Should We Boycott the Upcoming Beijing Olympics? | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the LifeZette. The author of this post is David Kamioner.

    As the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics showed, a sports boycott has little effect and only hurts athletes. But, can you turn a blind eye to Chinese genocide? Several groups say no.

    FNC: "Groups alleging human-rights abuses against minorities in China are calling for a full-blown boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a move likely to ratchet up pressure on the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and sports federations. A coalition representing Uyghurs, Tibetans, residents of Hong Kong and others issued a statement Monday calling for the boycott, eschewing lesser measures that had been floated like "diplomatic boycotts" and further negotiations with the IOC or China. The Beijing Games are set to open on Feb. 4, 2022, just six months after the postponed Summer Olympics in Tokyo are to end. The push for a boycott comes a day before a joint hearing in the U.S. Congress focusing on the Beijing Olympics and China's human-rights record, and just days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes."

    "The time for talking with the IOC is over," Lhadon Tethong of the Tibet Action Institute said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. "This cannot be games as usual or business as usual; not for the IOC and not for the international community. The situation where we are now is demonstrably worse that it was then. If the games go ahead, then Beijing gets the international seal of approval for what they are doing."

    "People have worked to engage with the IOC in good faith to have them understand the issues directly from the mouths of those most impacted - the Uyghurs at the top of that list and the Tibetans and others," Tethong said. "It's clear the IOC is completely uninterested in what the real impacts on the ground for people are. There are obviously a lot of people who are concerned about the athletes and their lifelong work. But in the end it's the IOC that has put them in this position and should be held accountable." She continued.

    "First is the moral question," Tethong said. "Is it OK to host an international goodwill sporting event such as the Olympic Games while the host nation is committing genocide just beyond the stands?"

    American skier Mikaela Shiffrin outlined the problem. "You certainly don't want to be put in the position of having to choose between human rights like morality versus being able to do your job."

    Britain's U.N. Ambassador, Barbara Woodward, called the situation in Xinjiang "one of the worst human rights crises of our time. The evidence points to a program of repression of specific ethnic groups," Woodward said. "Expressions of religion have been criminalized and Uyghur language and culture are discriminated against systematically and at scale." A gesture without much meaning versus athletic dreams. Either way, somebody gets shafted.