TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Michael Mazza, a nonresident fellow at the Washington DC-based American Enterprise Institute, has penned an opinion article calling for the U.S. State Department to sanction International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials for abetting China’s ongoing human rights abuses.
The IOC must be punished for its recent actions that have made it a “willing partner” in Beijing's crimes, writes Mazza in the article, published in the Washington-based publication The Hill on Monday (Dec. 13).
He contrasts the Olympic committee’s abysmal response to the Peng Shuai (彭帥) sexual assault scandal with the World Tennis Association’s (WTA). He says the WTA rightly questioned the validity of the shoddy screenshot put out by Chinese state media that claimed Peng was safe and sound, while the IOC unquestioningly accepted Beijing’s messaging as factual.
Mazza reserves his harshest criticism for IOC chief Thomas Bach, whom he says has “dived” into the “human rights abusers’ cesspool” after secretly proposing the idea of a video conference call to the Chinese side in order to cover the whole thing up. “He (Bach) is complicit in depriving Peng of her freedom and of her voice,” he asserts.
Mazza says the IOC’s shameful lobbying for the Beijing Winter Olympics, as China continues to suppress ethnic minorities and carry out abuses of all kinds, has gone “beyond the pale.” He says the IOC has graduated from being a “tool” of the CPP to its “junior partner.”
He ends by calling for a freeze on the IOC’s assets, which are denominated in U.S. dollars, and for his country to deny entry to the key persons involved in the collusion.
