China Olympics

The following two messages, are a clear call to the Jewish world to fulfil the mitzvah of Tikkun Olam.

...firstly, from an address by Jennifer Zeng, of Australia, a refugee from China and survivor of its forced labour camps, PUBLIC LIBRARY, Tel Aviv, February 18, 2008:

...Some 60 years ago, shocked by what had happened to millions of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps, the world vowed "Never Again". Unfortunately, similar anti-humanity crimes have been happening again now for eight years in China....which is killing people en masse for their vital organs.

For any sensible human being, this sounds unbelievable. But I know it is true as I myself am a survivor. In order to get out of a party-state concentration camp and to tell the world what was happening there, I have experienced something worse than death.

I was sent to the Female Forced Labour Camp in Beijing in 2001 for practising Falun Gong. ...We were shocked with electric batons, beaten up, sexually abused, forced to work under appalling conditions for 16 or even 20 hours a day. We were put under severe and endless mental pressure to betray our own beliefs in "Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance".

I saw people driven into insanity ...deprived ...of ... sanity, a free will, dignity ...human beings were reduced to being living corpses.

Having witnessing all sorts of unimaginable crimes for months, I suddenly developed a very strong impulse to write a book to expose it all. When I made the decision to give a statement pretending to give up my beliefs-so that I could gain freedom to write a book- I didn't know that the cost would be so dear. I was forced to write "thought reports" and essays ...slandering my cherished beliefs. I was forced to read out a slanderous article with a calm face in front of cameras and hundreds of inmates in the camp; I was even forced to help the police to torture the newcomers in order to make them "reform". I 'm too ashamed to go into more details. There were many times when I wondered why I had not gone mad or died.

Yet, among all these inhuman crimes, would you believe that camp officials pretended to care about our health so much that they gave us very thorough physical periodic check-ups, including X-rays and blood tests? While in the labour camp, I never had the heart or ability to think why they did this, until with a chilling realization I learnt that blood tests and a data base of blood and tissue types was necessary to set up a large live organ bank.

For those who don't know what the day-to-day life is like behind the walls of 21st century Nazi-like camps, I invite you to read my book: "Witnessing History-one woman's fight for freedom and Falun Gong". It is a first-hand account of my life, written with a lot of tears. It is about what's happening in a place some 20 kilometres from the Tiananmen Square, or thirty from the main Olympics facility in Beijing. Even before you finish it, you will draw your own conclusion as to whether humankind and the Olympics movement will benefit from an Olympiad hosted by a Hitler-type regime.

...and this is supported by the following from "HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA AND THE 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES", a Keynote Address by Hon. David Kilgour, J.D. International Forum, Grand Hyatt Hotel Taipei, Taiwan February 21, 2008:

...The government of China hopes that spending vast amounts of money on Games facilities--and forcibly removing thousands from their homes with inadequate compensation--will improve its reputation despite its well-documented systematic violations of human dignity. The opposite seems more likely since the Games are now being used by the regime as a pretext for a crackdown on human rights advocates and other patriotic citizens of China. One Internet survey I saw a few months ago in Canada indicated that more than nine in ten of respondents favoured changing our trade laws with China presumably because of their human rights abuses; surveys in a number of other countries evidently also show mounting concern about the Hu-Wen government....

...In 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were more than twice as many arrests in China as the previous year for the offence of 'endangering state security', which is used by totalitarian governments everywhere to silence journalists, civil-rights lawyers and advocates of religious freedom. The number jumped to 604 arrests in 2006 from 296 in 2005. Among those arrested were the crusading defence lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year and who has been repeatedly detained and beaten; the human-rights, AIDS and environmental advocate Hu Jia; the blind self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng, now serving a four-year prison term; and the civil-rights lawyer Guo Feixiong, now serving a five-year term.

Stubborn Facts
...The world should draw conclusions about China from facts alone. For example, Carsten A.Holz, an academic economist who specializes in China, ...noted for example, that China experts often take at face value the country's business laws without mentioning the dominant role of the Communist party. He adds: "At the national level, the leadership of the 50 largest state-owned enterprises-enterprises that invest around the world-is directly appointed by the Politburo." .... Holz notes that among the 3,220 persons with a personal worth of $13 million or more in the country 2912 are children of high-level cadres.....

....The Party seeks to equate itself with China as a country, to convince naive persons within and outside the country that it is China, and that without the Party there would be no China.....our criticisms are directed at the unelected government in Beijing and never at the exploited and hard-working people of the country.....

