New Jersey Congressman has asked for 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved due to continued genocide in China
The 2022 Winter Olympic games are set to begin in just under two weeks now over in China but there remains a continued push -- that actually goes back to 1994 -- for the IOC to reconsider the location of the games and a boycott if they remain where scheduled.
It's to do with how China has been reportedly inhumanely treating certain groups of people on extreme levels for decades.
"In 1994, I went to China and met with the father of the democracy wall movement, Wei Jinsheng, who had been imprisoned and almost killed by the Chinese dictatorship -- the communist party -- they let him out to get Olympics 2000, they didn't get it and they re-arrested him and almost killed him," U.S. Congressman Chris Smith tells Townsquare Media News.
Eventually, Smith said that he was finally let go on parole.
"He's just one of the bravest men on earth," Smith said.
In 2008, Smith said that he and Congressman Frank Wolf pushed to get the Olympics Committee to not award the Summer games to Beijing.
"They did it anyway and, again, dictatorship showcased itself, crushed the dissidents in the weeks leading up to and during the Olympics, so they couldn't talk to the Press or the athletes or anybody who traveled to Beijing," Smith said.
Six-years later, in 2014, there was an issue with Xi Jinping, a communist dictator, "who is as brutal as Mao Zedong, if not, more so. He's crushed so many people including Christians and the Wiegers in Xinjiang, he's committing a genocide against them."
He said in 2014, Jinping made an order to "crush the muslim leaders" in Xinjiang "and show no mercy", and to prove it, Smith said they have recordings and tapes on file.
2014 is relevant as well because it's the year these Chinese leaders asked for the 2022 Winter Olympic games -- "and they got it."
In 2018, Congressman Smith (who has chaired 74 congressional hearings over the years on China's human rights abuses), and Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote a letter to the President of the IOC asking him, “to review and ultimately reassign the location of the 2022 Winter Olympics given credible reporting of the mass, arbitrary internment of one million or more Uyghurs or other Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and other ongoing human rights abuses by the Chinese government" -- Smith previously said in a statement.
In July of 2021, Congressman Smith, who represents a large portion of Monmouth and Ocean Counties in Washington, made another push for the IOC to move the games out of Beijing, China "due to the ongoing genocide and other egregious human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)" -- Smith previously said in a statement.
He also has been asking sponsors of the games to bow out as well including Coca-Cola and Visa.
Flash forward to 2022, that push continues and added a chapter within the last week when Smith (R) along with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley (D) and Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern (D) called out the IOC asking them to prove that the Olympic uniforms are not being made from forced labor in China's Xinjiang Region where the CCP is committing genocide -- which brought on the name of the "Genocide Olympics".
Ahead of and heading into the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China remain several human rights concerns Smith and others want addressed.
"In a matter of weeks, we will have an Olympic games where Xi Jinping is the host while simultaneously running concentration camps where two, maybe three million people are being tortured, beaten," Smith said.
One woman who survived brutal, brutal attacks testified at a Committee hearing on the kind of torture she somehow endured while begging for it to end.
"We had one woman who came and testified, who was a lucky one who got out -- she told how that after they were putting electric caddle-prods in her private areas, under her arms and elsewhere -- she begged Allah, because was a Muslim -- to take her life," Smith said. "She goes 'I can't live'. She had three children, one of them died, when they separated her from the children. Her husband, of course, was killed as well."
It's not that he doesn't want the Olympics to occur at all, but has pushed for them to be moved out of China and be held somewhere else.
"I love the Olympics, I love sports but it's a Chinese Party Communist Dictatorship that is hosting it, making money off of it and showcasing that this is the model for governance for the rest of the world," Smith said.