TRI In The News

Conservative Attorney Calls for President Bush to Boycott the Olympics

From OneNewsNow
By Chad Groening
Original article available here.

Attorney John Whitehead believes the rampant greed of large corporations has turned the Olympic Games into a moneymaking enterprise, making it difficult for human-rights activists to call attention to the continued persecution and abuses in the communist Chinese dictatorship.

Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, says that millions of dollars have already been spent by various companies for the right to sponsor the Beijing Olympics this August. Some of the contributing corporations include Adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Microsoft.

The constitutional attorney says the latest tensions in Tibet illustrate that pouring capitalism into the communist dictatorship has not helped reduce the human-rights violations in that country. "The argument I always heard was that the more [the U.S.] interacted with China, the more they would become like America and revere freedom," he contends. "[But] the opposite has happened. In fact, China is not getting better; they're getting worse."

Whitehead believes President Bush needs to take a strong moral stand and boycott the Olympics, but he does not believe that will happen "because the world is run by greed."

"What we need to do is urge our president to come out and make a moral statement. Evangelicals put him in office, and it's time for him to live up to his professed faith," he argues. "We should not be holding the Olympics in a country like [China]. If we are, at least our president should come out and give a clear voice against it."

Other human-rights activists believe the president should not even attend the high-profile opening ceremonies, which would send an even stronger message to the regime.