A Palestinian Authority official, District Governor of Tulkarem, Issam Abu Bakr, has defended the naming of a West Bank school after one of the planners of the murders of the 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Last week, it was announced that the PA school would be named after Salah Khalaf, the founder of the Black September terror organisation, and mastermind of the Munich Olympics massacre.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has reported that Abu Bakr replied to criticism of the naming of the school with praise for the terrorist, stating that Palestinians will never forget him: “The occupation is deluded if it thinks that the Palestinian people can change its culture and forget its leaders, Martyrs Yasser Arafat, Khalil Al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf, and a great number of the fighters who sacrificed their blood for the freedom, independence, and establishment of the independent Palestinian state whose capital is Jerusalem”.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement also glorified the Munich massacre this week in a post on its official Facebook page. In the post, Fatah honoured Muhammed Daoud Oudeh, another of the planners of the terror attack, boasting that they “executed” the Israeli athletes “in the heart of Germany”.
The Palestinian Authority and Fatah have a long history of glorifying the Munich Olympics massacre and the terrorists behind it. Recently, PMW documented that Fatah called the killings “a heroic operation” and in 2014, Fatah boasted about the attack in a film posted on its Facebook page, stating that “the world stood still in view of the Munich operation”.
