What is China thinking?
In a global society you can’t hide. In an electronic age, you can’t silence, blind or forge information. The long history of demonstration and oppression is not new to China, however, never before has it been so exposed. The media offers real time streaming and blogs like this, could tell the true story, if the goverment didn’t shut-down the websites and jail the free speakers. As the growth of a global economy has turned China into the third largest economy in the world, is not time to demand respectable behavior?
Do you do business with a thief because his goods are cheap?
Embargos, financial asset freezing, less rhetoric and more substative action is necessary before the actions taken against the Monks, Sudan and Tibet encourage more Nazi-like behavior. Consider all nations behaving in such a manner) co-horts in a campaign against freedom. Are China’s fingerprints the only ones on the proliferation of terrorism?
I applaud the call to all Jews, world-wide, to boycott the Olympic games this summer. I agreed with the statement presented by 185 rabbi’s and Jewish leaders, that “The China Olymics are not Kosher,” published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday; the Day of Holocaust Remembrance around the world. China’s record on human rights, cozy relationship as a supplier of weapons to Iran and Syria and acknowledgement of Hamas, are not activities Americans, Jews or not, should find acceptable.
Now before you cry out that this will hurt the athletes, I am not going there. The competition will go on, be broadcast and medals awarded, however, what I am suggesting is that we all avoid the mass surge of consumerism that masks as national unity during this international competition, and feeds the China cash cow. Think before you spend. Go to Europe or Israel before you book The Great Wall walking tour.
Is this convenient timing to call-out CHINA, while we have the world’s attention on the Olympics? Perhaps we should also look at India, Japan and Russia, as Antoine Halff and Shalon Salomon Wald states in their article “Enough Misguided Maligning of China“, the Forward; “Under a veneer of political correctness, such efforts are threatening to become a major moral failure on our part. For all the obvious differences between China and the Jewish people, it is hard not to notice the similarities between today’s anti-Chinese feeling and the antisemitism that first emerged in the late 19th century, when Western Jews threatened Christian domination by moving into positions of power.
Our insistence on holding China to higher standards than other countries reflects our concerns about how its rise is reshaping our world and challenging Western supremacy. Outrage at Chinese policies is in style and uncontroversial because it gives those anxieties — about losing jobs, about Chinese takeovers of Western companies, about China’s competition with the West for scarce energy resources — a respectable cover.”
So today, as you shop for a vacation, toys or other products of mass consumption, look at the label and vote with your wallet.
If you don’t like this idea, consider the alternative… who’s next?
SLM
Leave a Reply