OPINION:
At least seven Americans have jumped Team USA to go play for China in the Olympics.
They are betraying the United States, pure and simple.
No man can serve two masters. Just as you can’t serve God and mammon — you can’t serve freedom and tyranny.
One player — the Californian-born Eileen Gu, competing for China under the name Gu Ailing — has a heritage that hails in part from China. As for others?
Nada.
They don’t even have that excuse.
Jeremy Smith, a former NHL goalie, was asked to join the China hockey team for the Olympics and said yes.
“Of course I said yes,” Smith said, as Breitbart noted. “I think it’s an honor to play in the Olympics. But to dream of playing for the host city in the Olympics, I didn’t ever think there would be a chance for me in my lifetime.”
Then there’s Jake Chelios, son of pro hockey player Chris Chelios, who moved to Beijing a few years ago to play for the Kunlun Red Star team — and who now apparently feels more in line with communist China than constitutional America.
“Since we’ve been over here for three years, whatever it is, you do start to feel a closeness to China,” he said, The Associated Press reported. “We’ve been eating Chinese food, we’ve been living the Chinese culture, so there’s a certain closeness you start to feel with China, and you start to feel like you’re actually going to represent them and you want to win for them.”
How nice for Chelios.
As WXYZ Channel 7 out of Detroit wrote: “China’s Olympic hockey hopes rest on North American talent.”
As NBC Sports more bluntly wrote: “China’s Olympic hockey hopes rest on North American talent.”
China lists 25 players on its men’s hockey roster. Eighteen of them were born or raised in North America — the USA and Canada — and one hails from Russia. And it’s not as if Olympic rules are being broken. The International Ice Hockey Federation allows players to represent the country they choose, so long as they’ve lived in and played for the country they choose for the two previous years.
But at a time when China, under the watch of a weak White House leader, is steadily taking over the world stage as the next leader — and is steadily growing influence on America’s own soil — the look of U.S. citizens abandoning their U.S. roots to play for a communist team is terrible.
It wouldn’t be so bad if China weren’t so conflicting with all that America represents.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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