There is much confusion and mixing of symbols and traditions old and modern in all this. To clarify things a little:

The Olympic Flame was there at the start, in the ancient Olympics. It would be lit at the temple of Hera using sunlight and a concave mirror and then conveyed all of a few hundred metres to the stadium, where it would remain lit till the end of that year's games. In symbolising purity of spirit, it was quasi-religious in its aim. As indeed were the Olympic games themselves. And the whole idea behind the Olympic Games was that wars would stop temporarily, a truce would be in effect, and mortal enemies would convene to compete in sport. After the games, the wars would resume, unless of course meanwhile the diplomats had sorted things out over a cup of wine between the events. But the whole point was to leave politics and wars out of it - breaking the Olympic truce was unthinkable.

The "Olympic Torch" and its procession are modern inventions (Diem/Goebbels, as mentioned above). Its origins are political in aim. And the practice of carting the torch all over the friggin' globe is even more recent, and commercial in its aims. They mean little in the context of the Olympic Games, and people can mess about with them, boycott or disrupt, to their hearts' content for all I care.

But given the background, I find the concept of disrupting the Olympic Games themselves for political purposes essentially blasphemous - whatever the reason or the cause. The whole point is the Olympic truce, for me, and without that the rest goes to pot. Now, both the USSR and the USA are guilty of ignoring the truce and boycotting each other's games in the past; so for people to do the same to the Chinese games would be no first, they would be simply following the example of others. But it doesn't make it right, IMHO.

And the villain in such cases is the one who breaks the truce, not the one who has given them the cause/reason for doing so.