It happens all the time around the world, but last weekend I saw it happen in Point Reyes Station: one tragedy upstaged another. Sixteen Falun Gong "practitioners," as they call themselves, passed through West Marin on Highway 1 Saturday and Sunday, hoping to draw attention to Chinese persecution of their group.
The yellow-and-white-dressed group had been slowly making a 926-mile trip from Seattle to San Francisco, stopping in towns along the way to walk around with placards that demanded the People’s Republic respect their rights.
In the past two years, more than 100,000 Falun Gong members have been arrested in China; 285 of them have been killed; more than 10,000 have been sent to labor camps; and 600 have been abused in mental hospitals, said one of the group, John Zheng.
Falun Gong, which is also known as Falun Dafa, "consists primarily of two components: self-improvement through study of the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance…and doing Falun Dafa’s five gentle exercises," the group’s literature said. "The exercises, which include a sitting meditation, are easy to learn..." Indeed, the literature compares the exercises to tai-chi.
"The benefits of practicing Falun Dafa [range] from improved health and newfound energy to mental clarity, stress relief, and peace of mind."
So why do PRC leaders care about the Falun Gong? "The reason why they see it as a threat," replied Zheng, "is the Falun Gong is growing too fast and too big. Falun Gong members far outnumber members of the Communist Party...[Party leaders] don’t want any other group to grow as big as they and challenge their power. They want to be able to abuse human rights."
Zheng claimed, "We’re not interested in politics." However, he would like US citizens to write their elected representatives, asking that they join in pressuring the PRC to stop persecuting the Falun Gong. US politicians should urge the Chinese to release all members of the group, said Zheng. Americans should also pay attention to 130 Falun Gong members who for five weeks have been taking part in a hunger strike at Ma San Jia Labor Camp.
One Tomales resident told sheriff’s deputies she thought the group looked like members of a "cult" when they stopped in town, but that "is a label that is completely inaccurate," says the group’s literature. "Falun Gong is more accurately thought of as a ‘cultivation practice’…Many other self-cultivation practices similar to Falun Gong have been practiced in China for many centuries."
All this sounds like a horrific farce in which PRC President Jiang Zemin has declared war on a homegrown New Age movement. The movement, by the way, was founded in 1992 by a man named Li Hongzhi, a sort of Chinese Ram Dass. Don’t be surprised if some serenity zealot here hijacks a crop-duster and bombs the PRC consulate with his old Windham Hill albums.
As for the tragedy which has upstaged the horrors that have befallen the Falun Gong, I have little patience with those who find anything righteous about Osama bin Laden’s and the Taliban’s behavior in recent years. The Taliban, as has been documented, are downright sadistic: skinning alive fellow countrymen they disapprove of, or hanging them, or stoning them.
Tens of thousands of Afghanis are starving, and the Taliban are able to rule Afghanistan only through fear and weaponry, not public support. The United States is already talking about arming various mujahedeen tribes, who are both familiar with that mountainous country and are hostile to the Taliban. That idea, however, scares the bejesus out of our ally, the Pakistanis, who fear the arms may someday be turned on them.
And for God’s sake, don’t try to pretend bin Laden and the Taliban are somehow independent of each other. I don’t know why it hasn’t gotten more news coverage, but the main reason the Taliban won’t turn over bin Laden to the West, thereby avoiding war, is that bin Laden is the father-in-law of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the "supreme leader" of Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Omar, also known as Emir ul Momineen (leader of the faithful), has four wives and one eye.
For once, I have no inkling how this nation should proceed. From the evidence available so far, it appears bin Laden was heavily involved in terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center this year and in 1993, on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the US destroyer Cole in Yemen a year ago. Not only have thousands of Americans died in these attacks, hundreds of foreign citizens have too. Clearly, this cannot continue. Some 85 percent of Americans surveyed in a New York Times-CBS poll said they favor a military response. Put me down as undecided.
Meanwhile, the only prominent Americans to even indirectly exculpate the Sept. 11 attacks are the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. As reporter Don Lattin noted in Sunday’s Chronicle, Falwell, Robertson, and one of the terrorists convicted in the 1993 Trade Center bombing, Mahmud Abouhalima, have all publicly stated the Sept. 11 bombings were an attack on American "secularism" rather than on the United States per se. What should govern this country, all three agree somewhat surprisingly, is Christian fundamentalism.
If the United States were really as morally lax as Falwell and Robertson claim, both men by now would have been skinned alive as traitors. Instead, they’re allowed to freely justify the killing of US civilians. Abouhalima can do the same, but from a prison cell.