Mass Media & Public Opinion
How Terrorists Hijacked the World: the Olympics, 1972
Just after 4:00 AM on the morning of September 5, 1972, a highly-trained team of Palestinian terrorists scaled the wall of the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, beginning the execution of a carefully planned attack on the Israeli Olympic Team and consequently, the State of Israel.
These eight men carried with them Kalashnikov automatic rifles and hand grenades. Aside from their physical weapons, they were armed with the intent of publicizing the plight of Palestinians to the international community.
After entering the Olympic Village undeterred, the Palestinians turned their attention to 31 Connollystrasse, an Olympic dormitory that housed the Israeli Olympic Team. The Palestinians approached the building with precision and familiarity, as many members of the group had been employed in the Village and had walked the streets extensively in preparation for the attack. Shortly after, the Palestinian terrorists took nine Israeli athletes hostage, killing two in the process.
As authorities became aware of the crisis unfolding in the heart of the Olympic Village, they scrambled to negotiate with the terrorists and, over the course of the day, they continued negotiating with the terrorists and the Israeli government to coordinate a fulfillment of demands for the immediate release of 234 Palestinians in Israel (Reeve, p. 12). Israel refused to concede to these demands. With thousands of media correspondents in the vicinity tasked with covering the Olympic Games, word of the event quickly spread and the Israeli hostages drew international attention. German authorities attempted a rescue operation at a nearby airfield, hoping to convince the terrorists that they would be given an airplane that would take them to any friendly Arab country they chose where they could then continue negotiations.
In reality, the Germans attempted to ambush the Palestinians at the airfield and, understanding that there was no feasible means of escape, the Palestinians killed all nine Israeli hostages.
With the World Watching
For the approximate twenty-four hours that followed the Palestinians’ entrance into the Olympic Village, the terrorists took hostage not only members of the Israeli Olympic Team but the attention of nearly one billion viewers around the world (Reeve, p. 2).
After major news organizations relayed word to the international public that all nine Israeli hostages had been killed, the world began to comprehend the larger implications of the attack, specifically public opinion of the Palestinian cause and security policy (Spaaij, 2016). In an effort to publicize the plight of Palestinians, the Black September Organization targeted the Munich Olympics for the unprecedented level of international media coverage present. This intense coverage created unparalleled visibility around the world and in America, shaping negative public opinion toward Palestinians and provoking the implementation of new terrorism security measures. Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Palestinian refugee camps received comparatively insignificant attention due to foreign news coverage norms and the retaliatory attacks’ vengeful nature.
The 1972 Summer Olympic Games was a media phenomenon because of its inclusive and international nature that drew viewers from across the globe; once the Olympic torch was lit, so were millions of television sets around the world, stationed in front of eager and engaged viewers from every age and countless nationalities.
The Munich Olympics was an international event: at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, 5,516 athletes competed from 112 countries (International Olympic Committee, n.d.). Four years later, a record-breaking 7,173 athletes from 121 countries participated in the Munich Olympics (History.com, n.d.). The presence of each country provided a sense of involvement and engagement for viewers around the world in that each had their own stake in the games.
Americans cheered as Mark Spitz won seven gold medals and set seven world records while Russian gymnast Olga Korbut captured the hearts of millions (International Olympic Committee, n.d.).
The high level of American engagement and viewership of the Munich Games can be quantified by comparing Munich’s TV rating figures to those of Olympic Games before and after Munich.
- The Munich Olympics received a 24.4 cumulative prime-time rating (Hirsley, 1996).
This figure represents the percentage of U.S. television households that tuned in to ABC’s coverage of the Games.
- The 1968 Winter Olympic Games in Grenoble received a 13.4 rating while the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City received a 14.5 rating (Ware, 2006; Nielsen Media Research, 2008).
Subsequent Olympic Games’ ratings paled in comparison to Munich:
- Montreal in 1976 received a 23.9
- Los Angeles in 1984 received a 23.3
- Seoul and Barcelona received ratings below 20
- Atlanta in 1996 received a 21.6 (Hirsley, 1996).
American interest in the Munich Games was extremely high compared to prior and subsequent Olympic Games.
“The mass media event of the century.”
Advances in media technology allowed the Munich Olympics to reach an unprecedented number of people globally. The media presence at the Games was staggering: “at least four thousand newspaper, magazine, and radio journalists” were tasked with covering the Games (Reeve, p. 2). The sheer number of media personnel present was caused in large part by the development of new satellite technology that allowed for the Games to achieve status as “the mass-media event of the century” (Reeve, p. 2).
