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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
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Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 25, 2008 / 18 Adar II 5768

A buzz of boycott on Mount Olympus

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Something's cooking on Mount Olympus, and it doesn't smell like Szechuan Chicken with Chef's Famous Garlic Sauce. Zeus and the gang are frowning on Beijing.


The latest Chinese rape of Tibet is putting second thoughts into the heads of people you might not expect to entertain tough thoughts. "There will be a boycott of some sort," says Edward McMillan-Scott, vice president of the European Parliament. "What kind of boycott, is the question right now. At a minimum, I think the European Union should require that no elected official from the 27-member [European] states attend the opening ceremony. But that is a minimum."


The Chinese tasted a bit of what's coming when two men breached the line of a thousand cops yesterday to unfurl a boycott-the-Olympics flag at the lighting of the Olympic torch at Ancient Olympia. The flag portrays the interlocking Olympics rings as handcuffs, like those stockpiled to greet impolite visitors at the Beijing games. A Tibetan couple were arrested on a road outside the ancient Olympian stadium when they fell to the pavement to obstruct a Chinese runner. Two more Tibetans were arrested when they unfurled a Tibetan flag from a balcony; an Indian tourist was detained on suspicion of "planning a pro-Tibetan incident."


Another boycott, like that of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, at first seems unlikely. "No, absolutely not," a spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee told ABC News yesterday. "No consideration is being given to a boycott. There is no discussion. We would never entertain it. It's not on the table." But with a denial like that, you never know.


The Chinese, who have learned they can behave with raucous contempt for the concerns of the rest of the world, obviously think they will pay no penalty for killing a hundred Tibetans (and probably many more) for celebrating their national day. The drumbeat of slander and libel of the Dalai Lama continues. When a hundred students at the Central University of Beijing held a candlelight vigil for the slain Tibetans, more than a dozen were led away in handcuffs to "assist the authorities in their investigation." One European professor who was a witness told correspondents: "It was just a group of Tibetans praying, but it was organized, so the Chinese freaked out."


Organized prayer always freaks out Chinese officials. It's the organization, since it can't be the prayer. When I once asked a Chinese ambassador at lunch why his government was so terrified of the Falun Gong, several of whom were at that moment chanting and waving banners outside his embassy on Connecticut Avenue, he replied with unconvincing incredulity: "Do you know that Falun Gong deny the deity of Jesus Christ?" When I asked whether his remarkable question reflected a change in his government's resolute atheism, he appeared flustered, and changed the subject.


Tibet is a special case for Beijing; the Dalai Lama is particularly reviled for standing up to brutal authority. Alice Thomson writes in the London Daily Telegraph of visiting the Dalai Lama in his exile at a hill station in India. An old woman arrived at the gate to ask for a blessing from the man the Tibetans call the Lord of Compassion. She told how she was arrested for carrying a picture of the Dalai Lama in the folds of her skirt. She was dragged through the streets by her hair and thrown into an open-air prison when she refused to spit on the photograph. She was raped repeatedly and suspended upside down by the Chinese soldiers, and forced to sleep on the bodies of dead inmates. When she was finally released she was told that her husband had been forced to marry a Chinese woman, and she would never see her children again.


If the fun and games must go on, the assembled heads of state ought at least raise a glass of their plum wine in salute to the strength, the courage and the bravery of the Tibetans. They deserve the gold.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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