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