Quote of the Day

I think that we need to deal less with medals and if we are going to achieve medals, and deal more with investing more in sport. The Olympics is just one symptom of the fact that the State of Israel is sick in both body and soul, and it is because there is no investment in sport... It is more important for the State to invest in kollels and torah learning than for learning sport. At the end of the day, this harms us, in our health, in our security and also in the Olympics.

  -- sports analyst Uriel Daskal

Daskal said this on the radio when asked to explain why Israel did so poorly in the Olympics, not even achieving a single medal. According to Daskal, the little part of the budget that is directed to the haredi parties for yeshivot and kollels is what caused the Olympic athletes to fail. In a sense he is right, as every agura directed to anything other than sport means less potentially invested in sport, meaning the athletes will do that much worse. So just like the haredim are responsible for the athletes' poor showing, so too is the school system, the defense system, the roads authority, the sciences, and every other office and institution that gets a budget from the government, taking away potential shekels from sport.

It is outrageous that he could blame the failure of the athletes on the haredim. Maybe he should have blamed the haredim because they did not pray enough for the athletes success. or maybe he should have blamed the haredim for nuclear war, for Greece and Spain  being in horrible financial situations, for the shooting in the theater in the US, for the boy in Tel Aviv who got killed at a basketball game from a freak accident, and for the devastation of the Carmel fire. Ridiculous.

While that is what Daskal said on the radio, in his own article about the athletes failure, he does not mention the haredim, and while he does say too little is invested in sport, and sport is clearly low on Israel's list of priorities, he does go on to explain how the money that is invested is not used efficiently.

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