This new technology allowed for levels of international broadcasting that had never before been seen, opening regions of the world to television broadcasting for the first time. The Olympic Games drew a “television audience of nearly one billion people in more than one hundred countries around the world” (Reeve, p. 2). The sheer magnitude of the Munich Olympics’ international viewership made the Games the perfect vehicle for a group with a message.
Black September
The Black September Organization was a faction of the Palestinian nationalist group Fatah; its primary purpose was to draw attention to the Palestinian struggle. Black September initially began as a small cell of Fatah members who were determined to take revenge upon Jordan and King Hussein after the Black September conflict, which resulted in thousands of Palestinian fighters’ deaths (Tristam, 2014). Led by the previous commander of Fatah forces in Jordan, Abu Daoud, the organization was formed to “take a role in drawing attention to the significance of the struggle” (Reeve, p. 34). From the outset, the organization’s central focus was to bring visibility to the plight of Palestinians at the hands of Jordan and Israel.
Six Palestinians were chosen to join two Black September leaders in carrying out the Munich operation; each of the six “foot soldiers” selected were young and had lived in refugee camps as a result of expulsion from Israel (Reeve, p. 40). Fifty Palestinian operatives between seventeen and twenty years old were initially selected by Black September leaders for intensive training. From this group, six men were chosen; two of these men were nineteen years old. According to Abu Daoud, the man credited as the planner, architect, and mastermind of the Munich attack, all eight of the Munich terrorists had suffered at the hands of Israel.
Each of the terrorists had come from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan and all came from poor families (Reeve, p. 41). The men had “left their homes in ’48, forced to flee, and then languished in the Lebanese camps since then” (Reeve, p. 42).
These men’s family homes in Israel “were now the homes of Polish, French, and American Jews who had replaced them in their own country, living as citizens there without any right to” (Reeve, p. 42). The camps these men were selected from were squalid and crowded with little chance of education; the male illiteracy rate in Lebanese camps in 1971 was 48.7% and the female illiteracy rate was 68.7% (Sirhan, 1975). Each of the terrorists understood the plight of Palestinians and had experienced the poverty and injustice caused by Israel firsthand.
Black September understood the power and unprecedented nature of Munich’s mass media coverage and targeted the Games specifically for this reason. The basis of the terrorist mission, as described by Black September leaders and the terrorists themselves, was to bring international attention to the plight of the Palestinian people and the injustice that they had experienced as a result of Israel’s creation.
Daoud described:
“the plan was for international pressure to be brought to bear through five hundred million TV sets, so that the Israeli government could not get away with stubbornly pursuing its own agenda without giving any thought to other human issues” (Reeve, p. 136).
Daoud made clear that the mission planned to capitalize on the mass international media presence at the Games to create pressure that would force the Israeli government to admit its wrongdoing towards the Palestinians.
By taking Israeli hostages at the most widely publicized media event of the century, Black September advertised its cause and the plight of Palestinians directly to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
As news of the crisis spread around the Olympic Village,
“Dozens, then hundreds of journalists and television reporters also began flocking to the administration center. The press had only sparse details, but everyone knew it was a critical moment in history…Reports of the attack began leading television and radio news broadcasts around the world” (Reeve, p. 17).
Even if Israel refused to release any Palestinian prisoners, the terrorists knew “the eyes of the world were upon them. People were transfixed by the events in Munich, and it must have given the fedayeen confidence: they were already achieving their aim of publicizing the Palestinian cause around the globe” (Reeve, p. 79). Merely by captivating the world’s attention, the Palestinians had succeeded in a part of their mission.
The Games were a perfect target for the Black September operatives because taking Israelis hostage in the Olympic Village required few resources, the initial capture of the hostages was of little danger, and Olympic/West German security posed little threat to the mission. The Palestinians were taking unarmed hostages, and therefore the initial attack would be of little danger and would require little more than a few rifles. The only danger posed would be in physical contact with the Israelis and, given that the majority of Israelis targeted were weightlifters and wrestlers, it was possible that they could inflict some harm. However, an automatic weapon could easily subdue any one of the Israelis who attempted to fight back.
The security at the games was extremely lax, contributing to the event’s designation as a soft target. The Olympic Games had never seen a terrorist attack such as Munich and, consequently, security was present but effectively useless. The Village had thousands of “police officers” whose sole weapons were walkie-talkies. These officers were not armed and their presence in the Village was more to charm tourists than to protect athletes from terrorists (Reeve, p. 3).
