=== Waco / Branch Davidians
1. Ex-prosecutor takes deal in Davidian case
2. Johnston to plead guilty in exchange for probation

=== Aum Shinrikyo
3. Making Chemical Weapons Is No Easy Task

=== Falun Gong
4. China Increases Attack On Sect After Suicide Attempts
5. China Scores a Propaganda Coup Against Falun Gong
6. Pressure Mounts on Sect in Hong Kong
7. Call for Hong Kong to curb Falun Gong
8. Rights Group To Discuss Falun Gong With UN Officials
9. China Blasts Foreign 'Interference'
10. Chinese Professor's Attack on a Sect Led to a Face-Off
11. One-Way Trip to the End in Beijing
12. Who's afraid of Falun Gong?

=== Falun Gong - China's Government-Controlled Media
13. Reports from China's government-controlled media

> Part 2
=== Scientology
14. Scientology: ties to Bush team?
15. The Bogey of a Cult

=== Buddhism
16. China warning over Karmapa Lama
17. India Grants Refugee Status to Monk

=== Islam
18. Christian 'decline' in north Nigeria
19. Bangladesh Muslim groups protest against anti-fatwa ruling
20. Afghanistan and the gods of little things

=== Jehovah's Witnesses
21. Jehovah's Witnesses' policy on child molesters attacked
22. Molestation victim, parents think church elders let them down
23. Policies on reporting abuse allegations vary among religious denominations

> Part 3
=== Hate Groups
24. Bertollini plans suit over arrest
25. Situation warrants independent probe (Bertollini)
26. It's ironic, but Aryans have their rights
27. White supremacist David Duke takes crusade to Russia
28. Dog's Owner Says Victim Failed to Save Self
29. Controversial anti-gay preacher leads protest in Traverse City

=== Rebirthing
30. Seeking Child's Love, a Child's Life is Lost
31. `Candace's Law' to be introduced this week

=== Other News
32. Church cult 'taxed members at £2,000 a month' (Peniel Pentecostal Church)
33. Psychics link Indonesia's political rumblings to volcanoes
34. Astrology fuels panic in quake city
35. Police arrest Indian astrologer who predicted new quake
36. The Presidential Corruption Index (Clinton)
37. Behind 4 Pardons, a Sect Eager for Political Friends

> Part 4
=== Noted
38. A Desire to Duplicate (Raelians)
39. Go forth ... by 2000? (AD2000 & Beyond)
40. Praise the Lord and gas up the Harley

=== Films
41. 'Left Behind' leaves the audience behind as well
42. Complaints Against Harry Potter Series Triple

=== The theme park critics around the corner
43. Christian theme park opens amid controversy


=== Waco / Branch Davidians

1. Ex-prosecutor takes deal in Davidian case
Associated Press, Feb. 6, 2001
http://www.dallasnews.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
WACO - Former U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston will plead guilty Tuesday as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors who accused him of obstructing the investigation into the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, a newspaper reported.

Mr. Johnston plans to plead guilty to misprision of felony, which means someone knows of a crime committed by someone else but doesn't report it. In exchange, prosecutors with special counsel John Danforth's office will recommend a probated sentence, Mr. Johnston told the Waco Tribune-Herald in a report for Tuesday editions.

''I think it is significant that they are agreeing to dismiss the entire indictment against me, and I am agreeing that I should have informed them that I didn't turn over my notes, which I have already publicly stated,'' Mr. Johnston said.
(...)

Mr. Johnston has said that Mr. Danforth improperly singled him out for prosecution.

''One reason I am agreeing to plead to this is that I am out of money, and I have to try to salvage some way to make a living because I am so far in debt from all of this,'' Mr. Johnston said. ''This offense gave me that chance. Were I convicted on any one count in the indictment, the State Bar of Texas would have to look at suspension or disbarment. That does not apply to this offense, but I cannot speak for the State Bar as to what they might do.''

