boycotting beijing, pt. 2

I'm not usually a fan of World Magazine but a friend of mine sent me the link to an article they wrote critiquing the current venue of the Olympic games and outlining a few of the events that haven't been discussed as eagerly as the Michael Phelps gold-rush.  Here's an excerpt:

In National Stadium we glimpsed a seemingly hapless President Bush, who removed his coat and bantered with Russian ex-president Vladimir Putin while Russia's tanks streamed across the border into Georgia. We saw an amiable President Hu Jintao and a stolid Jacques Rogge, the Interna-tional Olympic Committee president, take seats of honor knowing Hu had barred athletes and others (including U.S. Olympian Joey Cheek) from attending because of their political views.

And then there is the vast contrast between the pageantry in Beijing's stadium this month and duller echoes of oppression outside. We likely will never know the extent of the Chinese crackdown leading up to and following these Olympics. We do know that untold foreigners plus Chinese, even Beijing residents, were banished from the city.

We know that three Americans on the eve of the Olympic opening were arrested for staging a peaceful and unobtrusive protest in Tiananmen Square by unfurling a banner reading, "Christ is King." We know that Chinese officials harassed a team of Americans who host summer camps for Chinese orphans. The orphans, ages 5-18, are considered ineligible for adoption because they are disabled or too old (14 is the legal age limit for adoption). Officers shut down the Beijing camp site during the Olympics. Police kept workers at the camp's site in Nanchang, five hours south of Beijing, under what one worker described to me as "campus arrest," unable to travel outside the university where the camp was held.

If you'd like to read the rest of the article you can find it here.