Another aspect of the lax security that the terrorists utilized was the lack of a barbed wire perimeter fence surrounding the Olympic Village. The six-foot tall fence that lined the edge of the Village was a minor obstacle to the Palestinians who, while dressed in tracksuits, convinced a group of American athletes that they were also athletes that needed help climbing over the wall to return to their dorms. The only true obstacle that the Palestinians were faced with was the lock on the door to the Israeli apartments but the terrorists had obtained spare keys in the weeks prior to gain easy entry (Reeve, p. 6).
The Media’s Role in Shaping Opinion
The media’s framing function allowed the news coverage of the Munich Massacre to shape negative public opinion on Palestinians.
The media shape public opinion through coverage of terrorist events (Norris, Kern, and Just, 2003). The specific clips selected by the media to display to the public and the terminology and phrasing used by the media affect how Americans view the issue and how they subsequently judge what American action should be on the issue. Furthermore, the media’s reliance on certain sources affects how they shape coverage.
The media tends to err on the side of governments because of an “over-reliance upon the framework of interpretation offered by public officials, security experts, and military commentators…” (Norris, Kern, and Just, 2003). When this occurs, news functions to reinforce support for political leaders and the security policies they implement.
ABC’s Coverage
During the coverage of the Munich hostage crisis, the media relied heavily on official sources, particularly on information from members of the German government and Olympic officials. Because of this, one would expect international public opinion to be negative toward the Palestinians because coverage was shaped from a predominantly governmental standpoint. However, one must also account for the brutal and violent nature of the attacks. The public’s perception of the events would be primarily shaped by the images of violence and the news of the Israelis’ murders at the hands of the Palestinians. This imagery combined with the media’s reliance on official sources would form intensely negative public opinion of the Palestinians.
Because of the heavy American-media presence at the games, American citizens watched the entire event unfold before their eyes. This helped to create an emotional connection for the American public throughout the crisis and shaped negative opinions of Palestinians after the attack. ABC bought the broadcasting rights to the Games and thus, much of the world saw the same coverage of the events live.
Peter Jennings, of ABC, was tasked with covering the event as it unfolded and as a reporter with three years of experience reporting on Middle East issues, he was the perfect man for the job.
Positioned just opposite the Israeli building, Jennings gave audio coverage via a walkie-talkie while being supplemented with visuals from a television camera ABC had positioned on the top of a 950-foot-high structure in the Village. Jennings had the camera point directly at 31 Connollystrasse for the entirety of the crisis; he describes:
“I didn’t dare ever move that camera…We just stayed right on that shot. And it just went on and on and on” (Reeve, p. 69).
He described that because of this,
“…the entire Munich crisis was played out like a real-life soap opera on television screens across the globe” (Reeve, p. 69).
This play-by-play and live style of reporting created intense intrigue for the public viewing because it brought with it a sense of drama.
Just as Jennings did not dare move the camera away from 31 Connollystrasse for fear he might miss some major evolution in the crisis, families watching did not dare turn the television off for fear they might miss the culmination of a major historical event unfold before their eyes.
Style and Tone
The emotional connection between the public and the Munich crisis can be witnessed through the style and tone of the broadcast of the event. Throughout the event, ABC’s coverage repeatedly evoked emotion and focused on the humanity of the hostages, describing:
“…behind those windows are eight or nine terrified, living human beings…” (ABC, 1972).
This coverage allowed the viewer to relate with the hostages and become emotionally invested in the outcome of the crisis.
Furthermore, because of the breaking nature of the story, the head ABC anchor selected to cover the crisis, Jim McKay, and other anchors of major news networks never knew when a major development would occur. This created a sense that all information would be released to the viewers immediately upon the news networks learning about them. The public developed a sense of trust in the coverage that the networks were doing everything possible to relay information about the hostages to the world.
The tone of the media coverage surrounding the events of the hostage situation contributed to viewers’ perceptions of the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause.
Jennings, who was known to be sympathetic to Palestinians, is quoted multiple times in his coverage saying
“… there’s nothing in the Palestinian nature which suggests they’re going to murder these people” (Reeve, p. 69).
By repeatedly saying this, Jennings brought a new argument into viewers’ considerations: the Palestinians might be non-murderous and the hostages may survive. Although not believed by all, Jennings conveyed some realm of hope to the public.
Once news emerged that all the hostages had been killed by the Palestinians, those that believed Jennings would have experienced a change in perception of the Palestinians and Jennings’ statements would have been discredited as false hope. Because Jennings characterized the Palestinians based simply on their “Palestinian nature,” once these terrorists broke that mold and became murderers, the American public’s perception of Palestinians was negatively affected.
