By Derrick O'Keefe and Melanie Raoul - Znet

David Emerson, Canada's foreign minister, attended the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games and made it clear that he felt that this was not the appropriate time to talk about human rights, "We're no shrinking violet on [the human rights] issue but we don't see the Olympics as the venue to make that point"...Perhaps Emerson was concerned that the world would be impolite about Canada's human rights record when Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Games.

An innocent little Kachin girl was rapped and murdered by Burmese government troops. It was a most horrific tale for someone so young to endure. The details of which were beyond imagination.

[Warning: graphic material]

By John Chan

Last Friday’s opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a $US100 million public relations exercise by the Chinese Communist Party to refashion its image as a pro-business regime that has long repudiated its claims to a “socialist” or “revolutionary” tradition.

Are the Olympics financing murder and rape?

By JOHN ROSS - August 9/10, 2008

The Chinese big producton Beijing Olympics is a coming-out party for cutthroat capitalism, a feather in the cap of what used to be called "the developing world" of which the Chinese Peoples' Republic considers itself a charter member...But the Beijing games are not the first Olympics to be staged in the developing world. In 1968, a fast-modernizing Mexico was awarded the 13th Olympic Games. For then-president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, whose anti-communist mindset bordered on the pathological, the Games would carve his name in history. They did but not the way Diaz Ordaz anticipated.

By Naomi Klein - August, 08 2008

The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

HONG KONG - China is using the Beijing Olympics as a pretext to pursue — and in some cases tighten — a crackdown on human rights, notably ridding the capital of “undesirables,” Amnesty International charged Monday.

Reporting 11 days ahead of the August 8 opening ceremony, the rights group said that despite some minor reforms, authorities had stepped up repression of activists and lawyers to present a picture of stability and harmony.

The Daily Times, Pakistan, May 13, 2008

Now here's an idea that anarchists can get behind. You already have all those beer bottles and you've been wondering what to do with them...

The Nation: May, 17 2008

...The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented them with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, "that land can be handed over to the generals' business cronies" (shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the Asian tsunami). This isn't incompetence, or even madness. It's laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

Gleefully Than Shwe counts the votes in his bogus Constitutional Referendum after taking full advantage of the enormous loss of life. Granted the dead would have voted against this fetid piece of paper anyway. But what ticks me off is the fact it took a cyclone to get the world's attention in the first place. As usual it required dead bloating bodies in numbers hard to ignore before the mainstream media addressed the brutality [of] this military junta. Where is China and their wealth of resources in this time of crisis? Oh, I guess they made nice by climbing a mountain to promote their Blood Olympics.

Martin Lukacs | Rabble

In this small, impoverished northern village, people eke out a miserable existence. One of the world's most powerful countries occupies their land, plunders their resources, interferes with their governance and seems intent on assimilating them into wider society.

With its Olympic Games at hand, the country would rather the international community dwell on its national achievements than cast scrutiny on these abuses.

By WILLIAM BLUM - March 29 / 30, 2008

It's nice to see the West's conscience stirred up. They're real good about such things, when the target is not one of their own, particularly against a communist country. In 1980, 62 nations -- including the United States, Canada, West Germany, Japan, and Israel -- boycotted the Olympics in Moscow because the previous year the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Four years later, the Olympics were held in Los Angeles. Not a single member of "The Free World" boycotted it, even though the previous year the United States had invaded Grenada...

While the world ponders how to convince China, the real power behind the Corrupt Military Junta of Burma, to stop the bloodshed, the environment has been ignored. Deforestation has destroyed the soil with unchecked erosion. Putrid water littered with garbage and industrial waste line many waterways. And the total break down of medical services as well as other environmental and health issues has made this nation ripe for disease and pestilence on a grand scale.

As the world media reacts to China’s horrific actions taken against the Monks, I have to wonder why the media has not taken such a stance against the Military Junta of Burma. Clearly the people of Burma have been under siege for about 50 years as Than Shwe and his merry band of thugs killed their way into the hearts of millions.

By URI AVNERY - Apri1 7, 2008

The world media are shedding tears for the Tibetan people, whose land is taken from them by Chinese settlers. Who cares about the Palestinians, whose land is taken from them by our [Israeli] settlers?...[T]he Israeli spokespersons compare themselves - strange as it sounds - to the poor Tibetans, not to the evil Chinese. Many think this quite logical.