Washington Post
Letter to the Editor: Sen. Rick Scott
July 14, 2020

Regarding the July 7 editorial “What’s happening in Xinjiang is genocide”:

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has been persecuting and oppressing Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong, Christians and Taiwan. Now, it is taking away the rights of Hong Kongers. It’s time the world sees Communist China for what it is. 

For General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, the genocide — and that’s exactly what it is — of the Uighurs in Xinjiang is finally making the world wake up to China’s human rights abuses and general contempt for freedom and liberty. We also can’t forget the U.S. companies that have been profiting for years from the slave labor of Muslim Uighurs. They are complicit. 

It’s incumbent on all of us to take a stand. That’s why I introduced a resolution in the Senate calling on the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 games out of Beijing, and why I asked NBC not to air the Olympics unless the Games are moved out of Communist China. At the time, neither was interested in standing with the Uighurs and against one of the world’s worst human rights violators. Would Germany have been rewarded with the Olympic Games in 1944? Or Cambodia in 1976? Of course not. And we shouldn’t hold the world’s greatest athletic competition in a country that is perpetuating a genocide against its Muslim population and stripping away the civil liberties of Hong Kongers.

Rick Scott, Washington

The writer, a Republican, represents Florida in the U.S. Senate.