Booing Israel at the Winter Olympics plus the bobsled burglary story shows the public mood has turned into brutal punchlines. Right, so Israel has walked into the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan and got booed, and that alone tells you the big lie of this whole event is already struggling to hold. Then, almost immediately, Israel’s bobsled team says their training place has been burgled, passports gone, kit gone, and instead of sympathy the internet does what it does when it comes to Israel these days: it turns the story into a pile of brutal punchlines about theft, land, and the kind of excuses people have heard for decades coming from Israel. And the Olympic Committee’s response is the most revealing part, because they don’t talk about principle, they talk about zones, about what counts as their problem, about where responsibility stops. So if you think this is just a bit of crowd noise and a bit of crime, it isn’t, because what’s happening here is that the Olympics is being used as a legitimacy stage for a state under global condemnation, and the audience is refusing to play along, in public, on camera, on social media and with the whole world watching. So let’s unpack all of this, because the real story isn’t just the boos or the burglary, it’s what those two things have just done to the illusion that sport whitewash any of this. Right, so the International Olympic Committee has let Israel walk into the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, and the crowd response has been loud enough that nobody can pretend it is background noise. Israel has been booed during the Parade of Nations in San Siro Stadium, in the same ceremony where J.D. Vance has also been booed when he appears on the big screens, and the organisers have immediately been pushed into that familiar posture of “nothing to see here, move along, sport only”. That posture is not a principle, it is an operating system, because once the crowd is doing the opposite of what the broadcast wants, the first thing that breaks is the pretence that this is just a sporting event and not a live reputation stage.