German Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee. DR
Contributed by Youcef Benzatat – The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has just sentenced Algerian judoka Fethi Nourine and his coach Amar Benyekhlef to ten years of suspension from international competitions for having violated the Charter of Olympism, after refusing to face a judoka Israeli at the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2021. While the Algerian judoka had motivated his refusal to fight the Israeli judoka by invoking the same reason for which he was condemned, namely that the country represented by his opponent, Israel, does not respect the Charter of Olympism and, therefore, he would logically be ineligible for any participation in the Olympic Games and should in no case be admitted. The posture of Fethi Nourine is therefore reflected in another way by the refusal to fight against a judoka representing a State which violates the Charter of Olympism, would legitimately preserve the spirit of the Charter of Olympism from any drift which would threaten its foundations.
This decision of the IOC, which is akin to a “response from the shepherd to the shepherdess”, poorly conceals the underlying reasons that motivated it.
Indeed, since antiquity, since the Peloponnese, 2800 years ago already, the Greeks had started to organize Olympic games to put an end to the wars between the cities during their course and whose goal was to succeed in contributing to the peace between them and enable them to forge relations based on cooperation, solidarity and commercial and cultural prosperity. These lasted nearly twelve centuries, that is to say from the 8th century before the Christian era until the end of the 4th century after J. – C. The Olympism knew a second breath in 1894 when the French Pierre de Coubertin launched the daring idea of renovating the Olympic Games in the midst of the tumult of colonialism with its mass crimes, genocide and plundering of the wealth of defenseless nations, and in 1896 the celebration of the first Games of the modern era took place in Athens , to mark the continuity of the spirit of their Charter and whose goal has remained unchanged, namely their contribution to world peace, human development and the preservation of the integrity of civilization and of all humanity and in first of all, the banishment of racism in all its manifestations.
You have to be really bad faith and fundamentally dishonest not to recognize that racism is inherent in Israel’s Zionist ideology, or even to be complicit in denying Israel the practice of an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. and the systematic violation of his human rights through murder and arbitrary imprisonment, daily humiliation at crossings during movement within his lands, while stripping him of his land by force and against the international law. As was the iniquitous decision of the UN under pressure from the imperial-Zionist, Israeli-American lobby, when in 1991 its General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and of racial discrimination ”. Worse, later, this same lobby will equate any criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism!
The resistance of Fethi Nourine and his coach to this drift of Olympism, full of dignity, humanity and a spirit of responsibility, is not an isolated case. Our contemporary period has seen several similar episodes. He himself had already given up participating in the 2019 judo worlds, here in Tokyo, citing the same reasons. In the past, the violation of the Charter of Olympism was systematically brandished to justify the boycott of the games against the States whose IOC leaders were guilty of complacency with their drill, by allowing them to participate in them with impunity. total. This was the case with the 1976 Olympic Games when African countries boycotted the Olympic Games in Montreal to protest against the presence of South Africa, a racist country whose political practice was based on apartheid, within the IOC.
Long before, in 1973 already, the football team of the USSR refused to meet its Chilean counterpart to protest against the assassination by a foreign power, in this case the United States, of the legitimate president of this country, Salvator. Allende, and appoint a government that is theirs to orient its policy in favor of the interests of this power to the detriment of the interests of the Chilean people. This event will be the beginning of a new era for Olympism, where its Charter will become a geostrategic stake to continue the cold war between the blocks of the East and the West which had lasted since the end of the Second World War.
Indeed, in response to the boycott of the football match by the USSR against its counterpart in Chile, on the grounds of American intervention in the affairs of this country, the United States in turn boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. , by invoking interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, Afghanistan. In 1984, the Eastern bloc in turn outbid it by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in retaliation. Until recently, in 2004, the Western countries and their allies joined their voices to that of the United States in calling for a boycott of the Olympic Games planned in China, for the same ground of violation of the Charter of Olympism, namely the violation human rights and the deprivation of political freedoms in this vast country.
Obviously, this solidarity in the boycott of the Olympic Games between States is not the prerogative of groups concerned with the preservation of the Olympic Charter, but rather of lobbies united around ideologies and geostrategic issues which do not exist. ‘have nothing to do with Olympism, but rather driven by devious motives that are part of unacknowledged war strategies. As proof, no state has been sanctioned by the lobby to which it belongs for having violated the Charter of Olympism.
Fethi Nourine and his coach were suspended by a jury unworthy of representing the Olympic spirit, because having made their decision in favor of the interests of the lobby to which its members belong, partially and not objectively, for having previously accepted participation in these Games of a State which does not respect the same spirit of the Olympic Charter.
As a result, this condemnation has no effect on the integrity of these two Algerian athletes and can in no way diminish their ethical stance towards the spirit of Olympism. Rather, they become the true guarantors of the spirit of Olympism and expose the drift of this millenary practice of the search for peace and friendship between peoples. Rather, it was the members of this jury, having inflicted on these two Algerian athletes such a condemnation based on the denial of the violation of the human rights of the Palestinians, who behaved like real accomplices of a racist state having strayed from the right path which leads to peace and friendship between peoples, traced since antiquity by the sages of ancient Greece, having embodied it in this spirit of Olympism to perpetuate civilization and humanity on the basis of respect mutual between peoples and ensure justice and perpetual peace.
This posture of Fethi Nourine, his coach and that of all his staff who was associated with his participation in the Tokyo Olympics, as unique as it is, is not unique to these athletes; it is the whole identity of the Algerian people inherited and forged in pain and bloodshed for the quest for its freedom and its sovereignty during its resistance to the long colonial night that was expressed there, in solidarity with a people undergoing the same wrong. As the spontaneous gesture of the Algerian footballer Ryad Mahrez, during the presentation of the trophy of the champion of England of the past year in front of the cameras of the whole world, by having proudly waved the Palestinian flag with all the consequences and the reprisals which could s ‘shoot down on him.
If today the imperial-Zionist, Israeli-American lobby has managed to buy the complicity of the Arab monarchies and many African countries in return for the political support of their despotic representatives, who have cowardly abandoned the Palestinian people to the fascist abuses of the Israeli regime , it will be futile in the long run to want to hide the Palestinian sun with a sieve. “Only its stones will remain at the bottom of rivers after the flood”, says the saying of Fethi’s ancestors.
YB
