Human rights champion and China expert Reggie Littlejohn has condemned President Joe Biden for sending athletes to compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics as “pathetic” and his alleged diplomatic “boycott” “bogus.”
By announcing a “diplomatic boycott,” the Biden administration has “implicitly acknowledged being bound by the Genocide Convention to penalize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” for its crimes against humanity, Littlejohn said Friday, yet the extent of the punishment “can only be characterized as pathetic and utterly inadequate.”
Biden’s administration announced that it would not send politicians to Beijing to attend the event this week, branding it a diplomatic “boycott.” Politicians do not compete in the Olympic Games, so their absence does not affect the event in any way and does not constitute a boycott. The Chinese Communist Party responded to Biden by noting this fact and adding that the Chinese government never invited American politicians to the event, so they can’t actually “boycott” it.
The Communist Party’s crimes against ethnic and religious minorities in East Turkistan, a region China refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), and elsewhere include “mass incarceration, slave labor, systematic rape, forced abortions and sterilizations, torture and wholesale murder,” Littlejohn declared, and merit much more action.
Littlejohn — president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and co-chair of the Stop the Genocide Games Task Force — said that politicians not attending the Games is a “necessary, but grossly insufficient, response to a Chinese regime guilty of the most egregious and murderous oppression in world history.”
“Inevitably, such a response will only embolden the CCP to further – and probably far more devastating– criminal misconduct, both at home and abroad,” she warned.
“The 2022 Olympics in Beijing look ominously similar to the 1936 Games held in Berlin, Germany,” Littlejohn stated. “Like in 1936, we are confronting another totalitarian regime actively engaging in genocide. We must not make the mistake again of allowing a genocidal regime to glory in hosting the world’s most prestigious international event.”
US President Joe Biden meets with China’s President Xi Jinping during a virtual summit from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, November 15, 2021. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
The Genocide Convention commits contracting parties like the United States “to prevent and to punish” those who attempt to perpetrate such crimes whether in time of peace or time of war, Littlejohn noted. “Relocation of the ‘Genocide Games’ and, failing that, their comprehensive boycott should be just the beginning of this punishment.”
“Biden’s boycott is bogus because the CCP had already disinvited the world to the Games,” Littlejohn added. At the request of China’s Olympic Committee, international spectators have been banned from attending the Genocide Games.
“Only people living in China — only people under the CCP’s surveillance and control — will be allowed to attend the Games,” she stated.
The Chinese Communist Party “must be deemed ineligible to host what is arguably the most prestigious international event on earth – the Olympic Games,” she asserted.
The U.S. government should also take “a further, long-overdue step,” she stated. “It should designate the CCP as what it is: a Transnational Criminal Organization, thereby putting on notice those who do business with or otherwise abet its odious behavior, and will, therefore, be treated as accomplices to it.”
“Such steps would actually impose tangible costs– punishing the Chinese Communist Party, as we are obliged to do by treaty, and serving notice on others that they cannot engage in genocide or other egregious crimes against humanity with impunity,” she concluded.