So I get to reading this article by Frank Shorter this morning. If you don’t know Frank Shorter, he won the gold medal in the 1972 Summer Olympics. Those were the games held in Munich, Germany where members of the Palestinian group Black September held members of the Israeli team in the Olympic Village. The terrorists, 11 Israelis, and a West German police officer all wound up dead. The games continued, and Shorter chose to run rather than allow the terrorists to completely disrupt the games.
This is a moment in history that keeps capturing my attention, perhaps because it seems to be the beginning in many ways of the era in which we now live. There is a movie about the hostage situation and its aftermath called “Munich” which I would like to see. Netflix does not stream this film, and not being a Quickster subscriber, I can’t readily get it on DVD. There is also a Canadian television docudrama about the Israeli response to the attack.
This movie is available to be streamed on Netflix, so I watched it. It raises some disturbing questions about the limits of a civilized response to terrorism as well as the effects such a response on both the terrorists and the civilized. At the center is a loving relationship between a man, his wife, and their infant son. The wife is played by a vivacious actress named Leslie Hope. She would later play the wife of another terrorist hunter: Jack Bauer. She also hails from, wait for it, Halifax, Canada.