Quote:
Originally Posted by ADL Colin
BEIJING, China (AP) -- Efforts to link China to the Darfur crisis are "irresponsible and unfair," a government spokesman said in comments published Thursday, following director Steven Spielberg's decision to drop out as a Beijing Olympics adviser on human rights grounds.
The Hollywood heavyweight had been brought in as an artistic adviser to the opening and closing ceremonies of Games, but said he will not participate because he felt China wasn't doing enough to pressure Sudan into ending the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region.
"The Darfur issue is not China's internal affair and was not started by China. Linking the two is nonsense; it is also irresponsible and unfair," an unidentified spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. was quoted as saying in the state-run Global Times newspaper.
"Many people think the Olympics are a sports event but the West wants to bind sports and politics, this is a clumsy trick," said the highly nationalistic daily, published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily.
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Him pulling out has been one of the main stories in the UK news over the past few days. Remember, London is the next Summer Olympics city after China. So, we get a lot of Olympic stories. Plus, Darfur has been the 'celeb cause of choice' in the UK for a good while now.
There is one BBC reporter that is based in China and he has been really interesting to listen to on this issue. He related something about an Chinese gov't press conference a few months ago where he asked a question about Steven Spielberg perhaps pulling out (again, months ago). According to him, the spokeswoman looked really uncomfortable and made a bogus response was just about all the great things the gov't was doing for the Olympics. Then she wrote something on a paper and gave it to somebody who ran off the stage. When the press conference (which apparently happen once a month) went out on tv the whole question had been edited out as if he never asked it.
That is just the normal BBC correspondent. When that starts happening to a whole fleet of reporters from the West it will get interesting to see how it gets reported.