The False Hope that Echoed Around the World
The emotional connection between the American public and the hostages was strengthened by major news networks’ mistaken claim that the hostages had been freed and had survived the airfield skirmish. At 6:31 PM EDT, the Reuters news agency issued a stop-press wire-report to the world:
“ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES HAVE BEEN FREED” (Reeve, 128).
This message was adopted by world media almost instantly and relayed to every corner of the globe.
Once the news was released, waves of relief and celebration enveloped the American and international community that had been following the crisis. Relatives of the hostages rejoiced along with viewers around the world as the official spokesman for the German federal government went on national and international television confirming that the crisis had been resolved (Reeve, p. 129).
At 10:17 PM EDT, over three hours after the initial press release, Reuters released a correction:
“FLASH! ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES SEIZED BY ARAB GUERRILLAS KILLED” (Reeve, 132).
The news of the hostages’ release raised the public in jubilation only to bring them plummeting down upon learning of the death of the hostages. Reeve describes that “Relatives of the athletes and television viewers around the world had shared, to an extent, the same tragedy” in experiencing the intense initial jubilation then having it torn away (Reeve, 132–133).
This complete shift in emotion related the public to the families of the victims and spurned the heart-wrenching emotion experienced by those close with the victims to be experienced by the public.
Relating with America
Various news networks ran stories during and after the crisis about the personalities and families of the Israeli victims, with NBC and ABC putting particular emphasis on David Mark Berger, an Israeli-American weightlifter from Ohio.
By running these stories and portraying Berger as a member of the American community, these networks created a more personal connection because an attack on Berger would constitute an attack on an American, amplifying the emotional connection. Reeve states “The West typically views such barbarous attacks with disgust, and the perpetrators as ‘evil terrorists’” (Reeve, p. 21).
The cruelty and level of evil with which the American public associates terrorists is only amplified by the emotional connection developed through the format and structure of the news coverage surrounding the event.
The Backfire
The terrorists’ efforts to draw viewership to the suffering of Palestinians in refugee camps backfired because it brought almost exclusively negative attention and provided justification for Israel to retaliate against these camps and Palestine. In the months following the attack, in various televised interviews, Abu Daoud insisted that violence and murder were never the direct intent of the mission.
Daoud explained the violence used in the attack by claiming the terrorists were to only use violence if necessary; if violence was used against the Palestinians, they were told to use violence in return (Reeve, p. 136).
But in following this explanation, the Palestinians would presumably refrain from displaying open acts of violence. This was not the case, exemplified at one point when Issa, the leader of the terrorist group, ordered Moshe Weinberg’s body to be unceremoniously dumped on the street in front of 31 Connollystrasse early in the negotiations.
The Palestinians were desperate men and in throwing Weinberg’s body into the street, they proved their determination to the world (Reeve, p. 12). This gesture deemed any supposed non-violent intentions of the Palestinians null and void. Issa effectively displayed to the world a sense of barbarity that viewers around the world would subsequently associate with the Palestinians.
In the events at the airfield, the terrorists’ brutality was further shown; the murder of the Israelis was a product of the men’s desperation and hatred for Israel. Throughout the day, the terrorists had been put under severe psychological stress. At various points in the negotiations, Issa was described as “nervous and worried”; for over eighteen hours, he and his men had been on vigilant alert as any wrong move may have resulted in their death or the failure of the mission (Reeve, p. 96).
According to Annaliese Graes, the German negotiator responsible for communicating with the terrorists, this stress had led Issa to become “fatalistic” (Reeve, p. 97). The stress experienced by the terrorists coalesced at the airfield. Over an hour after the start of the tense exchange of gunfire at the airfield, four armored German cars arrived and began moving close to the helicopters containing the terrorists and hostages.
Upon seeing the cars, the terrorists “apparently thought they were about to be machine-gunned” and began firing at point-blank range at the hostages (Reeve, p. 120). The terrorists understood that the mission was over. They were outnumbered with no reinforcements and no way out. The terrorists acted in desperation and followed Abu Daoud’s orders to use violence if violence was used against them. Each of the eight terrorists had lived their entire lives in squalid refugee camps, resenting Israel for the injustices it had inflicted on the Palestinian people. In a final act of anger and hatred against Israel, the terrorists turned on the hostages.
