Nike Makes Uyghur Targeting a Team Sport
For the hundreds of Uyghur girls walking through the factory’s gates, it may not be a Xinjiang camp — but it’s a prison just the same.
For the hundreds of Uyghur girls walking through the factory’s gates, it may not be a Xinjiang camp — but it’s a prison just the same. The barbed wire, the cameras, the heavy police presence, they’re all a sickening reminder that the nightmare they’ve been living isn’t over. It’s just changed. Now, hunched over tables, stitching Nike’s logo on endless pairs of shoes, they wonder which is worse: “reeducation” lessons or forced labor.
They come in groups of 50, usually by train from the network of camps in the west. Chinese officials tell them they’ve “graduated” from their detention and been given jobs. But what they aren’t given, the Washington Post warns, is a choice. Shipped to factories around the country, they’re sentenced to work as slaves for some of America’s most recognizable brands. “Everyone knows they didn’t come here of their own free will,” one of the vendors tells the Post’s Anna Fifield in Laixi. “They were brought here. The Uyghurs had to come because they didn’t have an option. The government sent them here.”
Conscious of the military-style guards, Anna raised a camera to her face and snapped a shot of the factory’s high walls with razor-sharp fencing. “There is a special police station equipped with facial-recognition cameras and other high-tech surveillance,” she explains, “that workers must pass through when they enter and exit the facility.” The locals she talked to believe that it’s run by the tightest of security standards. And why not? The secret they’re keeping — that persecuted religious minorities are being “bought and sold” by local governments to work for Nike, Apple, and others — would implicate American companies in one of the worst human rights atrocities in the world.
As she interviews local townspeople, a horrifying picture of what looks like a modern slave trade starts to emerge. And a lucrative one at that. The Chinese, Fifield discovers, get “a sum of money for each Uyghur head.” “Officials and private brokers receive money for every Uyghur person they manage to transfer,” Vicky Lu, one of the leading experts on the story, confirms. “The recipient companies receive a cash inducement for every Uyghur they take.” Worse, Lu's report warns, “At these factories, they continue to undergo… [forced] indoctrination programs."
Thousands of miles away in America, companies like Nike are scrambling to explain away their involvement in China’s forced labor program. Spokeswoman Sandra Carreon-John tried to wash the brand’s hands of any wrongdoing by insisting that suppliers are "strictly prohibited from using any type of prison, forced, bonded, or indentured labor. But the reality is, Nike’s known about the situation since at least last year, when the Wall Street Journal started sounding the alarm that U.S. businesses were being implicated in the Uyghur crackdown.
While companies like Abercrombie raced to cut ties with the suppliers in question, Nike, Gap, Apple, Samsung, and others stood pat, hoping the story would die down. Now that it hasn’t, Nike’s Carreon-John is crossing her fingers people will believe the lie that the company "respect[s] human rights in our extended value chain, and we always strive to conduct business ethically and responsibly. We are committed to upholding international labor standards globally.”
Of course, the rub for American customers is that Nike has spent the last several years parading around the U.S. as some sort of social justice warrior. We were supposed to believe that they cared about injustice and inequality. And yet all this time, the retail giant that was crusading against police brutality and oppression was quietly fueling it on an international scale. While they droned on about supporting athletes’ “right to freedom of expression,” they were busy crushing that same freedom abroad — and trading in human capital while they were at it. All to make a buck.
Here at home, Nike almost seems to be taking a page from the playbook of their foreign partners, the Chinese Communist Party. The company launched an all-out war against religious liberty in places like Tennessee, where the brand argued that letting adoption groups live by their beliefs was somehow bad for business. If it were up to the shoe giant, they’d kick men and women of faith right out of the public square. When it comes right down to it, Nike has a lot more in common with China’s dictatorial regime than anyone cared to admit. Let that serve as a warning, Vice President Mike Pence has said. “A progressive corporate culture that ignores the abuse of human rights is not progressive, it is repressive.” And a progressive corporate culture that not only ignores it — but engages in it — is far, far worse.
Originally published here.
Media Injects Faith Debate into Coronavirus
The Left seems to love creating hysteria and mocking Bible-believing Christians — so they couldn’t have asked for a better gift than the coronavirus. Not only does it give the media a chance to fuel the fear and fill headlines, but it’s also given them a chance to take another whack at Vice President Mike Pence. Not because he’s done anything wrong, of course. But because of what he believes.
When a picture circulated of the vice president praying with his coronavirus emergency team, extremists saw the opening and pounced. After a week of bashing Pence for not having the experience to lead the response, liberals went ballistic at the idea that the man in charge of America’s task force would “waste time” praying. “We are so screwed,” Thomas Chatterton Williams posted. Others were upset that he’d dare to bow his head with other agency heads. But one of the worst responses had already come from CNN’s Don Lemon, before the picture, when he argued, “Is that the person you want in charge of the coronavirus outbreak? Someone who needs to pray on something instead of looking at science? …I don’t have a problem with praying. I have a problem with someone who is allowing people to die because he doesn’t want to look at science and to save lives.”
