Leave it to the dutiful scribes at NBC News to parrot the communist Chinese government’s preferred talking points.
When Uyghur skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang helped light the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie gushed that the “provocative” decision was an “in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide.”
Guthrie’s disgraceful, subservient repetition of Chinese propaganda might have turned out better if Yilamujiang had ever been heard from again.
Just 18 hours after carrying the torch, however, Yilamujiang placed 43rd out of 65 participants in her cross-country skiing event. By International Olympic Committee rules, every athlete is to make themselves available to foreign media after their event, but Yilamujiang never showed. She was pulled from her cross-country relay event the following day, having served her propaganda purposes. Guthrie has conveniently failed to update viewers on this part of the story.
Similar disappearances have befallen 2 million of Yilamujiang’s fellow Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province. Many of them now live in concentration camps despite the world’s empty declarations that such things should “never again” happen.
NBC’s eagerness to acquiesce to communist China’s demands was an all-too-common theme of these winter games. U.S. corporations, including Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Intel, and Visa, all eagerly placed profits over the values of honesty and transparency. Far too many U.S. corporations make similar choices year-round, leaving U.S. consumers, manufacturers, and workers vulnerable to the whims of the communist China regime.
As we have thoroughly documented over the last two weeks, China is a genocidal and aggressively expansionist regime, unafraid to spy on, steal from, and coerce other nations into getting what it wants. While its territorial claims in the South China Sea and its belligerence toward Taiwan are bad enough, the United States should be gravely concerned about the universal reach that China practices when punishing dissent, going so far as to kidnap people from abroad. China wants everyone to know that there is no country where people who criticize the regime can ever feel safe.
The International Olympic Committee should never have chosen China to host these Olympic games. The U.S. should take a long hard look at future involvement in international organizations that are so corrupt and morally obtuse as to reward China with an event such as the Olympics. Absent reform, the U.S. should consider withdrawing from such organizations.
It is also time U.S. consumers and voters started asking why so many of the nation’s biggest corporations continue not only to do business in China, but work with the regime to undermine American values such as freedom of speech and respect for human rights.
How China treats its own citizens today is how they want to rest the rest of the world tomorrow. They have global ambitions, and American companies need to stop helping them expand their reach.