In throwing Weinberg’s body into the street and killing all the hostages at the airfield, the terrorists introduced the world to a violent and threatening Palestinian group, leading the way for mass characterization of the Palestinian cause as dangerous.
A UNESCO publication on the media’s relationship with terrorism states:
“the Palestinian cause will long have the hooded face of a killer. The political effect of sympathy sought has turned into the very opposite” (Terrorism and the Media, 2017).
Israeli Retaliation
As the public was witness to this violence at the hands of the Palestinians, the attention was so negative that when the Israelis began their retaliation attack and started bombing innocent Palestinians in refugee camps, the world, and America, paid little notice.
There was little international coverage of the murder of Palestinians by the Israeli government because it was viewed as retaliation for the Munich attacks. The hostage crisis was dubbed the “Munich Massacre”, a simple alliteration that directly associated the event with the brutal slaughter of people.
Immediately following the hostage crisis, Israeli press became fixated on a national vengeance campaign. With international cries to root out the dangerous Palestinian terrorist organization, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the largest military operation of its kind since the 1967 war on September 8, 1972 (Reeve, 152–153). The Israeli air force launched strikes on at least ten separate PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon, resulting in some two hundred innocent Palestinians being killed, many of them women and children (Reeve, 153).
This was only the initial strike.
Israeli revenge soon took the form of armored columns directed into villages in Lebanon suspected of housing PLO leaders (Reeve, 153). Once this attack was complete, a series of covert assassination operations were issued by the Israeli government with the intention of locating and eliminating the surviving members of the terrorist team from Munich and other high-ranking Black September and PLO officials (Reeve, 153).
None of these attacks garnered international attention on a relative scale to that of the Olympic hostage coverage due to the nature of the coverage. Reeve states, “there were few complaints from the Western world at the slaughter, and few outside the Middle East seemed to care about the dozens of children murdered by Israeli bombs as they played on the edge of one of the refugee camps” (Reeve, 153).
There was no international backlash because the world perceived the attacks as retaliatory and therefore justified.
The coverage of the Israeli attacks did not allow for a deep emotional connection to be developed with the victims.
There were not 4,000 media correspondents already stationed in Palestinian refugee camps like there were at the Games.
The world did not watch the events progress, nor did they watch as relatives of the victims were interviewed in real-time (NBC, ABC, CBS 1972).
There was no personal connection established between the Palestinian children and American viewers, and no segments run on the hopes and dreams of the children murdered.
The victims of these attacks were not accomplished athletes nor were any of them American citizens as was David Berger.
Furthermore, the Israeli retaliation did not cause widespread criticism and did not receive intense domestic coverage because the United States government did not condemn the attacks, rather, it actively prevented the halting of Israeli vengeance operations.
At a United Nations Security Council meeting on September 10, 1972, the United States refused to condemn Israel for its attacks on Syria and Lebanon, instead choosing to cast America’s first lone veto of a Security Council Resolution (Chamberlin, 2012). The resolution would have called for an immediate halt to Israeli military operations in the Middle East.
The resolution did not mention the Munich attack that had led to the Israeli reprisals. Because of this, when questioned about the decision to veto, the United States’ representative George Bush responded that “it was impossible to separate the attack in Munich by guerrillas…that had led to the death of members of the Israeli Olympic team, from reprisals by Israel” (Onis, 1972).
The United States’ decision was described by Arab officials as a “green light” for Israel to continue military operations; the veto displayed the United States’ stance that because of their retaliatory nature, the strikes were allowed to continue.
On September 8, 1972 — the day of the initial retaliation attacks — CBS aired a one-minute-and-thirty-second clip on the Israeli attacks. NBC aired a two-minute-and-ten-second segment on the Israeli retaliation on September 10, 1972 and another segment on September 21, 1972.
These segments constitute the extent to which the major news broadcast sources covered the Israeli retaliation for the entire month of September in 1972. These three clips pale in comparison to the twenty-six clips aired by CBS, NBC, and ABC directly focused on the terrorist events at the Olympics, Arab terrorists, and the Israeli victims (Vanderbilt Television News Archive, 1972).
The Theoretical Framework
Four factors contribute significantly to whether news is covered or ignored by the American media:
- Normative deviance of an event
- Relevance to the United States
- Potential for social change
- Geographical distance (Chang, Shoemaker, and Brendlinger, 1987).
The media ignored the Israeli retaliation attacks and this lack of coverage can be explained through the framework described by Chang, Shoemaker, and Brendlinger. Conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine was common at the time and the American public was accustomed to news of Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. The international community had no stake in the event. While hundreds of countries participated in the Games and created a viewer base of nearly one billion people who were invested in their own team’s success, the Israeli response became a very isolated viewership event.
