[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

On July 26, the 2024 summer Olympic Games will kick off in Paris, as they did 100 years ago in 1924. Back stories from those games were dramatized in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, about Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, an outgoing Christian, and Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams, younger brother of Sidney Abrahams, who represented Britain at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Sidney was duly knighted, and Sir Sidney Solomon Abrahams served as chief justice of Ceylon during the 1930s. “Solly” was also the first Jew elected president of the London Athletic Club, founded in 1863. Younger brother Harold, born in 1899, followed in his footsteps but got off to a rough start.

At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Harold Abrahams failed to win a medal in the 100 and 200 meters and in the long jump placed a distant 20th. At Cambridge, on the other hand, Abrahams won victories over Oxford in sprints and the long jump. Chariots of Fire picks up the story when Abrahams, played by Ben Cross, is preparing for the 1924 Olympic games in Paris.

Aware that talent is not enough, Abrahams hires Scipio Africanus “Sam” Mussabini, the famed athletic coach of Italian, Syrian and French extraction. So in 1924, the UK was already a diverse, inclusive society.  Mussabini (Ian Holm) shows Abrahams how to get the most out of his stride. The choice of a coach causes friction with snooty Cambridge officials, but Abrahams takes it as a challenge.

Edinburgh University student Eric Liddell, played by Ian Charleson, raced for the Edinburgh athletics club and gained fame as a rugby star. Liddell keeps busy with evangelism but aware that “God made me fast,” he wants to compete in the 1924 Olympics. Contrary to the film, Liddell knew all along that 100 meters was on Sunday and trained instead for the 400 meters.

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” Liddell quotes Isaiah 40:31 in a sermon. “They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” For the Scot, that turned out to be a prophecy. Despite a rather wild running style, Liddell won gold in the 400 in world-record time of 47.6 seconds. The gold medalist shunned the spotlight and returned to China to continue his family’s missionary work.

During World War II, Liddell wound up in a Japanese internment camp with other foreigners, including theologian Langdon Gilkey, author of Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure. Gilkey found Liddell “overflowing with good humor and love for life, and with enthusiasm and charm. It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.” Liddell died there in 1945, and as the film says “all Scotland mourned.” For teammate Harold Abrahams, it was a different story.

In the 100 meters, Abrahams faced Americans Jackson Scholz and Charles Paddock, the defending Olympic champion and world record holder. After a shaky start, on a track of ground cinders, Abrahams took the gold with a time of 10.6 seconds. His athletic career ended by an injury in 1925, Abrahams became an attorney, radio broadcaster, and served as chairman of the British Amateur Athletics Board from 1968 to 1975.

As a nation, Israel began competing at the Olympics in 1952. Twenty years later, at the Olympic games in Munich, Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. What Harold Abrahams thought about the massacre has not emerged in print, but nothing like that took place in any previous Olympics. Harold Abrahams died in 1978 and Chariots of Fire emerged in 1981, winning Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay, costume design, and musical score.

Ian Charleson passed away in 1990, followed by Ben Cross and Ian Holm in 2020 and director Hugh Hudson in 2023. The executive producer of Chariots of Fire was the Egyptian Dodi Fayed, who died in the August 1997 car crash with Princess Diana. That tragedy played out in Paris, site of the 2024 Olympics.

The games take place in the wake of 10/7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Across Europe and America, on university campuses and in the streets, anti-Semites call for a second Holocaust. Israel is sending an Olympic team to Paris and there could be a repeat of 1972, which has a legacy of its own.

The mastermind of the Munich massacre was Muhammad Abu Yousef al-Najjar, a commander of Fatah’s military arm Al-Assifa, and member of the PLO’s executive committee. In 1973, Israeli commandos killed Muhammad Abu Yousef al-Najjar and his son Yasser al-Najjar became a fugitive. In one account, he came to the United States as a foreign student, but documentation of his arrival and presence in the USA is hard to find. When National Public Radio profiled him in 2003, Yasser al-Najjar was an official of the Palestinian Authority living in Gaza.

Yasser’s son, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Democrat, worked on the Obama campaign in 2012 and served in the Obama administration. The “Palestinian Mexican-American,” ran for Congress in 2018 and 2020, losing to Republicans both times. After an unsuccessful run for mayor of Chula Vista, near San Diego, Campa-Najjar joined the U.S. Navy. Watch for the Munichian candidate to make another run for national office, billed as a U.S. Navy veteran.