If U.S. District Judge Charles Shaw accepts the plea agreement, Mr. Johnston said, he could be on probation for up to three years.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


2. Johnston to plead guilty in exchange for probation
Waco Tribune-Herald, Feb. 5, 2001
http://www.accesswaco.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Former federal prosecutor Bill Johnston, who claims that Special Counsel John Danforth improperly singled him out for prosecution, will plead guilty to a federal felony today in St. Louis, Johnston said.
(...)

A conviction for misprision of felony does not carry a mandatory or ''compulsory'' disciplinary action from the bar, a State Bar of Texas spokeswoman said.

However, any felony conviction leaves an attorney open to disciplinary action.

The offense carries up to three years in prison. If U.S. District Judge Charles Shaw accepts the plea agreement, he can place Johnston on probation for up to three years, Johnston said.

Johnston, a former U.S. attorney from Waco who helped prosecute 11 Branch Davidians, was the only person indicted in Danforth's 14-month, $17 million investigation into government actions on the final day of the 1993 siege at Mount Carmel.

Johnston resigned from the office last year and has been in private practice in Waco.
(...)

Danforth, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, based his Branch Davidian investigation in St. Louis. A special grand jury there indicted Johnston in November on two counts of obstructing Danforth's investigation and on three counts of lying to Danforth's investigators and to the grand jury.

Before the plea bargain was reached, Johnston had asked that the charges against him be dismissed because he alleged that Danforth was holding him to a higher standard of conduct than others who were caught lying during Danforth's investigation.

Johnston has acknowledged that he withheld his handwritten notes that indicated he had discussed the use of pyrotechnic tear-gas devices before the Branch Davidian criminal trial in 1994. He has admitted that he ''temporarily misled'' the grand jury about his knowledge of the tear-gas canisters and whether he had turned over all his notes and other materials relating to the Branch Davidian case.

Before that, Johnston also had been ordered by a federal judge in Waco and a congressional subpoena to turn over all of his materials in the case.

Johnston has said that he withheld the notes because he didn't trust his colleagues in the Justice Department, whom he accused of continuing to mislead Attorney General Janet Reno about the use of the tear-gas canisters.

Friends and supporters of Johnston have raised about $40,000 for his legal defense and have asked President George W. Bush to pardon Johnston.

''It just makes me sick at heart,'' said Johnston supporter Carey Hobbs, a Waco businessman. ''I still think that it is a gross miscarriage of justice that they have decided that he is the one that they are going to prosecute out of all the people that made all the mistakes. It just doesn't make sense to me that they are going after him.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Aum Shinrikyo

3. Making Chemical Weapons Is No Easy Task
Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2001 (Column: Vernon Loeb)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
With U.S. intelligence fixated on Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden and the chilling possibility that he has been testing chemical weapons on animals, policymakers in the Bush administration and members of Congress would do well to consider the true difficulties involved in making chemical weapons.

The theoretical possibility of mass casualties from a chemical or biological attack makes figuring out how to respond - and how much to spend - exceedingly difficult.
(...)

But Amy E. Smithson, a researcher on chemical and biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, makes a persuasive argument in a recent study that many terrorist ''experts'' have consistently hyped the threat of chemical or biological terrorist attacks.
(...)

When all is said and done, Smithson said, a huge gulf remains between the ''theoretical possibility'' of mass casualties resulting from a chemical or biological attack and the ''operational reality'' of terrorist organizations.
Terrorists, she writes in ''Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response,'' ''are likely to find it quite difficult to obtain and use biological and chemical weapons effectively.''

A Case in Point: Aum Shinrikyo
To make her case, Smithson dissects the capabilities of Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic Japanese cult that killed a dozen commuters on the subway in Tokyo with a sarin gas attack in 1995.

''Aum Shinrikyo, it is fair to say, changed the way the world thinks about terrorism,'' Smithson writes.

Unfortunately, most of the doomsday lessons drawn from the group's sarin attack, Smithson contends, have been the wrong ones, emphasizing ''theoretical possibility'' over ''operational reality.''

And the ''operational reality'' of Aum Shinrikyo, Smithson writes, is an object lesson is just how difficult it was for this well-funded, highly motivated and well-educated terrorist organization to pull off either a biological or a chemical attack.

