The 2022 Winter Olympics start on Friday, February 4 in Beijing, China. While billions of people around the world tune in to watch the spectacle as thousands of the top athletes from around the world compete,
there is a lot that our TVs will not be showing -- including violence against Hong Kongers, a reign of terror against Tibetans, and a genocide against the Uyghur minority population in the Xinjiang region.Luckily, some countries, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Japan are speaking out against the Chinese government's horrific human rights abuses by practicing diplomatic boycotts of the Games. The U.S. actually even recently went one step further by
banning all products imported from Xinjiang, China, in the hopes that economic sanctions can help force authorities to rethink their ethnic cleansing mission.
Sign the petition to demand that the other countries implementing diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Winter Olympics also institute economic sanctions against the Xinjiang region!In fact, China's human rights abuses are so egregious that athletes flying to China are
being advised by their home countries
not to speak out -- for fear of what could happen to the Olympians. Foreign nationals are being warned that protecting their safety could be difficult if Chinese authorities choose to detain and prosecute them under the country's vague and far-reaching anti-free speech laws.
If internationally televised Olympians are told to be afraid for their safety, that can only hint at how bad conditions are for people who don't have the same celebrity status. Experts say that upwards of 1 million ethnic minorities have already been disappeared into mass detention sites, where grabbing the world's attention is impossible.
The whole world should be outraged and speak with one voice uniformly declaring that another genocide will not be allowed to occur on our watch. Yet many nations of the world have been silent, afraid to take on the economic powerhouse that is China. Even many well-known companies have refused to take a stand on the right side of history.
Tesla just opened a new showroom in Xinjiang. As the organization the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rightly stated, this "amounts to economic support for genocide." And Coca-Cola, AirBnB, and Intel
remain sponsors of the Beijing Games.
But economics must not supersede morals. We have an ethical obligation to elevate the voices of Uyghur peoples who have been disappeared, abused, coerced into forced labor, operated on and sterilized against their will, and murdered.
Tell the leaders of Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom to ban products made in Xinjiang, China and to support Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kongers' human rights!
