I was talking to my boss about produce in Norway, and asking if it was any good. I said when I lived in Paris a lot of the produce was imported from Israel. He said, well I don’t think Norway gets much of anything from Israel.
Why?
Because after the Munich massacre where Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped and then murdered, PM Golda Meir of Israel authorized Operation Wrath of God which was to hunt those responsible for planning the attack and killing them.
Somehow this led the crew of Israeli assassins to Norway where they mistook a Moroccan waiter for Ali Hassan Salameh and shot him repeatedly while he was talking a walk with his pregnant wife.
This is referred to as the Lillihammer Affair. The fallout was that those caught received minimal charges and the guy who led the murder (Michael Harari-known associate of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega) ran away and Israel refused to extradite him back to Norway. This is crazy. Here is an interesting article on this from perspective of a Norwegian.
Not the craziest happening in Israeli history, but its up there. The government of Israel authorized the murder of an innocent man. Okay, so maybe the guy they wanted to murder wasn’t innocent, but the guy they did murder was. Civilized countries do not just go and assassinate people in daylight. Maybe just Israel and the United States get away with it.
The moral of the story is that many Norwegians boycott Israeli goods and it has been so effective that Israel doesn’t even bother to export goods to Norway.
What happened in Munich was AWFUL. No doubting it. But an eye for an eye is ineffective and I just can’t get my head around using violence in these modern times. I realize that this contradicts my idea belief that it was justified to use violence to fight slavery. I don’t know when it is okay or not to use violence. I just know that I don’t want to personally use violence and today I think that war is not the cure for war.
Israel seems to operate like the rules don’t apply to them, and the more that they do get away with this, the more the rules don’t apply to them.
Muppets and History 