ROME — Pope Francis has reiterated his support for the Beijing Olympic Games, urging critics to get over their “prejudices and fears.”
“I wish the great Olympic and Paralympic family a unique experience of human fraternity and peace,” the pontiff tweeted Thursday. “May the Games help everyone overcome prejudices and fears and make our communities more welcoming and inclusive.”
The pope’s words followed a similar appeal issued Wednesday, in which he wished the organizers of the Beijing Olympics “every success” in the midst of repeated calls for a boycott by human rights groups who have decried the genocide of Uyghur Muslims taking place in Xinjiang under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The World Uyghur Congress told Breitbart News last August that participation in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is “indefensible,” given the CCP’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghur people and other Muslim-majority minorities of East Turkestan.
“Enabling China to host the Olympics and to use it as a promotional event without addressing its human rights crises sends a signal to China that the international community will not hold it accountable,” said Koen Stoop, the E.U. policy director for the World Uyghur Congress. “This will only encourage the Chinese regime to continue its crimes against Uyghurs and others.”
Rights groups have also drawn a comparison between the Beijing Games and those staged in Berlin in 1936.
In a joint letter last year to the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), with a copy to the International Olympics Committee (IOC), Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and the Committee on the Present Danger: China reminded the organizations of their “charter commitments and international obligations pertaining to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for Genocide.”
The letter recalled the eerie similarity of the Beijing Games to the 1936 Berlin Games, which “proved to be an enormous propaganda windfall for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, affording it unwarranted international prestige, legitimacy and credibility.”
The 1936 games provided “a smokescreen for the horrific crimes against humanity that the Nazi regime subsequently unleashed in its genocidal Holocaust against 6 million Jews and in the course of the world war Hitler precipitated,” it declared.
Today, “we are confronting another totalitarian regime actively engaging in, among crimes against humanity, another genocide,” the letter stated. Yet, Olympic authorities are enabling the CCP “to receive and exploit a propaganda bonanza that will make what the Nazis enjoyed pale by comparison.”
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