''In short, Aum has often been portrayed as a beacon for terrorists to follow, but it could be just the opposite,'' Smithson writes. ''If the past is any predictor of the future, weapons of choice for terrorists will remain truck bombs and other conventional tools that are markedly less technically demanding, resource-intensive, and dangerous for the perpetrators.''

A Terrorist Nightmare
Whatever bin Laden's chemical capabilities may be at remote camps in the mountains of Afghanistan, Aum Shinrikyo's were most likely far greater.

The cult operated in and around modern Tokyo, spent an estimated $30 million on its chemical weapons program, targeted the recruitment of graduate students and other well-trained scientists, and still managed to kill fewer people on the Tokyo subway with sarin than the terrorists who bombed the USS Cole in October did with conventional explosives.

''By almost any standard, Aum was a terrorist nightmare - a cult flush with money and technical skills led by a con-man guru with an apocalyptic vision, an obsession with chemical and biological weaponry, and no qualms about killing,'' Smithson writes.

But by almost any standard, Aum Shinrikyo's chemical weapons program, and an earlier attempt to develop biological agents, failed to produce anything close to the killing power the group desired.
(...)

But in the final analysis, she notes, 85 percent of the 5,510 people treated at Tokyo hospitals and clinics were simply worried, not harmed. Twelve ultimately died from sarin exposure, about 40 others were seriously injured, and slightly less than 1,000 were ''moderately ill.''

Aum Shinrikyo and Bioware: Serial Flops
Aum Shinrikyo's attempts to produce biological weapons, meanwhile, were far more inept. The cult tried and failed to isolate deadly strains of botulinum toxin and anthrax. And isolating lethal strains is only the first hurdle that must be cleared in executing a biological attack.
(...)

''Thus, despite the cult's investment of considerable money and time and the participation of graduate-level scientists in the effort, Aum's efforts to isolate, produce, and spread biological agents were, from start to finish, a serial of flops,'' Smithson concludes.

And most other chem-bio terrorists have been no more successful.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Falun Gong

4. China Increases Attack On Sect After Suicide Attempts
AP, Feb. 5, 2001
http://asia.biz.yahoo.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
BEIJING (AP)--China's government is seizing on the dramatic suicide attempt by purported members of the Falun Gong sect to try to sway a public that has stood on the sidelines during the 18-month-long crackdown on the banned group.

State media have intensified attacks on Falun Gong. Scholars are denouncing it in a symposium-like forum touring Beijing. Schools have been ordered to hold classes criticizing it once the Lunar New Year vacation ends this month.

''Blood Debts Old and New Will be Thoroughly Reckoned,'' the People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's newspaper, blared in a typical headline. China Central Television has shown people identified as ordinary citizens expressing hatred and revulsion for the sect and its U.S.-based founder, Li Hongzhi.

Touching off the campaign was the attempt by seven people to burn themselves on Tiananmen Square on Jan. 23, eve of the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday.
(...)

China claims the immolators were obsessed Falun Gong members, their act the most outrageous in a series of outrages instigated by founder Li. Spokesmen for Li in New York deny the seven followed Falun Gong and suggest the government orchestrated the act. The only known foreign witnesses, a camera crew from Cable News Network, said the protesters struck meditation poses typical of Falun Gong.
Li's denials are absent from the one-sided state media accounts. Seizing on shock over the television footage, the government's propaganda machine has featured scathing testimonials from former Falun Gong practitioners and group condemnation sessions.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


5. China Scores a Propaganda Coup Against Falun Gong
New York Times, Feb. 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) When the Chinese government tried to make propaganda from attempted self-immolations by apparent Falun Gong believers, which left one person dead and four severely burned, its plan was as wooden and anachronistic as ever: First, suppress the news. Then, days later, orchestrate a crescendo of extreme television, radio and newspaper reports and editorials. Finally, marshall relatives of the duped victims to utter condemnations of the evil Master Li, then ask major groups - from leaders of Catholic, Buddhist and Muslim churches to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce - to issue shrill denunciations.

