NBC News is refusing to air an ad that highlights not only China’s human rights abuses but the American corporations that kowtow to the co...
NBC News is refusing to air an ad that highlights not only China’s human rights abuses but the American corporations that kowtow to the communist regime during the Olympics, underscoring just how much moral compromise is taking place on the part of American companies and organizations during what critics are aptly dubbing the “Genocide Games.”
One such critic is Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, whose campaign bought an ad slot from NBC for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.
The ad in question slams the “Genocide Games” and highlights the moral depravity of allowing the capital of the Chinese Communist Party-controlled nation to host the Olympics. It also questions the business relationships between China and companies such as Visa, Coca-Cola, Nike, Intel and Procter & Gamble, according to The New York Post.
“This is the equivalent of holding the Olympics in Germany in the 1940s or Rwanda during their atrocities,” the indignant Republican lawmaker told the Post. “It is beyond the pale that the [International Olympic Committee] didn’t move the games.”
The Olympics were actually held in Germany in 1936, the final Games before World War II. The prestige of hosting the international event gave a boost to the Nazi dictatorship of Adolph Hitler.
For the 2022 Games, the International Olympic Committee has been criticized for allowing Beijing to host the competition amid growing outcry over the country’s human rights abuses, particularly of its Uyghur Muslims and practitioners of other minority religious groups like the Falun Gong and members of non-state-sanctioned Christian churches.
Additionally, China has slammed down the hammer on Hong Kong, squashing a vibrant pro-democracy protest movement and largely restricting free speech and civil liberties in the previously largely autonomous region. It severely restricts the rights of mainland Chinese citizens and is always to use military pressure against the government of Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province, not an independent country.
“I think the companies supporting it should be absolutely ashamed,” Waltz also said. “Many of them preach social justice and contribute millions of dollars to social justice causes and yet are turning a blind eye to the genocide going on. Many of them are complicit with their own supply chains.”
The ad also featured Enes Kanter Freedom, the Boston Celtics basketball player and Swiss-born Turk who was recently naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
Freedom has been a fierce critic of the Chinese regime and the accompanying Western wokeness that so often seems to enable its human rights abuses.
Along with Waltz, the NBA player concludes the ad by encouraging viewers to boycott Chinese-made products, saying, “When you see, ‘made in China,’ put it down.”
Yet true to the very spirit of moral compromise on the part of American companies that Waltz sought to highlight in the 30-second spot, which cost his campaign $40,000, NBC is now refusing to air the ad unless logos for the American corporations are removed, Waltz said.
“NBC will not run our ad unless we remove the corporate logos of companies,” the congressman’s spokesman, James Hewitt, told the Post.
According to the Post, an NBC spokesman said the network did not reject the ad, but said. “Per NBCUniversal’s long-standing advertising guidelines, changes to the ad were requested so it could air.”
But the network did refuse to run the ad as it was produced. And to make the changes Waltz says NBC requested, of course, would greatly diminish the ad’s intended message, as Hewitt noted.
“It defeats a major purpose of the ad: to highlight US sponsors’ culpability with China’s human rights abuses,” he said. “The point of the ad was to target Olympic audiences in DC.”
And before anyone dismisses Waltz’s attacks on China as some sort of political stunt, bear in mind that last month he co-sponsored a bill with Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Vermont to strip the International Olympic Committee of its U.S. tax-exempt status over its willful blindness to China’s human rights abuses.
As for NBC, one wonders if it was consistent with NBCUniversal’s guidelines for the network to air what many critics slammed as communist propaganda on air during the opening ceremonies last week.
As highlighted by Stand for America, a group newly founded by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, a commentator on NBC noted during the broadcast of the opening ceremonies Friday that China styles itself as a “champion of the developing world.”
“It’s worth remembering that while Western countries may be boycotting these Olympics over human rights issues, China styles itself as a champion of the developing world,” the commentator noted. “And it has plenty of support in countries from Africa to Latin America where its investments are building up local economies.”
It’s interesting that the commentator noted China’s “investments” in the developing world, where China has aggressively targeted third-world countries with struggling economies to hook into impossible-to-repay loans so as to stretch its tendrils of influence and power into the corners of the globe it is too weak to overtake with its military.
NBC’s headquarters in Manhattan was also the site of protests last week by pro-Hong Kong activists, who called on the network to highlight Beijing’s brutality during the Olympics:
NBC is certainly not to blame for the fact that China has been picked to host the Winter Olympics, to be fair. But its executives are to be blamed for allowing this communist apologist drivel to air on their network, only to turn around and refuse to run an ad that holds accountable Beijing and American companies that have questionable relationships with the despots in power.
History has not remembered the 1936 Olympics fondly, nor will it remember kindly the 2022 Winter Games and all those entities that turned a blind eye to China’s abuses to make it happen.
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