By Monica Showalter
What the hell were they thinking?
Adidas, the German athletic shoe giant founded by actual Nazis, decided to put out a celebratory shoe from its 1972 Munich Olympics collection.
The shoes had been popular, or as they say in the trade, iconic, with stripes running down the sides. But it was a little skeevy to package them that way, given that the first thing that comes to mind about the 1972 Munich Olympics was the monstrous attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists.
At that Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in gruesome ways by hooded “Black September” terrorists, dancing around and waving their guns up and down as if it were Oct. 7. After that, the feckless German response ensured that the terrorists got away with it, escaping, until the long arm of the Mossad caught up to them and picked them off one by one.
Nevertheless the Munich shoe was a popular design and even Jewish-American athletic swimming champion, Mark Spitz, wore the shoes at those games. It wasn’t wrong to bring them back, actually, the issue was the framing. The shoes sport a fabulous retro look that appeals to the young.
The big problem is who they chose as the marketing face to promote them: Bella Hadid, a loudly, militantly, anti-Israel supermodel who frequently wears a keffiyeh, and has a famously Jew-hating Palestinian dad, as if there weren’t enough supermodels out there to choose from.
According to the New York Post:
Adidas has sparked outrage for choosing anti-Israel supermodel Bella Hadid to market its re-released retro 1972 Olympic sneakers — the same year 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by a Palestinian terrorist group at the Munich games.
Hadid, who is half-Palestinian on her father’s side, and her sister Gigi have faced criticism for being supporters of the Palestinian relief efforts since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The German athletic wear company announced Monday the re-launch of the classic SL 72 shoe ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Hadid seems more malevolent than the average Hollywood celebrity airhead.
She’s not only outspoken about supporting the Hamas cause, she’s a reliable spreader of Hamas propaganda, all of it false:
The Post reports that she has advocated violence against Jews and Israel, which if true, would make the matter even worse. This would be a full-blown Jew-hater of the worst sort.
Now she’s the glamour face of those shoes, done in blood red as if to get the point across about the 1972 Olympics, and everyone’s supposed to be fine with it.
What indeed were they thinking?
Sure, Adidas, a German company that would remember those Olympics well, did a semi-apology for it, as TMZ and others reported:
Adidas says … “We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events – though these are completely unintentional – and we apologize for any upset or distress caused. As a result we are revising the remainder of the campaign.”
But it’s pretty lightweight, acting as if the choice of model was some random accident.
They didn’t think of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the work of Palestinian terrorists? They didn’t think of Hadid’s loudly pro-Hamas advocacy? They didn’t put two and two together and total up a potential boycott? One wonders if they just wanted the negative publicity or something like it.
And the ignorance is inexcusable. Adidas, recall, is a company founded by a militant Nazi, Adi (short for Adolf) Dassler, who signed his letters “Heil, Hitler” and who had a brother who was an even bigger Nazi who eventually founded his own shoe business, Puma. A summarized history can be read here.
Nazis are the chief inspiration for Hamas, which makes this whole tennis shoe controversy pretty multi-layered and shocking.
A little thought could have gone into the choice of model and the focus would have been on the shoes, not the disgusting past of Adidas’s founder and the disgusting acts of its latest spokesmodel. It’s as if the company’s Inner Nazi is coming out.
They need a bigger apology than the one they gave, along with an explanation about whether this is their style of business to promote Naziism in all its most modern forms, or they really are so stupid they pay no attention to their own history.