Thursday, October 18, 2012

President Obama Accepts Letter From Falun Gong Practitioner


By Ren Baimin
Epoch Times Staff
Karen Gao, a representative of the Washington D.C. Falun Dafa Association, shakes hands with President Obama, and gives him a letter at a public campaign event at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on Oct. 5, 2012. The letter updates the President about the live, forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist regime, and asks him to help end this atrocity. While looking directly into Ms. Gao’s eyes, President Obama takes the letter. (The Epoch Times)
Karen Gao, a representative of the Washington D.C. Falun Dafa Association, shakes hands with President Obama, and gives him a letter at a public campaign event at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on Oct. 5, 2012. The letter updates the President about the live, forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist regime, and asks him to help end this atrocity. While looking directly into Ms. Gao’s eyes, President Obama takes the letter. (The Epoch Times)
At a campaign event in Virginia on Oct. 5 a Falun Gong representative shook hands with President Obama and handed him a letter from practitioners of the spiritual discipline about allegations of forced, live organ harvesting in China. The photo of the letter being handed over, when seen in China, will grab people’s attention and may change some minds there, while the letter itself may help the president understand better a mass atrocity taking place in China.
Karen Gao, a representative of the Washington D.C. Falun Dafa Association, delivered the letter to the president during a public meeting with voters at George Mason University in Fairfax, asking for his help to stop the Chinese Communist regime’s forced, live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China. 
While looking directly into Ms. Gao’s eyes, President Obama accepted the letter from her hand.
The photo of the moment is the first in more than 10 years of a Falun Gong practitioner personally handing over information about the persecuted meditation discipline to a U.S. president. 
Chinese people have for 13 years been inundated with propaganda demonizing Falun Gong and have been kept in the dark by state media about the atrocity of forced-live organ harvesting. 
The photo of Ms. Gao shaking hands with President Obama explodes some of the false narratives about the practice purveyed by the Chinese regime’s media. Her asking for his help while handing him a letter describing the “most evil atrocity on earth,” if conveyed to the Chinese people, will cut through the veil of ignorance in China surrounding the mass atrocity of forced live organ harvesting. 
Normally, on such an occasion, the president wouldn’t casually accept any materials. However, he reached out with his left hand, while his bodyguards stood close by, observing everything, eyes fixed on the letter. And instead of passing the letter to his staff, Obama put it in his trouser pocket. 
The letter may help direct President Obama’s attention to congressional interest in the issue of organ harvesting in China.
On the previous day, Oct. 4, 106 U.S. congressmen, approximately one-fourth of the membership of the U.S. House of Representatives, co-signed a letter to the Secretary of State, asking to “release any information” the State Department has “relating to transplant abuses in China.” 
The CQ Global Researcher has reported that investigators into organ harvesting in China estimate that in the years 2000-2008, 62,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed through forced live organ harvesting. The human rights lawyer David Matas (co-author with David Kilgour of the groundbreaking book “Bloody Harvest”) estimates that each year 8,000 practitioners are killed by forced, live organ harvesting. 
The persecution of Falun Gong was launched by former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Jiang Zemin in 1999. According to the Falun Dafa Information Center , those who practice Falun Gong are subject to severe human rights violations at the hands of the CCP. 
The number of people targeted—in 1999 Chinese state authorities estimated between 70 and 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong—make it the largest religious persecution in the world.

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