In the ‘Genocide Olympics,’ Are We All Complicit?

The Olympics have been in a state of moral crisis for some time now, mired in countless controversies over bribery, corruption, financial waste, cheating, environmental damage, forced displacement of local residents and, more recently, the pandemic. But as the Times sports columnist Kurt Streeter wrote last week, “Beijing 2022 sits at a whole other level of discord.”

Casting the darkest pall over the Games by far are the human rights abuses occurring about 2,000 miles away in the region of Xinjiang, where one million or more Uighurs, a Chinese Muslim ethnic group, and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities are reportedly being subjected to mass detentions, forced labor, sterilization and torture. Their repression has been described by the Biden administration, among other governments, as nothing less than a genocide. (My former colleague Nick Kristof wrote in April about the appropriateness of that label.)