Organ Pillaging - "Bloody Harvest Games"
David Matas, and I concluded to our horror following our independent investigation last year that since the end of 2000 the party-state of China and its agencies have killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, mostly without any form of prior trial, and then sold their vital organs for large sums of money, often to 'organ tourists' from wealthy countries (Our report is available in nineteen languages, including Mandarin, at www.organharvestinvestigation.net).

Neither of us are Falun Gong practitioners, but my experience with Falun Gong in the numerous national capitals Matas and I have now visited, seeking to bring these crimes against humanity to a halt by helping to raise public awareness, has been overwhelmingly positive. Falun Gong practitioners really do attempt to live their core principles of "truth, compassion and tolerance", which are shared by virtually all of the world's spiritual communities.

Matas and I have spoken in several countries to a small number of Falun Gong practitioners sent to labour camps since 1999, who managed later to leave both the camps and China itself. They told us of working in appalling conditions for up to sixteen hours daily with no pay and little food and many persons sleeping in the same room, making export products, ranging from garments to chopsticks to Christmas decorations for multinational companies. .... The labour camps, operating across China since the 1950s, are remarkably similar to one's in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. They operate outside the legal system and allow the Party to send anyone to them for up to four years with no hearing and no appeal by simply getting their police to sign an order.

Rwandan Echoes
The propaganda phase of the persecution, begun in mid-1999 against a then estimated 70-100 million Falun Gong practitioners across China, demonized, vilified and dehumanized them in Party-controlled media. Many Chinese were thus persuaded to think of the community tragically as even somehow less than human. The phenomenon recalls a similar media campaign unleashed by another party-state in Rwanda against its minority Tutsi community prior to the genocide there between April and June, 1994.

...Why is it that in only one of the eighty or so countries where Falun Gong practitioners now live are they persecuted mercilessly? Their growing popularity among the Chinese people generally during the 1990s was clearly one major reason, but another no doubt was that the values of those in power in Beijing were and are at the opposite end of the ethical spectrum.

The Chinese Medical Association has now agreed with the World Medical Association quite recently that 'organ tourists' will obtain no more transplants in China. Whether this is anything more than public relations cant intended to benefit the Beijing Olympiad remains to be seen. Another concern is that organs seized from unwilling "donors" across China, including Falun Gong practitioners, will now go to wealthy Chinese patients instead, with the grotesque commerce thus continuing in the same volume.

None of these deaths would be occurring if the Chinese people as a whole enjoyed the rule of law and their government believed in the intrinsic worth and dignity of each one of them. Human lives generally across China appear to have no more value to the party-state there than does the natural environment, work safety, health care and social programs for all Chinese, or Buddhist monks in Tibet and Burma. In my judgement, it is the toxic combination of totalitarian governance and 'Anything is permitted' capitalism that allows this new form of evil in the world to persist.

"Genocide Olympics"
A number of the world's most brutal dictatorships, including North Korea, Burma and Zimbabwe, have fallen under Beijing's sway during its scramble to acquire as much as possible of the earth's natural resources. ...I'd ask you to consider how any regime which is doing such terrible things in Burma, Tibet, East Turkestan, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the world could be allowed to host an Olympiad?....

Growing Shadows over Olympic Games
... the Summer Games this year face increasing opposition because the host national government remains one of the world's most gross and systematic violators of human dignity.

China was awarded the Games by the IOC only after it pledged to respect the Olympic Charter and to improve its human rights record. Many independent organizations have since observed that an already appalling record is instead worsening as the Beijing Games approach.

Why, for example, do Falun Gong practitioners face continuing merciless persecution after eight long years? What principle of the modern Olympic Games, especially after the experience in Hitler's Berlin at the 1936 Olympics, allows a host government to bar Falun Gong or any spiritual community's members from competing in, or even watching, events in Beijing? What about Tibetans, Buddhists, Uighurs, human rights advocates, independent journalists, other spiritual communities and democracy activists?

The government of China's outrageous treatment of human beings deemed 'enemies of the Party' both at home and abroad in the run up to the Games has led to an understandable call for a boycott. Both the Olympic Games and human rights movements worldwide share a common goal: the unity, dignity and equality among the entire human family. When this precept is violated systematically by the host government of a particular Olympiad, as is the case this year, the modern Olympic movement as a whole comes into question....The IOC should demand from the organizers of the 2008 Olympic Games that they conform to the Charter and refrain from discrimination against any group or individual during their Games....