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FIRST ON FOX: Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul is set to launch a campaign ad Friday that targets China’s human rights abuses, coinciding with the start of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.
McCaul, who sits as the chair of the China Task Force and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been highly critical of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for permitting the games to be held in China despite reported human rights abuses.
“It’s reprehensible that the International Olympic Committee has bowed down to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ignored their gross human rights violations, and allowed them to host this year’s Olympics,” McCaul said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Just as they did in 2008, the CCP will certainly use these Olympics in an attempt to whitewash their genocide, military aggression and oppression of their own people.”
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, briefs members of the media outside the West Wing of the White House.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Following reports of arbitrary detainment, forced sterilization, family separation, sexual abuse and torture being committed against the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China, the U.S. declared the Chinese government was committing genocide in January 2021.
The CCP has repeatedly denied these allegations and has justified the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs as a security precaution.
McCaul took aim at the CCP for not only its human rights violations, but also its military aggression against the U.S. and Taiwan, along with its continued “cover-up” of the origins of the coronavirus that has infected nearly 390 million people worldwide and killed over 5.7 million since the pandemic began in 2020.
“Now they want us to watch the Olympics and forget their crimes,” he said in the 30-second advertisement “Olympics” first obtained by Fox News Digital. The five-figure ad buy will run in the Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, media markets and online.
The Texas Republican joined GOP calls to have the games moved from China to another host country and has voiced repeated concern for the safety of athletes and their teams.
The IOC rejected calls to move the games and has dismissed concerns regarding human rights abuses by saying it will “focus on the athletes.”
REPUBLICANS PROMISE SANCTIONS FOR IOC IF ANY US ATHLETES GO MISSING DURING BEIJING OLYMPICS
Ice-cleaning machines prepare the surface at the Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing, China.
(Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
“We have our full focus on the athletes,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a December news conference. “We welcome that they can participate, that they are supported by their national governments. The rest is politics.”
In January the committee rejected further GOP calls for an athlete ban after the Biden administration announced a diplomatic ban, arguing the move would only serve to hurt athletes without any geopolitical benefit.
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McCaul has since backed several bills that would sanction the IOC should anything happen to Americans while abroad.
“It’s important the American people stand up and in one united voice say that we will not turn a blind eye to the CCP’s genocide,” McCaul said Friday. “We will cheer for team USA – while we also condemn the morally reprehensible actions of the CCP and the IOC.”
