Product: One Day in September [VHS] (2006)
Rating: 4.0
Heartbreaking
I just saw this film again, and in reading the reviews here, I am saddened to find the antisemitism that was prevalent in the film, alive and well here too. However anyone feels about the conflict in the Middle East, these athletes were innocent, unarmed, defenseless civilians. Funny that is, how all the terrorist acts around the world, murdering thousands of innocent civilians, have always been executed by Arab extremists. Never Israelis. Not once. The cowardice of a bunch of armed thugs "capturing" unarmed people in their beds, and being treated as "heroes" for doing so, sickened me. They are liars as well, since they said that they didn't intend to kill anyone unless they "had" to, and the first killing was immediate, with the threat then of one hostage executed per hour. What was even more sickening was the fact that the Games were not immediately halted. First, seeing all those people sunbathing, playing ping pong, etc only feet away from the room where the hostages were held, waiting to die, reminded me of pictures I have seen of Germans lounging in cafes, laughing, while the noose tightened around the necks of Jews all around them. Who could be entertaining themselves while this was happening? Then, the fact that the Games were not immediately halted was unbelievable. I know what was said about the reasons why they weren't, but that is meaningless. I know the other athletes had been training for years, but how could they go on with their contests while their fellow Olympians' lives had already been taken, with others' hanging in the balance? Does being an Olympian mean you don't have to be a human being? The thing that kept resounding to me, throughout the film, unspoken but louder than anything else, was "who cares. It's just Jews."I was thinking about the fact that there have been Olympic Games for a hundred years, and nothing like this has ever happened before or since. Not once was in mentioned in the film that the ONLY time this has ever happened was to an Israeli team, in Germany. No one thinks this is quite a coincidence? I don't think it is coincidence at all. All the egregious errors made by the German police made them look like Keystone Kops, and still no one drew the conclusion that the bumbling was intentional,that they had no desire to and no intention of saving the Jews, so they didn't? Germans are not bumbling or sloppy. They executed two world wars on multiple fronts and developed extremely efficient death factories, killing millions of people, yet they are powerless in the face of less than TEN terrorists, and unable to rescue TEN people in the apartment? It showed the guys filming the "surprise attack," yet no one stopped them or would know that the rooms had televisions, and therefore the terrorists would also see them? No one on the police force had guns or knew how to shoot them? The list goes on and on. The terrorist said that the East German team helped them to plan the way in. I am convinced that the Olympic Committee and Germany either knew this was going to happen or chose to do nothing when it did happen. The hijacking/prisoner exchange was shown to be bogus, and the Germans complicit. I am convinced they were complicit in the murders of the Israeli team as well, and that the blood of those Jews continues to be on their hands. They should have been banned from ever being able to host or compete again. To have had criminal charges to be brought was too much to hope for, since the terrorists themselves were never even charged. It was true after the war and still true, that you will get off scot free if you kill Jews.Who was the bastard that was laughing?