This time, though, the message seemed to resonate. While it is always perilous to assess public opinion in a country where everyone wears political antennae, there is a sense here that, after a year and a half of flailing, the government finally scored a propaganda coup last week against the outlawed spiritual group.

If so, it was not the stale delivery but the raw material: a deluded mother leading her 12-year-old daughter to self-immolation, graphic footage of the charred girl writhing on the ground, interviews with former practitioners who saw the light and with unrepentant believers who to many Chinese, in light of events, came across as loony.

What the government did not report to its people was the increasingly fierce methods it has used to fight an organization that has proved far more tenacious than, say, the China Democracy Party - not only because of Falun Gong's vastly larger membership but also the inexplicable willingness of so many followers to ruin their lives.

The controlled media have recently started acknowledging that die-hard believers demonstrate illegally on Tiananmen Square, and have announced that small numbers of key organizers have been imprisoned. But they have never mentioned what human rights monitors believe are the widespread beatings and torture of detained practitioners by frustrated policemen, resulting in perhaps a hundred confirmed deaths. They have not mentioned the thousands who appear to have been shipped to labor camps without trial, or simply to have been expelled from jobs and homes.
Nor have editorials raised basic questions about the appropriateness or efficacy of the government's heavy-handed eradication campaign, questions that many Chinese have asked in private.
(...)

China's leaders may truly believe they are waging this campaign out of idealism. They surely feel they are saving people from exploitation and ruin, and most important, they think they are preserving the social stability - meaning preservation of Communist Party rule - that permitted the great economic and social progress of the post-Mao era. They seem unable to imagine an approach toward possible cults and fringe groups like that in the West: that is, to arrest people who commit demonstrably harmful acts, not those who peacefully express oddball views.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


6. Pressure Mounts on Sect in Hong Kong
International Herald Tribune, Feb. 5, 2001
http://www.iht.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) Hong Kong's top security official said last week that the police would more closely monitor Falun Gong's activities in this former British colony. The secretary for security, Regina Ip, said the movement had taken an increasingly high profile and was ''targeting the central government for attack.''

Mrs. Ip's statement followed a warning from Beijing that it would not tolerate Falun Gong's turning Hong Kong into a base for anti-Chinese activities.

A mainland official, quoted by Xinhua, the Chinese government's official press agency, said, ''Hong Kong Falun Gong has taken off its mask.''

An influential member of the National People's Congress and several pro Beijing newspapers have demanded that the Hong Kong authorities strip Falun Gong of its legal status. Falun Gong was outlawed in China in 1999, but it remains legal in Hong Kong, which has kept its own laws since reverting to Chinese rule in 1997. Though the movement claims only 400 local members, it holds an annual conference here, which draws thousands of practitioners.
(...)

With Falun Gong showing no signs of muting its voice, some opposition leaders say the government's treatment of the movement will be the stiffest test yet of Hong Kong's freedom and autonomy within China.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


7. Call for Hong Kong to curb Falun Gong
Financial Times, Feb. 4, 2001
http://news.ft.com/f
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A member of Hong Kong's de facto cabinet at the weekend called for the government urgently to consider enacting subversion laws to tackle the Falun Gong sect's activities in the territory.

Hong Kong's post-colonial constitution includes an article that requires laws prohibiting treason and sedition against China. However, the government has so far delayed putting in place such laws due to concerns that doing so would meet substantial opposition.

On Saturday, Nellie Fong, a member of Hong Kong's Executive Council, which advises Tung Chee-hwa, the city's chief executive, said that there had hitherto been ''no urgent social need'' to legislate such laws. ''This time, regarding the case of the Falun Gong, we shall have to actively consider enacting Article 23 [laws dealing with subversion and sedition],'' Ms Fong told local television.

Her remarks followed a harsh warning late last week by Regina Ip, Hong Kong's secretary for security, to local members of Falun Gong. She said the government would keep ''a close eye'' on members of the sect in the city.
(...)

