking that if the guy I whacked with that hammer is still alive today, he still has the scar I gave him that late afternoon day. The day of the authentic Jewish hammer.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker