Falun Gong marks 24 years of persecution at Tel Aviv Chinese embassy

Eliyahu Tulshinski

July 23, 2023

Israelis Thursday protested in front of the Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv to mark the 24th anniversary of Communist China's July 20, 1999 abduction and detainment of thousands of leaders of Falun Gong and its continuing persecution of practitioners.

The protest in Israel, pictured above, was one of many that took place around the globe to bring attention to the atrocities of the communist regime.

Party above all

Falun Gong, an offshoot of Buddhism which quickly gained government recognition as an official branch of qigong meditation and exercise system after its introduction in 1992, soon found itself subject to increasingly coercive demands from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1995, the CCP demanded that the practitioners, who came to number in the millions, embed the CCP as a partner in the movement, a demand the Falun Gong refused.

Falun Gong's refusal to essentially become a state-run religion was met with attacks on their polytheistic beliefs rooted in Buddhist and Taoist theology by more than twenty state-run newspapers accusing the movement's leaders of spreading “superstitions”. The Central Propaganda Department of the communist nation then banned the publication of Falun Gong books.

Fact or myth?

Communist China has long been accused of not just jailing Falun Gong adherents, Tibetans, and Uyghur Muslims on fabricated charges, but then forcibly removing their organs to sell to citizens and "medical tourists". Human rights lawyer Hamid Sabi confirmed the practice in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Sabi represents the China Tribunal, an independent panel exposing Chinese organ harvesting. The panel is headed by British lawyer Sir Geoffery NIce who had previously led the prosecution against Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. According to Sabi,

Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale … [by having doctors] cut open [prisoners' bodies] while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.

A whistleblower surgeon who escaped to England has confessed to his role in the CCP's harvesting, explaining that children are “brainwashed from kindergarten” to believe that anyone to be executed is an enemy of the state. He therefore followed orders when told to remove the liver of a woman who was shot in the head but was still alive, as he recounts in the below Vice video.

In 2006 alone, eleven thousand medical tourists came to China where, according to the video, one can receive a kidney in “a matter of hours." Falun Gong members are “favored,” according to the video, because of their avoidance of cigarettes and alcohol. The narrator concludes that, “the constant supply of organs available in Chinese hospitals could only be coming from executions.”

Taking action

The choice of Israel for a demonstration against CCP abuses may reflect the willingness of the state to confront the Chinese regime on this issue, as reported the The New American:

Israeli lawmakers were among the first to tackle the organ-harvesting programs by Beijing. In an interview with this magazine at his Knesset office before the summit, then-Deputy Speaker Moshe Feiglin, a member of the ruling Likud party at that time, said that what has been going on in China is a tragedy.

Chinese authorities, he warned, were literally cutting body organs out of dissidents and selling them to wealthy customers. As the state of the Jews, Israel has a special moral responsibility for upholding the cause of human rights around the world, including exposing ongoing atrocities in Communist China, he said, adding that no amount of pressure would stop him.

Knesset Member Feiglin connected the reestablishment of a free Jewish state with the need to oppose the enemies of freedom throughout the globe:

That’s the real reason for our existence. We should focus on our own on developing a real Jewish state that radiates the moral message of freedom to the entire world. I think this potential — the old people of the Book that came back to the Promised Land have that potential in them — and I think the whole world, deep in their mind, in their soul, are waiting for that message to come out of Zion. I think this is the reason for the existence of the Jewish state.

Speaking at this year's rally, Dr. Oz Guterman, PhD, a senior lecturer Israel's Bar Ilan University, described the global significance of standing up to the CCP, as recorded by The Epoch Times:

When you do not fight evil, in this case—the Chinese Communist Party’s evil—this evil spreads.

Whoever is ignoring the cruelty toward Falun Gong won’t have a problem when the CCP exports its propaganda, such as through Confucius Institutes or influencing Hollywood.

This is the result of a cultural brainwashing. Our cultural decline is partly because we didn’t fight these things.