Mrs Ip said that although local members of Falun Gong had not broken any laws, she had received complaints about their aggressive distribution of pamphlets and email campaigns.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


8. Rights Group To Discuss Falun Gong With UN Officials
AP, Feb. 4, 2001
http://asia.biz.yahoo.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
HONG KONG (AP)--A local human rights group said Sunday it will discuss the rights of the Falun Gong sect, which has been banned in mainland China, with visiting U.N. human rights officials this week.

Law Yuk-kai, director of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, said he will express concern about allegations by pro-Beijing activists that Falun Gong is using Hong Kong as a base to subvert the Chinese government in talks Tuesday with U.N. officials P. N. Bhagwati and Christine Chanet.

The five-day tour of Bhagwati and Chanet, organized by the Hong Kong government to examine civil and political rights here, will mark the first visit by members of the U.N. Human Rights Committee since the former British colony returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


9. China Blasts Foreign 'Interference'
AP, Feb. 5, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
HONG KONG -- Beijing lashed out Monday at foreign ''interference'' in Hong Kong, one week before a Dutch human rights official plans to meet with followers of the Falun Gong meditation sect. Hong Kong affairs ''are the internal matters of China,'' said a spokesperson for the local Chinese Foreign Ministry office in a statement without referring to the Netherlands by name.
(...)

The Dutch ambassador for human rights, Renee Jones-Bos, will meet with Falun Gong representatives during a visit beginning Sunday so the Netherlands can gain a better understanding of the group, the Dutch consulate said over the weekend.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


10. Chinese Professor's Attack on a Sect Led to a Face-Off
New York Times, Feb. 5, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
BEIJING, Feb. 4 - In the spring of 1999, Professor He Zuoxiu, an elderly theoretical physicist whose avocation is debunking pseudoscience, hoped to provoke some debate with a short article warning about the ''deceitful lies'' of certain ''qigong'' meditation sects. One called Falun Gong, he charged, led a student into mental illness.

At the time, his provocative views were not welcome in the mainstream press, and the article appeared in the April issue of ''Science and Technology for Youth,'' an obscure magazine published by a teacher-training university in Tianjin, 100 miles southeast of Beijing.
(...)

It was anger over the professor's article that led 10,000 or more Falun Gong believers to hold a vigil on April 25, 1999, outside the leadership compound in Beijing, demanding an official apology and legal recognition. And it was that unauthorized demonstration that led the frightened authorities to outlaw the spiritual group, which had attracted millions of Chinese with its promises of physical and spiritual salvation through meditative exercises.

Mr. He, now 74, is a Chinese original. As a physicist he aided China's development of nuclear weapons in the early 1960's. Today, he said in an interview at his small apartment in a compound of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he is still collaborating with scientists at M.I.T. in the search for ''dark matter'' in the universe.

Yet this advocate of scientific methods is also a devout Marxist who has published essays questioning whether today's pell-mell market reforms are steering China off the true path of Marx and socialism.

''As a scientist I make my judgments based on universal laws,'' he said in the interview. ''And Marxism is a science just like all the others.''

If his orthodox Marxism is not always welcomed by the leadership, his diatribes against ''evil cults'' garner more official respect these days, and he has no regrets about his cameo role in the bizarre national drama of Falun Gong.

He said that the latest news, of seven apparent followers trying to immolate themselves in Tiananmen Square, only meant that Li Hongzhi, the Falun Gong founder, was even more despicable than he had asserted before. ''This proves that Falun Gong is more evil than other cults,'' Mr. He said. ''With the Branch Davidians in the United States, at least the head of the cult burned himself together with the others. Here the head wanted to sacrifice his followers to achieve his own ulterior motives.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


11. One-Way Trip to the End in Beijing
International Herald Tribune, Feb. 5, 2001
http://www.iht.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
KAIFENG, China There is a neighborhood on the eastern side of this once-glorious city called Apple Orchard, but there are no apple trees here, only drab concrete buildings and clusters of unemployed men loitering on mud streets. It was here, in a fourth-floor apartment in Building Six, that Liu Chunling and her 12-year-old daughter, Liu Siying, lived.

The mother was a quiet woman who kept to herself, the daughter a lively schoolgirl who never failed to smile and say hello. Neighbors recalled that there was something both strange and sad about Liu Chunling, that she sometimes hit her child, that she drove her elderly mother away, that she worked in a nightclub and took money to keep men company.

