SubscribeThe agony of defeat takes on new meaning
You know how when you say a word or phrase over and over again, it loses its meaning? Or when you warn your kid about meting out a punishment you both know won’t really happen? That’s what this seems like to me.
The League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith of Canada weighed in on the case of female ski jumpers who were denied the “right” to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
That BBC should deem this a situation worthy of their resources is a separate issue, but what really rankles the their comparison of the Olympic organizers to the Nazis for discriminating against the athletes.
From the organization’s press release:
In a letter to John Furlong, CEO of VANOC, the League recalled the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the IOC turned a blind eye to Hitler’s fascist regime, which was even then implementing discriminatory policies against Jews that impacted Games that year. The League asks the IOC and the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) to focus on its policies and practices relating to discrimination, “and that includes eliminating discrimination against women now, just as it should have included resistance to discrimination against Jews then”.
As my colleague Andrew Silow-Carroll writes in his blog today,
Did no one at B’nai Brith Canada pause and think, “Sure, discriminaton of any kind is awful, but do we really want to compare a boneheaded policy by some piggy snow jocks to the systemmatic apartheid and dehumanization policies that led to the slaughter of 6 million Jews? Won’t that sound, I don’t know, out of proportion?”
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