There’s something unnerving about watching a great big grown-up American company kowtow to the Chinese Communists. But that’s exactly what Marriott Corporation is doing.
The World Uyghur Conference wanted their event to be held at the Marriott Hotel in Prague. The Uyghurs have suffered horrific systematic abuse at the hands of Chinese Communist authorities, including torture, slavery, and human trafficking. More than a million Uyghurs are held in concentration camps, most of them in Xinjiang province.
But the Marriott declined the opportunity to host the group. Would you like to see how a multinational corporation grovels at the feet of Chinese Communists?
“Thank you very much for your visit today,” an email from a Prague Marriott obtained by Axios told a Uighur event organizer who had reached out for quotes for housing at a convention in town. “Unfortunately, I have to inform you that we are not able to offer the premises. We consulted the whole matter with our corporate management. For reasons of political neutrality, we cannot offer events of this type with a political theme. Thank you once again for your time and understanding.”
“Political neutrality”? More like moral blindness. But this is what the Chinese Communist government depends upon. They play to the fear of corporations in the West that they will be frozen out of the billion customers in China who have plenty of money to spend.
It’s truly nauseating.
A Marriott spokesperson told Axios that the hotel giant would be reaching out to apologize to the group saying that the Prague location’s response was “not consistent with our policies.”
In a statement to Fox Business, Marriott spokesperson Melissa Froehlich Flood confirmed that the company intends to reach out to apologize to the event organizers.
“Marriott International is committed to giving a warm welcome to all,” the statement said adding, “We are working with the hotel team to provide additional training and education on our longstanding practices of inclusion.”
They will no doubt apologize profusely. But will they change their minds?
China is carrying out genocide against the Uyghurs, according to UK investigators.
“On the basis of the evidence we have seen, this Opinion concludes that there is a very credible case that acts carried out by the Chinese government against the Uighur people in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region amount to crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide,” it says, according to the BBC. “Mr Xi controls the overall direction of state policy and has made a range of speeches exhorting the punitive treatment of the Uighurs.”
Now, of course, the world will descend on China for fun and frolic during the Olympic games. There are no statements to be made. Even by the nation that’s supposed to be the primary defender of human rights, the best Joe Biden can muster is a “diplomatic boycott.” Aside from depriving rich, fat international bureaucrats the pleasure of the flesh available in China during the winter, what good does it do?
American songwriter Tom Paxton penned a song in the 1960s that described the universal response when a ghastly crime against humanity unfolds, “We didn’t know.”
We didn’t know said the Burgomeister,
About the camps on the edge of town.
It was Hitler and his crew,
That tore the German nation down.
We saw the cattle cars it’s true,
And maybe they carried a Jew or two.
They woke us up as they rattled through,
But what did you expect me to do?
There is no excuse for not knowing. The Marriott and other “woke” American corporations are acting in a morally reprehensible way that should never be forgotten.
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