Q: I ask because I've seen Israelis compete but no people from any of the Arab nations of the middle east. Is that because of their laws or religion or something? I'm not surprised the arab women don't compete (def. has to do with their laws/religion) but how come the guys can't compete? If they DO compete however, let me know I haven't noticed any. Please no hate comments against Israel, I'm not in the mood for that crap and because this question has nothing to do with their current situation, just the olympics. Thanks.
A: Iran participated but its swimmer withdrew when he would come up against an Israel swimmer. That's too bad to let politics or hatred come into the way of Olympic games. I view games as healthy competition. Iran's National Olympic committee paid the athlete their first place prize for not competing anyway. So they in essence have role models who exhibit "unsportsmanship" like conduct. And we all know what happened to Israeli athletes in Munich 1972 Black September which was a group subset of PLO and Fatah. 11 athletes were murdered and the movie "Munich" is out on DVD. The Black September Jordan group was also responsible for attempted assassination of King Hussein and they used a Jordanian Soldier's head as SOCCER practice! Here is example where Palestinian Authority they actually name teams according to their degree of terroristic anti-Israel activity: "Each of the 24 soccer teams is named for a terrorist or other Shahid [the term of supreme honor designating "Martyrs" - those who died in the combat with Israel] including some of the most infamous murderers." http://www.pmw.org.il/murder.htm#leaderssponsor This case is from Ramallah (Palestinian predominant West Bank) where a riot ensued after a soccer game and instead of police handling it properly, they went crazy threatening people even bystanders and shopkeepers where it seems police were "making sport" of shooting people: "The first thing I saw," she said, "was four guys restraining a policeman, saying to him, 'Calm down, you're a policeman. You must respect the uniform you are wearing.' The policeman, trying to push them off, shouted back, 'I don't care if I'm a policeman or not, I am going home to get all of my guns and shoot every one of those sons of whores.'" http://nigelparry.com/diary/ramallah/soccer.html They really have issues with nationalism and within their own nations there is internal tribal violence. It goes way beyond Olympic games and sportsmanship it's like a symptom of a larger societal problem when they can't compete in a HEALTHY competitive game something else is substituted instead. You can add the example of throwing the bronze medal from the first person to respond to your question to my list that is so unsportsmanlike this is WORLD OLYMPICS people should be competing world class athletics WITH world class behavior. For the people that do participate in the Games that value sportsmanship, I wish them the best of luck.