Editor
Star Times
New Zealand
The article written by Tim Hume "The gospel truth: Falun Gong" is
troubling. I have written a report with David Kilgour which concludes that
Falun Gong practitioners in China have been killed in the tens of
thousands so that their organs could be sold to transplant tourists. Hume's
article casts doubt on our report in a number of gratuitous ways.
However, my primary concern with the article lies elsewhere, its unfair
generalizations about Falun Gong practitioners. Through the travels I
have undertaken around the world, including New Zealand, to publicize
our report,
I have met many Falun Gong practitioners. Though I myself
have never practised Falun Gong, the extensive contact I have had with
the Falun Gong community in over forty countries has taught me at least
this.
Falun Gong is not an organization. It has no leadership. It has no
funding. It has no membership. It is rather just a set of exercises
with a spiritual dimension. The people who engage in Falun Gong exercises
have as much or as little cohesion, planning, coordination and
organization as people who engage in running or swimming or any other form of
exercise.
Because Falun Gong has a spiritual dimension, one can think of it as a
religion. But it is a religion without congregations or priests or
preachers or churches. The writings of Li Hongzhi which inspired Falun
Gong are all publicly available through the internet.
Falun Gong practitioners understandably get worked up when
their
co-practitioners in China are persecuted for something as innocent and
beneficial as exercising. Individual practitioners throughout the world
volunteer time, effort and money in an attempt to end the persecution. But
this indignation, even when fervent, does not bespeak a plan or a
policy or a platform. It is, or at least should be, a normal human
reaction to the torture and killing of innocents.
Hume's article, which is quite long, throughout treats the Falun Gong
as a group or an entity and attributes to this entity the behaviour and
words of individual Falun Gong practitioners. It is as if one
attributed the words and behaviour of some fervently patriotic New Zealanders
to all New Zealanders, or of some enthusiastic swimmers to all
swimmers. The article, because of its failure to grasp the nature of Falun
Gong, is fundamentally misconceived.
Sincerely yours,
David
Matas