In 2016 the House of Representatives took its own action, approving a resolution that,

(1) condemns the practice of state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China;

(2) calls on the Government of the People’s Republic of China and Communist Party of China to immediately end the practice of organ harvesting from all prisoners of conscience;

(3) demands an immediate end to the 17-year persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China, and the immediate release of all Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience;

(4) encourages the United States medical community to help raise awareness of unethical organ transplant practices in China;

(5) calls on the People’s Republic of China to allow a credible, transparent, and independent investigation into organ transplant abuses; and

(6) calls on the United States Department of State to conduct a more detailed analysis on state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in the annual Human Rights Report, and report annually to Congress on the implementation of section 232 of the Department of State Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003 (8 U.S.C. 1182f), barring provision of visas to Chinese and other nationals engaged in coerced organ or bodily tissue transplantation.

Paragraph (4) would have doctors help make medical tourists aware that their participation in Communist China's transplant business could be at the expense of a Chinese citizen's life.

Not new?

CCP's practice of removing organs from Chinese people actually predates the modern organ transplant business. In the early days of the regime, communists utilized, “beheadings, boilings, live burials, stonings, drownings and disembowellings” to instill a level of fear that would preclude the possibility of wide scale rebellion. The communists even employed cannibalism to defile the bodies of their victims, according to China expert Professor Frank Dikotter who noted, “There were several dozen cases of ritual cannibalism. It was about not just eliminating your class enemy, but devouring him.”

Communists even succeeded in getting citizens to eat each other not for ritual but for food, during the mass starvation of tens of millions of Chinese during Chairman Mao's government created famines, under the Orwellian “Great Leap Forward” policy instituted in 1958. Human rights campaigner Harry Wu of the Laogai Research Foundation demonstrates the extent of the cannibalism by spotlighting just one year in one province, in an interview with Radio Free Asia:

[T]he head of the Anhui police department ... wrote a report [during the 2000s] in which he said that [there had been] 1,289 cases of cannibalism reported in the province in 1960. That's 1,289 cases. These were considered "special cases." That's the name they gave to cases of cannibalism . . .

an official document that was sent for forwarding to an office in Gansu province . . . documents nearly 50 cases. Here it shows you the time, and the rural work unit the people belonged to, and the names of those involved, and who it was that they ate, and how they ate them.

Here's one: "Ma Waiyou, of Maiji commune, Xinmin village. Status: common peasant. He ate Chen Zaxi. Relationship: spouse. He ate his own wife. He dug up her body and cooked it."

Here's another: "Yang Wenyi and Yuan Shuying of Houxiyan village together with ... eight people in total, dug up the body of a child, cooked and ate it." [Emphasis added].

Also not new

Communist persecution of the religious can be traced to Karl Marx who, in 1843, famously expressed his disdain for religion:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. [Emphasis added].

As scholar Rabbi Marvin Antelman makes clear in the title of his classic analysis of communism To Eliminate The Opiate, Marx, in labeling religion a dangerous drug, made its elimination a top priority. Forceful coercion to accept atheism is thus seen wherever communists seize power.

Feiglin, in a statement to the Epoch Times, added that communism is the basis for people reinventing their identity without regard to the identity with which they were born:

What happens in the communist regime in China and communism is always the result of an atheistic view, a materialist view that says there is no G-d in the world, which negates faith. But if there is no God, there are no identities.

You can then be whatever you want. You can be a man, you can be a woman, and you can reinvent your national identity. That is, you were not born with the identity that God created, you rather re-invent it at any given moment.

Feiglin explained that the freedom to create a new identity is actually no freedom at all and instead leads to endless wars:

When you have no identity, you have no freedom.

At the time of the Nazi regime, when freedom was taken from the Jewish people, the first thing that was taken away was their identity, and numbers were tattooed on their arms, he said—they were not human anymore, they were just numbers.

That is, one’s freedom is an outgrowth of one’s identity. Man has no identity if he does not have God.

The CCP is exporting the negation of identity.The progressive movement, or the progressive ideology that we experience today is the modern appearance of the Bolshevik Revolution. And for it to “grease the wheels of the revolution,” it constantly needs wars where “everyone has to fight everyone all the time.”

