Tag: olympics

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general freedom international affairs media and media people

“Nobody” Cares

“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.”

And not a good sport, either.

“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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Accountability general freedom international affairs

The Real Thing

Uyghurs, China, Coke, Olympics
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international affairs

Feckless Endangerment

China, Olympics, genocide, boycott

The Biden administration sure knows how to look feckless when it comes to standing up to China.

The administration has decided that the best way to protest Chinazi aggression against Hong Kong democracy and freedom — and against the lives and freedom of millions of Uyghurs — is to announce a “diplomatic” boycott of the Beijing-​sponsored Olympic games, scheduled to be held in February.

U.S. participation would continue as before: athletes will perform, sports fans will attend, and corporations will make money.

What will be missing?

Government officials.

Viewers around the world won’t notice any difference, of course. They don’t tune in to watch muckety-​mucks photo-​bombing the medal ceremonies.

Even Jimmy Carter, loath to be outdone in the fecklessness department, knew that the way for the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow-​hosted Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to actually boycott the Olympics.

Columnist Cathal Kelly notes that the “diplomatic” boycott is “worse than meaningless.”

The administration’s language games amount to nothing less than “a more impressive sounding way of saying you are eliminating Olympic junkets,” Kelly writes. “Now all the sad, second-​rate pols from North Dakota and Maine won’t get flown private to Beijing so they can take a bunch of ego shots with Auston Matthews.”

With the Winter Olympics mere months away, we can’t expect the U.S. government to improve its policy in time.

But that still leaves many other parties who can act, including governments of other countries, U.S. sports teams, and individual U.S. athletes.

Withdraw, and say why.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Should Oppressors Host the Olympics?

Olympics, China

China is scheduled to host the Winter Olympics in 2022. Should it be allowed to? If allowed, should anybody go?

Cato scholar Ilya Somin argues, at Reason, for at least boycotting the event.

Why? To respond to the Chinese government’s “many egregious atrocities, including its detention of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps, brutal repression in Hong Kong, and much else.”

China is one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. So why let the Olympics serve as a “propaganda showcase” for the regime?

The ideal of an Olympic Games unencumbered by politics is untenable. You can’t keep the games free of politics when tyrant-​hosts routinely exploit the event for political purposes while appeasers turn a blind eye.

A globally publicized boycott would make the work of the appeasers much harder.

Somin goes further, however. He argues that the International Olympic Committee should permanently prohibit oppressive governments from hosting the Olympics.

If this policy were enacted, there would be heated debates about whether Country Y or Country Z belong to the same ban-​worthy category as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe.

Maybe we could use Cato’s Human Freedom Index as a guide to oppression.

How brutal is too brutal? Let’s talk, because without open argument, any decision or policy will be arbitrary and useless.

And I welcome those debates about borderline cases, just as long as the most blatantly brutal regimes can never again host the Olympics and exploit them to advance their vicious agendas.

Until then: Boycott the 2022 games in China.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Townhall: Gold Medal Democracy

Bostonians win big in the Olympics. How? By not hosting them. Click on over to Townhall​.com, then come back here for a few more events. Don’t worry — low hurdles. Just a little reading:

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

Gold Medal Worthy

Yes On 1

The 2024 Summer Olympics will not be held in Boston.

Beantown abandoned its bid to host the games after Mayor Marty Walsh refused to sign a contract that would have left the city responsible for billions in possible cost overruns.

Did I say possible?

Call it seemingly inevitable.

“I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk,” declared Walsh.

People throughout the Bay State can now rest easy — no tax hike or debt burden to build expensive infrastructure … and produce bigger traffic jams. Of course, polls had long shown voters opposed to the idea. But that doesn’t matter to career politicians. Nor to the mayor — until recently.

Mayor Walsh’s deep concern for taxpayers notwithstanding, citizen activism made the difference. A month ago, the Yes on 1 committee joined together with Evan Falchuk, chairman of Citizens for a Say, in supporting a ballot measure to prohibit spending any tax dollars on the Olympics.

Last year, I worked with Yes on 1 — led by Steve Aylward, Rep. Geoff Diehl, Marty Lamb and Rep. Shaunna O’Connell — to pass Question 1, ending automatic gas tax increases in Massachusetts. Olympic officials had been assured a ballot measure was unlikely to get in the way; then came the Yes on 1 folks with the know-​how to petition just such a measure onto the ballot.

Walsh claimed this opposition had nothing to do with his decision, calling them “about ten people on Twitter and a couple people out there who are constantly feeding the drumbeat.”

Dancing to a different drummer, Mr. Mayor.

Bostonians can thank the state’s ballot initiative process, which provides a way for the people to be heard. And, of course, citizen leaders who take the initiative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Yes On 1