But no one suspected that Mrs. Liu, 36, might have joined the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong. And hardly anyone noticed when she and her daughter disappeared.

And then there they were on television, their bodies engulfed in orange flames in Tiananmen Square. Liu Siying was shown lying on a stretcher, her face and lips charred black, whimpering, ''Mama, mama.'' Her mother, the newscast reported, was already dead.

What drove the Lius and three others from this city in central Henan Province, about 560 kilometers (350 miles) south of Beijing, to pour gasoline on their bodies and set themselves afire on Jan. 23, eve of the Chinese New Year?

An intense battle is underway to answer that question, with the five individuals cast in turn as victims of an evil cult, righteous protesters against a repressive government or desperately estranged people on the margins of a fast changing society.
(...)

Falun Gong leaders insist that the Lius and their companions could not have been members of their movement, which promotes a mix of Buddhism, Taoism and traditional Chinese breathing exercises. They have said Falun Gong clearly forbids both violence and suicide and have suggested the government may have staged the incident.

Other human rights activists say the five set themselves on fire to protest the government's crackdown on Falun Gong, which has resulted in thousands of arrests and as many as 105 deaths in police custody.

All but Liu Siying, 12, had protested Beijing's actions against Falun Gong in Tiananmen Square previously, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

There is a tradition of politically motivated suicide in China.
(...)

But there is hardly any precedent for public self-immolation. In Kaifeng, a city of 700,000 that was China's imperial capital and one of the world's most populous cities at the turn of the last millennium, most residents took a dim view of what the Lius and the others did.
(...)

But even in Kaifeng, there are signs that the government's propaganda campaigns have lost some of their effectiveness. Several residents expressed weariness with the barrage against Falun Gong.
(...)

The state media have said little about why the five who set themselves on fire might have joined Falun Gong. Beijing denied requests to interview Liu Siying and the three other survivors, who remain hospitalized with serious burns.

But Liu Chunling's Apple Orchard neighbors described her as a woman who led a troubled life.
(...)

None ever saw her practice Falun Gong.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


12. Who's afraid of Falun Gong?
Salon, Feb. 2, 2001
http://www.salon.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) So is Falun Gong a dangerous sect or a positive spiritual movement? And why is China so afraid of it?

Journalist Danny Schechter offers a spirited defense of the movement in his recent book ''Falun Gong's Challenge to China.'' He portrays it as a benign, loose-knit religious group that has offered a welcome haven for disaffected Chinese -- many of whom have suffered under the cutbacks in the health system that have been an inevitable side effect of China's economic reforms.

In a recent interview with Salon, Schechter explained the beliefs of Falun Gong's followers and traced the origins of the movement and the Beijing-ordered ban crackdown.

Your book offers a sympathetic portrait of the Falun Gong movement. How did you first become interested in it?

The publicist of my book ''The More You Watch, the Less You Know'' was a Falun Gong practitioner. I didn't know much about it. I just thought it was a New Age-y type group.
(...)

I had certain expectations going into it. Our company had earlier done a film on Rev. [Sun Myung] Moon, and I had been relying on media accounts about Li Hongzhi. The Chinese government was calling Falun Gong a ''cult'' and a ''sect.''
And the American press was adopting the same media frame and using the same term. Maybe ''cult'' and ''sect'' are great headline terms, but it sort of reinforced an impression of a kind of group of people who were basically being manipulated by a powerful and charismatic figure.

What struck me upon interviewing [Falun Gong founder] Li Hongzhi, was that this didn't seem to be true. A lot of what was being written about Falun Gong was wrong, and it was a much more nuanced story than it appeared to be. For example, the American media positioned it as being anti-government protest and an anti-Communist movement. In fact, many of the practitioners were members of the [Communist] party and supportive of the government.
(...)

It's obviously assumed that the major political dimensions of the crackdown have tainted Jiang Zemin's prestige and power against Falun Gong. The Falun Gong followers criticize him as the oppressor in this. But there's an even bigger dispute that may be behind this whole thing.

