"Farrow's Darfur Olympics & Our Olympic Shame" -- by Christopher J. Finlay in the Huffington Post

With just days to go before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Mia Farrow is on her way to a refugee camp in Darfur to host The Darfur Olympics, a week-long web broadcast that will be timed to coincide with the first week of the Olympic Games. Although the majority of Farrow's Olympics-related activism, such as her now almost completely moribund calls for major world leaders to boycott the Beijing Games, have been misguided and would have likely hurt her cause had they been taken more seriously, it is important to recognize just how cannily she was able to use the Beijing Olympic Spotlight to promote her agenda. While many might welcome the Olympic Spotlight as a powerful tool for activists, this tool ought to be seen as a source of great shame for us all. This is because the Olympic Spotlight plays a dual role. It both focuses Western attention on neglected causes as well as demonstrating how fickle and disengaged this same audience is with global issues in the absence of major media events like the Olympics.

Appeals to some form of global morality are central in the majority of the Olympic-related anti-China/pro-human rights rhetoric (it continues to be increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two). It is claimed that the abuse of human rights by the Chinese government at home and their abuse of human rights by proxy in Darfur are clear violations of a universal moral code. Western activists use of the Olympic Spotlight has attempted to highlight China's amorality. If China is to 'graduate' into world power status, the argument goes, then the Chinese government must develop a moral code and that code must be in line with the one we profess to have in the West. Quite frankly, if China were to adopt a new moral code (they may be immoral by some standards, but the country certainly isn't without a moral code), they could find a much better model than ours.

In highlighting the West's capricious appetite for stories of genocide in Africa and political and religious intolerance and killings in Asia, the Olympic spotlight has, in fact, inadvertently revealed our own moral bankruptcy. It is reprehensible that activists such as Farrow must patiently wait for global media events to coincide with their causes in order to have an audience. We shouldn't need two weeks of sports and ceremony to learn that something terribly evil is happening in Africa or to realize that we should be fighting to stop it. The fact that we do indicates that our own morals are as transient, trend-oriented and, I fear, temporary as fashion. Summer 2008's style is Darfur. What's the style going to be next season?

Read the entire piece on the Huffington Post here.

"Using the broad stage of the Olympics to promote justice" - by Emily Bloemker

Some of my earliest memories involve watching the Olympics with my mom – in our household, during Olympics weeks, we would spend every evening and weekend watching events coverage. I remember, at age five, seeing Greg Louganis hit his head on a diving board. I remember, more clearly, the Magnificent Seven gymnasts of 1996 – at age thirteen, I cried when Kerri Strug (after spraining her ankle) stuck the landing on her second vault attempt and sealed the U.S. women’s gymnastics victory for that year. In our household, and across the world, Olympics have always meant high drama.

And so it continues, but on a broader stage, with more dire consequences. I recently read a post by Nicholas Kristof, entitled The Genocide Olympics. A latecomer to some human-rights issues, I only became aware a few years ago of China’s poor human rights record via the controversy surrounding “Bodies … the Exhibition” in which many worried about the origin of the displayed bodies, obtained from dubious Chinese sources. In his post, Kristof raises questions about the upcoming Beijing Olympics, especially in light of China’s unapologetic underwriting of the Sudanese genocide. In a later post, Kristof outlines his reasons for opposing a boycott, but gives few suggestions of how the average citizen can proceed.

I believe that the Beijing Olympics, and China’s support of the Sudanese genocide, are issues that Christians cannot ignore. So here are a few ideas:

We must educate ourselves, first thing, if we are not already informed. A good place to start is Amnesty International, which is tracking China’s progress in the leadup to the Olympics.

We must pay attention to see if there is one aspect of this very large injustice which catches us: is it the economic participation in entities that support the Sudanese genocide? Socially responsible investing in general? The location of the Olympics in China in the first place? If you are concerned about socially responsible investing, I would suggest visiting Amy Domini’s website – she received an honorary doctorate from Berkeley Divinity School last year, and is a powerful force for good in the investment world. If you would prefer to target investment that supports genocide in Sudan, I recommend visiting this Sudan divestment page, which gives a map of the United States and various divestment efforts happening in them. Finally, if you are opposed to the location of the Olympics in China in the first place, I encourage you to start up discussions with friends, to raise the question from your pulpits, to write about it on your blogs. I hope to preach about an aspect of this issue during my work as a camp chaplain this summer, and I also plan to raise the question of human rights in every conversation I have about the Olympics (and there will be many, since my love of the Olympic games has not waned since childhood).

What is the best way to use this Olympics to spur just action on behalf of the persecuted people of Sudan? How can we best raise awareness and respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters? Let us see this broad stage of controversy as an opportunity for advocacy and justice, and to not allow the opportunity to pass without our voices being heard.

Emily Bloemker is a middler at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, Emily has traveled in Haiti and Sudan with the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Church.