“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay,” Chamath Palihapitiya stated emphatically on the All-In Podcast. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth.”
Concern that the totalitarian Chinese regime has locked more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps is “a luxury belief,” according to Mr. Palihapitiya, the Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American billionaire venture capitalist, once a senior Facebook executive and now partial owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
As the Olympics Games open today in Beijing, the validity of his assertion remains to be seen.
“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the Genocide Games,” argues Teng Biao, the former Chinese human rights activist, now teaching law at the University of Chicago. “The CCP’s purpose is to exactly turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities.”
In addition to the genocide “against my Uyghur brothers and sisters,” basketball star Enes Kanter Freedom points out the Chinazis are “erasing Tibetan identity and culture, attacking freedoms in Hong Kong and threatening democratic Taiwan.
“The world needs to wake up,” he warns, “and realize that the Chinese Communist Party is not our friend.”
“It’s hard to understand why anyone feels it’s even possible to celebrate international friendship and ‘Olympic values’ in Beijing this year,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s Omer Kanat told The Washington Post. Kanat charged “Olympic corporate sponsors” with “sportwashing genocide.”
“Do you ignore the ongoing genocide,” he asks, “or do you take a stand?”
Throughout these Beijing Olympics, I hope athletes and others — from news networks to you and me on social media — will care enough to take a stand by speaking up.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on ““Nobody” Cares”
Speaker Pelosi has advised athletes to say nothing at the Olympics, except about their own sport. She can’t risk offending China, lest it hurt her husband’s business interests there. She was more outspoken in 2008, when her family’s wealth was not tied up in China.
As for the Uyghurs, for many people, it’s out of sight out of mind.
Tibet and Hong Kong are of more interest to activists.