Qigong, the traditional Chinese exercise, was very popular with the Chinese. In the 1950s, Communist Party leaders practiced it. Then it was looked on with disfavor because as the party became more politically correct and the Cultural Revolution principles of Mao took hold. But it [qigong] thrived nevertheless.

The idea of the ''qi'' is that we have energy sources within ourselves. We know it in the U.S. mostly through karate and other martial arts. Like the martial arts, qi is also an exercise system that has different schools, and each has a different master. It's an exercise-based approach to healthy and good living that goes back 6,000 years.

What Li did was to build his version of this on the basis of bringing together a spiritual dimension to the exercise system. And that was essentially bringing into this meditation a mix of Buddhist and Taoist principles. There are three qi ideas in Falun Gong: compassion, truthfulness and forbearance. It's a self-improvement system, and the deeper you get into it, you can achieve a higher consciousness.

Starting in the late 1970s, there was a change in China between a government system and a more market-driven system.
(...)

At that time, the government reintroduced and sanctioned qigong. Since the government likes to control everything, it created an official qigong federation. Essentially, this federation was run like a state enterprise; it was a business. All these masters charged people to learn their practices. What happened was that Falun Gong began to get increasingly popular. There began to be jealousies between the other masters who wanted to know why all were going to [Falun Gong's] Li.

He's somewhat of a marketing genius, and he said he would make the practices free. You could download his books for free if you had Internet access, and you could practice Falun Gong for free. He'd also go to a park where people were practicing. With defunding of public health facilities at the time, the hospitals began to decline. At the time, people were growing older and retiring earlier, as early as their 40s, in order to create jobs for young people. All these older people began doing these exercises as a way to take responsibility for their own health. Falun Gong began to grow dramatically because it was free and people thought it had health benefits.

The reaction within the federation was outrage that Li had cut his prices -- other members saw this as unfair competition and they asked the government to take action. The consequence was that these other practitioners forced Li to raise his prices. So he quit the federation.

In other words, a business dispute is part of what fueled the original cleavages and the crackdown. These other groups started lobbying the government to do something.
(...)

The Chinese government is completely overreacting -- just as people often do when there's something they don't understand or want to understand. We know this from our own history -- like when the police in Chicago got more repressive and the anti-war movement grew. This type of approach doesn't work. And it reveals the weakness of Jiang's approach.

A lot of people in the Beijing government are speaking out in small ways about Falun Gong. The South China Morning Post has reported that there is a big debate about it. Many in the Chinese government think this approach is counterproductive. The Asian Wall Street Journal has carried interviews with unnamed high officials who were worried about the consequences [of the crackdown]. Look at the ''Tiananmen Papers:'' Ten years later, we're just getting to those aspects of the story. The media role in all of this and the role of the U.N. and U.S. government is shameful.
(...)

Most American media people see the Falun Gong as a manipulative cult, and they seem to want to expose the manipulative angle more than the human rights violations the group faces -- with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, which has done a great job.

All of this is happening at a time when our trade with China is becoming more important. And the media is probably looking the other way because there are a lot of people in corporations who would like this whole thing to go away.

There's been a lot of rhetoric but not much government action on Falun Gong.
The New York Times called my book a ''rose-colored'' view. But what I tried to do was explain the Falun Gong rather than condemn it; and that makes people uncomfortable. I'm not a practitioner, but I'm fascinated by it. Often it's the smallest things that cause big changes in society. Ideas have powerful consequences, and often religious and spiritual ideas drive social change -- look at Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa or Martin Luther King Jr., for example. These movements had religious components, but they weren't initially seen as political movements. That came later.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* Falun Gong's Challenge to China
by Danny Schechter (Editor) (Review by the Japan Times)

=== Falun Gong - China's Government-Controlled Media

13. Reports from China's government-controlled media

* China's government-controlled media has, in recent days, published dozens of items denouncing Falun Gong. As these items are essentially press releases meant as propaganda rather than news reporting, there is little to be gained by including them in RNR.
To access these items, see: Current Falun Gong News

> Part 2