New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke at the Firecracker Ceremony and Cultural Festival in Chinatown, Manhattan, on Tuesday as the guest of honor, addressing the crowd in front of a giant banner reading “Support Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics” and featuring the official logo of the Games.
The event was organized in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, lower Manhattan, and had no obvious connections to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the government of China, or NBC, the broadcaster with exclusive rights to air the Olympics. Among the sponsors listed on the banner behind Adams was an NBC rival, ABC, and a group called the “Tibetan Association of North America” – notable because most Tibetan groups in the United States and the world have enthusiastically called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in response to decades of grave human rights abuses by the Chinese Communist Party against Tibetan people.
The celebration – officially titled the Firecracker and Cultural Festival and organized by a group called Better Chinatown NYC – featured Chinese dances and musical performances, traditional tiger puppets to celebrate the incoming Year of the Tiger, a fireworks display – typically used to ward off evil spirits in the new year, and remarks by several public officials, including Adams.
Adams used the event to address mounting concerns regarding safety in the Asian-American community of New York, which has suffered a disproportionate number of violent crimes in recent memory, as such attacks have skyrocketed.
“I’m recommitted more than ever to make sure my AAPI [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] community is safe in the city of New York as we end the violence against this community,” Adams told the crowd. “We stand united.”
Local network CBS New York reported that crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans in New York had increased by 343 percent between 2020 and 2021, shortly before Adams took over for far-left former Mayor Bill de Blasio in the new year.
Adams did not mention the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
The promotion of the event is a particularly jarring political statement in what was otherwise an apolitical cultural celebration attracting thousands, many of whom either fled communism in China or are Americans as a result of their ancestors doing the same. Local news outlets covering the event appeared not to mention the Olympics or any controversy surrounding it, or any IOC involvement in the event.
Human rights activists and members of communities repressed by the Chinese Communist Party have spent over a year urging the IOC to relocate the Winter Olympics out of China. The IOC has largely ignored those calls, so protesters then turned to Olympics sponsors, participating governments, broadcasters like NBC, and the general public. Opponents of China hosting the Olympics point to the Communist Party’s ongoing genocidal activity in multiple regions of the country, its repression of political dissidents and people of faith throughout the country and in nominally autonomous communities like Hong Kong, and mounting concerns regarding the safety of athletes in Beijing as Chinese coronavirus cases skyrocket there, including within the allegedly safe Olympics “bubble” village.
The Chinese Communist Party is currently engaging in genocide against the ethnic Uyghur people of East Turkistan, using an extensive concentration camp system to torture, indoctrinate, and sterilize millions of people. Similar policies are being implemented in Tibet, where an estimated 500,000 people have been trapped in concentration camps and forced to abandon their faith, language, culture, and individual thinking to embrace the Communist Party and leader Xi Jinping. China has outlawed the Tibetan flag – endangering athletes who have been photographed with it in solidarity – and forced the head of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, to live in exile for decades.
Honoring China with hosting the Olympics would lead to further such crimes, activists assert.
“We were deeply discouraged to see that China was even awarded the opportunity to host these Olympics despite the fact that it is carrying out an ongoing genocide,” Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, told Breitbart News this week. “The last time China hosted the Summer Olympics, in 2008, it promised that it would make improvements in human rights and so forth – and none of those promises have been met. In fact, things have gotten much worse.”
At press time, no governments have boycotted the Beijing Olympics in solidarity with the protesters.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.