Anti-American protest at the Greek Olympics

Keep the following history in mind before you read the anti-American protest at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games.

Afghanistan

Dreaming of Dismembered Limbs

One Year Later - Abdul Jalil and Mohammed Ismail could hardly have crossed paths under more gruesome circumstances. Jalil, accused of theft by the Taliban, was about to have his hand publicly chopped off on a dusty Kabul soccer field. Ismail was the groundskeeper responsible for cleaning up the gore from the weekly amputations by Afghanistan’s harsh fundamentalist regime.[...]

About this time, Ismail was at the sports stadium, preparing the field for a soccer match between two local teams. Taliban soldiers drove the truck carrying Jalil and the other prisoners into the stadium through a small tunnel at the north end and parked at centerfield. “When the truck drove in, I knew what was going to happen next,” Ismail says. “So I left the field and walked into a tunnel so I wouldn’t have to see it.” The thousands of spectators, there for the soccer match but familiar with the Taliban’s practice of cutting limbs off alleged thieves and toppling brick walls onto men accused of homosexuality, waited in silence.

The soldiers took Jalil off the truck first, removed his blindfold and motioned him toward a table where a doctor was waiting with a long knife. Once he realized where he was, Jalil struggled with the soldiers, who beat him with their rifle butts until he fell to the ground. He pleaded with his captors and screamed to the crowd that he was not a criminal, but the silence continued. The soldiers dragged Jalil to the table, restrained his right arm against the metal surface and rolled up his coat sleeve. The doctor, who was masked so he wouldn’t be recognized, began sawing off his wrist. “I was screaming and crying,” Jalil says. “After about 10 minutes I fainted, and when I woke up, I was in the hospital.”

Other stadium workers said it took the doctor a further five minutes of sawing before Jalil’s hand finally came off. The doctor spent the next hour removing the hands of two other prisoners, and finally the foot of the last one. Taliban soldiers threw the four men back into the truck and drove off. Ismail came back onto the field with a bucket of water to clean up the blood when he noticed the severed body parts on the ground.

Iraq

Iraqi soccer team torture

Before every match, players were forced to watch a video in which Odai threatened them if they did not triumph, Baba said. [...]

After losing an important match, he said, the entire team was once taken directly from the soccer stadium to jail in a bus with blacked-out windows. They were crammed into a single cell and beaten with sticks.

"It was normal to spend days and weeks in jail," said Laith Hussein, the team's current captain, who is not related to the former president. "We would joke that we had three homes -- our own houses, the stadium and jail." [...]

A missed penalty kick could bring a humiliating head-shaving at the Stadium of the People, team members said. Sometimes players were forced to play "matches" in which they would kick concrete balls around the prison yard in 130-degree heat.

Another player, Sharar Haddar, has said that Odai dragged him and his teammates over concrete, pulling skin off their backs, then yanked them through a pit so that sand stuck to their raw skin and made them jump in a vat of sewage.

So what was the anti-American protest at the opening ceremony all about?

Games Opening Ceremony Full of Spectacle

"There was huge applause for Afghanistan on its return to Olympic competition after an eight-year absence and with its first female athletes.

The entrance of the more than 500-member U.S. team - led by basketball guard Dawn Staley - drew cheers. But some people also stood and put their thumbs down in an apparent show of displeasure for the war in Iraq. Moments later, the Iraqis entered to a roaring ovation."

Cheers for the liberated and jeers for the liberators.
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