It's lovely seeing the joy on the winners' faces, regardless of their nationality.

Team GB deserves lots of praise - not just the winners but the losers, too (the gap between them is often just a few hundredths of a second).

Nevertheless I say again that China shouldn't have been allowed to host these games.

Sure, the opening ceremony was breathtaking but no one should be surprised. Dictatorships can spend as much money as they like on self-promotion, confident that they will never be called upon to account for their actions.

There's also something sickening about totalitarian regimes like China putting a disproportionate effort into sport.

The Nazis at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the East European Communist regimes during the Cold War were all determined that their athletes should win at any cost to show the rest of the world how wonderful life was within their utopian borders.

So it was refreshing to hear Radio 4's Today programme last weekend reporting that three sites had been set aside in Beijing for public protest. Guess what? They were not used once throughout the Games.

I suppose that means everyone in China must be happy. Yet two fearless little old ladies told the BBC they were upset that their homes had been demolished to make way for Olympic buildings.

When they had first demanded compensation from the authorities, they were arrested and only released on the understanding that if they complained again they would be sent to a labour camp for 12 months' "re-education".

They say that China is modernising and opening up to the world, so we should not judge them by Western standards of liberalism and human rights. I say: "Why not?"

Western liberalism is grounded on the teachings of Christianity which has its moral roots firmly in Judaism. The notion that every individual is created by God has a place in this world and ultimately is not subservient to the government is very Jewish.

The idea that governments are subject to the law of the land as well as a higher moral authority accords entirely with Jewish thought and teaching.

For Jews and most non-Jews in the West, societies that embrace these values are happier, healthier and, yes, morally superior to totalitarian regimes where the government considers it has the absolute right to do whatever it likes to its people.

I was pleased to see "our boys and girls" do well in Beijing, but regret that our obsession with sport blinds so many to the fact that these past Olympics were hijacked by a government that spits at Western liberal values

Please don't tell me that sport brings people of different nations together. For the fortnight of the Olympics, perhaps. But what is the point if, when it's all over, Chinese people are still too frightened to protest that the government has destroyed their homes without offering compensation.

I'm dreading the London Olympics.

What idiot had the bright idea of bringing such a major jamboree to a country whose health, education and social services are already over-stretched?

Who authorised the government to spend £9 billion of our money (yes, our money, not theirs) for two weeks of "hop, skip and jumping" in four years' time? (When they pitched for the project the original budget was three billion).

Were you ever consulted? I must have been out in the kitchen making a cup of tea when the subject came up.

Jews shouldn't be ashamed about our relative lack of prowess at sport. Better to remember the hugely disproportionate number of Nobel prizes awarded over the years to Jews for their achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, economics and literature -fields of endeavour that tangibly benefit the whole of mankind.

The Chinese can keep their gold medals - all 51 of them.

Hey, parents, let's give kids a bit of hush

WHILE on the subject of sport, I sympathise with the correspondent to this newspaper who said it was a disgrace that only seven parents/grandparents managed to attend a Manchester King David High School sports day.

"Where were all the rest?" she asks.

I cannot help her, I'm afraid. True, in the scheme of things, sport doesn't matter, but that is no excuse for not supporting your children at a school sports event.

If it is any consolation, there is a silver lining. In my experience (and others have made the same point) Jewish parents, when assembled together, find it hard to keep quiet even where the purpose of their assembly is to watch a play or musical recital in which their children are taking part.

On several occasions, Melissa and I have felt compelled to shush other Jewish audience members who insist on talking incessantly while our (and their) "little darlings" are performing on stage. Are we being rude to shush? I don't think so. The parents suffering from verbal diarrhoea are the rude ones, though the stares they give us and the mutterings afterwards would suggest otherwise.

Last month we were lucky to get tickets to see David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in Hamlet at Stratford. It may surprise some readers to learn that the "to be or not to be" soliloquy was delivered in complete silence. There was no background chit-chat about someone's holiday in Eilat or which shop on Manchester's fashionable King Street to grab a bargain.

So I think the handful of parents who were present at the otherwise ill-attended sports day were lucky in that they were at least able to enjoy their children's efforts in relative peace.

There's usually something in the Torah to support my views, and today is no exception. From Kohellet (Ecclesiastes):

To everything there is a season

A time to be born and a time to die

A time to weep and a time to laugh

A time to chatter and a time to shut up.

E-MAIL: sdorfman@jewishtelegraph.com