First of all, who said the Vice President isn’t looking at the science? Just because the vice president is a Christian doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the research. On the contrary. The people who say faith is incompatible with science or health care either don’t have a grasp of history or are intentionally ignoring it to fit their narrative. Throughout the human experience, Christians have been behind the discovery of some of the world’s most important vaccines and treatments. Not only that, but the entire hospital network in this country — and others — is dominated by the Catholic church and other religious affiliates. To suggest that religion and science are mutually exclusive is not only ignorant — but insulting.
“The entire country,” Mike Huckabee argues, “should have found it reassuring when the president appointed Vice President Mike Pence to coordinate the Trump administration’s coronavirus response efforts. [He] has direct experience with this type of work, having overseen Indiana’s public health system as governor in 2014 when the first U.S. case of the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) virus [a deadlier version of the coronavirus] emerged in that state.”
The Left is ridiculing him to get a political advantage, President Trump argued, “but this shouldn’t be a political thing.” He’s right. Nor, Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) pointed out on “Washington Watch” with guest host Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) should any of us be panicking to begin with. A medical doctor himself, Murphy has watched the coverage spiral out of control, when, he explains, “The lethality rate here in the United States are actually outside of China has been less than one percent. So it is not nearly as lethal as the other viruses that have been encountered.” People need to worry more about getting the flu, Dr. Murphy insisted. “The regular old flu. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious and smart. But it does mean we shouldn’t overreact.
"We’re going to have to change our habits a little bit. But there is no reason whatsoever for panic. You know, a lot of people have put a big rush now on getting face masks. Those are totally not necessary. The face masks do… nothing to prevent somebody from getting the virus. What they do is if somebody has the virus, it decreases the amount of secretions that they actually push out. S o, again, it really goes back to basic techniques of just making sure you’re washing your hands and… [decreasing] the amount of human contact, handshaking, those kind of things in the next few months. And hopefully, this will not nearly be the calamity that some are screaming that it’s gonna be.”
As for Don Lemon’s comments that Mike Pence isn’t qualified to deal with this because he has faith, that’s “flat-out absurd.”
“You know, people have said, ‘What does he know about science? What does he know about infectious disease?’ He doesn’t have to know anything about them. A leader is someone who gathers around them smart individuals of different areas of expertise and helps coordinate a response… And that’s what he is doing… He will have doctors in the room. He’ll have epidemiologists. He’ll have hospital administrators. He’ll have military in the room, all putting their heads together and their areas of expertise together to continue to mount a response to this problem. So that that’s irresponsible reporting. And when it comes to prayer,” Rep. Hice went on, “for crying out loud, you know what? I want people praying for our country and for protection on this. And the more the better as it comes to addressing what could be a pandemic type scenario in our country.”
Originally published here.
Pro-lifers Smoke out Dems during Vaping Vote
Give the House conservatives credit. When it comes to protecting innocent life, there’s no quit in this bunch. Despite hostile leaders at every turn, they’ve found creative ways to keep raising the issue of infanticide. For months, they’ve used every tool at their disposal, even managing — this past Friday — to turn a bill about vaping into a debate about born-alive protections.
More than 80 times they’ve asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to let them have a vote on abortion survivors. And more than 80 times the Democrats have said no — sometimes even cutting off the members’ mics just so they can’t ask. But late last week, they didn’t wait to be turned down. Two days after the Senate held its own vote on medical care for abortion survivors, the House’s pro-lifers decided it was time to make a statement of their own.
Instead of making a unanimous consent request, like they’ve been doing since January of last year, they decided to use one of the minority’s only other weapons: the motion to recommit. Essentially, it gives the Republicans a chance to recommend changes to the language of the bill they’re considering — which, in this case, was a proposal to ban flavored e-cigarettes. Following Greg Walden’s (R-Ore.) lead, the GOP decided to seize the opportunity to force the Left’s hand on another dangerous trend: infanticide.
“We all care deeply about the health of our children," Walden said of the tobacco regulations, adding that "the younger the child, the more vulnerable and defenseless they are.” “That’s why we are offering a final amendment to the bill that literally would save the lives of the youngest children, the babies,” he explained. “I hope that we can end the ghastly practice of letting die, children when they are born alive after an abortion.”
A lot of motions to recommit fail, like this one did. But it does make a powerful statement from Republicans — and three Democrats, Reps. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), Ben McAdams (D-Utah), and Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) — who feel very strongly that House liberals have sidestepped this question long enough. At least now, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) points out, the American people know where everyone stands. “Democrats AGAIN blocked my bill requiring lifesaving medical care for babies who are born-alive,” she tweeted. “It breaks my heart to find that we must defend lifesaving care for newborn babies. I will not stop until we get a vote on this critically important bill.”
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