This revolution eventually leads to the erasure of all identities and the denial of all freedoms and ultimately to death.

John Birch

The CCP didn't even wait to take power to abuse religious individuals. In 1945, four years before turning China communist, CCP officials came across and executed Christian missionary John Birch, who was recruited into U.S. Army Intelligence where he used his knowledge of China and familiarity with nationalist soldiers to rescue stranded American pilots. His murder was subsequently covered up by US officials. The New American describes how that coverup led to the loss of millions of lives:

Captain Birch was killed by a supposed ally while on a peaceful Army mission, and that fact was buried in a massive coverup by forces within the U.S. government who did not want the American people to know the truth — the communists under Mao Tse-tung were not simply “agrarian reformers,” and they were not our allies.

Adeline Gray, a newspaper reporter, wrote Birch’s parents that “had not the truth been suppressed, Captain Birch’s death would have headlined every newspaper in the United States.”

Had the fact that an American intelligence officer and Baptist missionary was murdered by Chinese Communists been widely known in the United States, it might very well have derailed the effort by conspirators inside the U.S. government to hand China — the world’s most populous nation — over to the totalitarian dictatorship of Mao Tse-tung.

Instead of dealing with the hostile China of today, Americans might very well be celebrating decades of friendship with that nation — if only John Birch’s murder had not been covered up.

Who lost China?

The effort by U.S. officials "to hand China” to the communists, referred to above, is a reference to the arms embargo placed on the pro-US nationalist government that was defending China from CCP attacks. The embargo was particularly difficult as it came after the CCP was armed with weapons the US forced the Japanese to abandon, as described in a separate New American article:

Ambassador Hurley recommended that the terms of surrender for Japan include a provision that all Japanese arms in China be surrendered to the Chinese government. But this was not to be. The Soviet Army entered the war against Japan almost immediately after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima . . . General Wedemeyer wrote, “The Red Army naturally met practically no enemy resistance and was soon in complete control of Manchuria.” They then proceeded to receive the surrender of Japanese arms and equipment, which they turned over to their Chinese Communist comrades.

With the CCP fully armed, soon-to-be Secretary of State George Marshall decided it was time to pressure Chiang Kai-shek, the pro-West leader of the nationalist government who became a devout Christian after marrying the daughter of a Methodist minister, to bring the communists into a power-sharing agreement.

Despite [the arming of the CCP], the Nationalist forces were able to make significant military progress against the rebel communist forces, over the objections of George Marshall, who had been sent to China by Truman after the resignation of Hurley. Marshall kept insisting that Chiang cease his efforts to destroy the communist armies, and instead enter into a “coalition” government with them. When Chiang failed to heed these orders, the United States slapped a 10-month arms embargo on the sale or shipment of arms to Chiang. Marshall seemed pleased when he said, “As Chief of Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist divisions; now with a stroke of the pen I disarm them.”

As the military advantage shifted to the communists, Congress finally passed a measure to provide some aid to China’s forces, but the delivery was sabotaged. The Truman administration, Wedemeyer complained, “succeeded in thwarting the intent of the [1948] China Aid Act by delaying the shipment of munitions to China until the end of that critical year.”

In his book America’s Retreat From Victory, Senator Joseph McCarthy wrote, “Over the hump in India, the United States military authorities were detonating large stores of ammunition and dumping 120,000 tons of war supplies in the Bay of Bengal — much of it undelivered to China but charged to her wartime lend-lease account.” [Emphases added].

JFK also weighed in on the loss of China.

In short, McCarthy blamed policymakers in the U.S. government for the loss of China. But lest someone think that this was just partisanship on the part of the Republican McCarthy, consider the words of a young Democrat member of Congress from Massachusetts, John Kennedy, who told the House of Representatives on January 25, 1949,

“The responsibility for our failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming, unless a coalition government with the communists were formed, was a crippling blow to the national government.”

He added later, “What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”

Today's John Birch Society, parent organization of The New American, is named after that “first fatality of the Cold War,” a fatality which could have altered history if not for its coverup.

See our previous coverage of Communist China and their deceptive break from Soviet communism