From China Matters:
The revelation that the White House granted a Falun Gong activist, Dr. Wang Wenyi, a temporary press pass in the name of the Epoch Times, whereupon she hectored Chinese president Hu Jintao at length on the White House lawn on April 20 during the welcoming ceremony, is unlikely to elicit a forgiving shrug from the Chinese government.
Dr. Wang is not a journalist. She is a pathologist, and the lead researcher on Falun Gong’s current hot-button issue–the alleged vivisection of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government at a facility in Shenyang, and the sale of their organs for transplant purposes.
The Epoch Times is widely known as an organ of the Falun Gong spiritual practice movement, which has been at loggerheads with the Chinese Communist Party ever since the Chinese government suppressed its practice in 1999.
An analogous situation would have been if the Chinese government had granted a credential to Jose Padilla’s mother as representative of “The Newspaper of Record for Increasingly Desperate and Infuriated Relatives of Detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamoâ€? and permitted her to participate in President Bush’s visit to Beijing last year.
Read the whole thing; it does a good job of putting into perspective just how egregious yesterday’s 3-minute outburst was.
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By Brendan
Comparing Wang to Jose Padilla’s mother is giving her too much credit. She’s a crazy-ass cultist. The amount of simplistic crap I’ve seen about this thing on blogs is just sickening. Yes, it was probably a brave thing to do; no, she shouldn’t be imprisoned or deported for it, but come on: Falun Gong is a creepy, sick cult, and the fact that the Chinese government is down on it doesn’t automatically make it good.
I can’t believe that the story about organ-harvesting at Sujiatun keeps coming up. I haven’t seen any evidence at all, other than that the Epoch Times (newspaper motto: “By crazy-ass cultists, for crazy-ass cultists!”) keeps reporting on it, that it’s true.
April 23, 2006 @ 2:25 am | Comment
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By mean
I don’t think most people would agree with you re. FLG being a cult, and I’m sure some of them have read the Holy Books of Master Li Hongzhi… or at least the whitewashed anglicized versions of it.
April 24, 2006 @ 3:03 pm | Comment