Furthermore, the retaliation was not directly relevant to the United States; rather, the dispute involved two peoples without the presence of the international community. The United States did not participate in the retaliation nor were there any Americans involved in the attack (Mapes, 2009). Because the issue was not directly relevant to the United States, there was little potential for social change on the same level of the Munich attack’s impact on counter-terrorism measures and precautions. Finally, the geographical distance from America was extremely large as the events were taking place in Syria and Lebanon. These four reasons directly contribute to why Israel’s retaliation received little coverage by American broadcast networks.
Conclusion
The events of Munich 1972 shaped international relevance of terrorism policy and forced governments, including America, to rethink security policy. The attack on the Olympics was unique in its scale of international visibility and thus was a turning point for countries in their approach to and study of terrorism. The attack shaped future Olympics security measures in that future host cities intended to make the Munich attack the first and only attack of its kind. The U.S. State Department’s Bureau for Diplomatic Security reports that the Munich Massacre in particular caused the bureau to “reevaluate how it protects American diplomats, emissaries, and other representatives abroad” (“The Munich Olympic Massacre”, 2018).
Furthermore, the bureau reports that Munich was the core reasoning for placing diplomatic security at the “forefront of U.S. foreign policy concerns,” committing the personnel and technology necessary to combat terror effectively, and to include the State Department, White House, and Congress in the diplomatic security policy-making process (“The Munich Olympic Massacre”, 2018). Munich signaled to the American government that terrorism was a real and viable threat and in order to combat the growing threat of terrorism, the United States needed to allocate resources and policy.
The visibility that surrounded the Munich attack forced the American government’s hand in implementing measures to prevent terrorism in the future. In September of 1970, Black September surprised the world by hijacking four jet airliners bound for New York City and London; this attack did not trigger any significant measures of American security policy upheaval. As “… the most widely watched terrorist attack in history”, Munich was unique in its level of visibility (Reeve, 68).
The American Reaction: What’s in it For Nixon
Among the American reactions to the events in Munich was executive action carried out by President Nixon. Nixon ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to cooperate with each other and foreign agencies to more effectively share information regarding terrorism (“The Munich Olympic Massacre”, 2018). As 1972 was a presidential election year for Nixon, he understood that he had to assure the American public that he would do everything in his power to strengthen U.S. security policy with regard to terrorism. On September 25, 1972, just twenty days after the attack at the Olympics, Nixon created a new cabinet-level committee focused on counterterrorism (Nixon, 1972). The committee ordered that all foreign visitors to the U.S. were required to carry visas and that the visa application process was carefully screened. The committee further began to compile lists of suspicious persons that were distributed to federal intelligence agencies. Additionally, Congress authorized the president to block U.S. air service to countries that were known to aid or harbor terrorists. Munich 1972 was a turning point in American and global perception of terrorism, causing the United States to reevaluate its terrorism prevention and terrorism intelligence-gathering procedures.
The perception of terrorism, developed by Munich, grew to embody the image of a masked Arabic man carrying an automatic weapon and committing violent acts against the western world.
The most famous image associated with the Munich attack is the image of an armed Palestinian terrorist wearing a mask, peering over the balcony of 31 Connollystrasse into the street below (Cosgrove and Bhowmick, 2013).
This haunting black-and-white image embodies the mystery and danger that global viewership associated with the attack. The mask that the terrorist is wearing obscures his facial features and prevents viewers from relating with the man as a person. The picture shows a foreign and mysterious figure, intent on inflicting harm on the West. This image perpetuates and motivates the characterization of terrorism as attacks carried out by foreign and dangerous Arabic people.
Black September targeted the Munich Olympics to publicize the plight of Palestinians through the intense international media coverage present. The emotional coverage of the violent and brutal attack shaped negative public opinion toward Palestinians and caused the United States to develop anti-terrorism measures. Israel’s retaliation on Palestinian refugee camps was largely ignored because of its vengeful nature and foreign media coverage norms.
In the months leading to the 1972 Munich Games, the event was billed as the “Games of Peace and Joy” (Reeve, p. 2). The legacy of the Munich Games is not of peace or international goodwill. The 1972 Summer Games will not be remembered for the number of gold medals each country won, or any team’s athletic achievements; rather, they will be remembered for the team of eight terrorists that hijacked the media and through it, the world’s attention.
For a complete list of the sources cited in this article, see this link.