Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. Photo: Twitter.

JNS.org – Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has condemned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party for consistently praising the Palestinian terrorist group Black September’s killing of 11 Israeli team members at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

“There are still those who see in the murder of sportsmen a heroic deed,” Rivlin said in Germany on Wednesday at the unveiling of a memorial for the slain Israeli athletes.

“Just last year, Fatah marked the massacre of the sportsmen as an ‘act of heroism,’” he said. “Terror must be unequivocally condemned, everywhere.”

Rivlin also noted that Israel has waited almost 50 years for the Olympics to host an official moment of silence to memorialize the slain Israeli team members.

“They were the Olympic family’s sons — a family which for many years abandoned its commitment to them,” he said.

In 2012, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) held an impromptu minute of silence in the London Olympic village to mark the 40th anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group’s killing of the Israelis. In 2016, the widows of two of the Israeli team members participated in a ceremony and minute of silence at the Rio de Janeiro Olympic village. The IOC, however, has refused continued requests for an official moment of silence for the slain Israelis at the Olympics.