Lan tỏa sự thật.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce you to a man here tonight. Mr. Lijie He. Lijie, please stand up. Lijie is a very good friend of mine. He was a senior engineer at China's Ministry of Construction, one of the top six in his field in all of China, and he had received multi awards for his work. In 1995, Lijie started to practice Falun Gong. His study of Falun Gong brought him to realize that his life's purpose was to guard his morality with the Falun Gong principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, so that he could reach enlightenment and ascend back to where his soul came from. His life changed. He became happier, healthier, and less stressed. When conflicts in life started, he started to look inside himself to see where he could do better. He stopped pointing the finger at others and took full responsibility to change his environment for the better. I've known Lijie for about 14 years, and I can honestly say he's always smiling. We've worked on some stressful projects together, and I've never heard him complain about anyone once, or I've never seen him raise his voice once. Me being from southern Italy, I'm still working on that, so I hold Lijie as one of my dear role models. At that time, Falun Gong was practiced by tens of millions of people across China. It was supported, awarded, and even endorsed. High-ranked government officials even stated in news reports how Falun Gong helped save the country billions of dollars in health care costs. Falun Gong is rooted in ancient Chinese culture, where for thousands of years, China was known as the land of the divine. People believed in heavens and gods. They believed that the true purpose of a human being is to ascend back to where we all come from, by first becoming a good person. Since the beginning of humankind, people have been drawn to find the answers to human life. This is the significance of religious freedom. This is every human being's first right, to find the meaning of life, the truth of the universe. This quest is the fundamental freedom of all, and when people cannot find or search for the freedom, for the meaning of life in their own way, then this is the gravest crime of all. Unfortunately in China, you will never be able to have true religious freedom, because freedom of belief goes against everything the Communist Party stands for. In 1949, the Communist Party violently took over China and started to destroy all belief in gods and religions in order to kill the human spirit and brainwash society to think that the Communist Party was God. It was Mao who stated, fighting with heaven, fighting with earth, and fighting with human beings, what a great pleasure. Through their multi-campaigns to destroy religious freedom, tens of millions have died. Today, religions exist in China, but all religions and spiritual disciplines must be controlled by the Communist Party, and must place the Communist Party over their belief in their chosen God. Otherwise, they're persecuted. In their constitution, they give lip service to religious freedom, but they leave a massive loophole by stating that only normal religious activities will be protected, and it's the Communist Party who decides what is normal today and what might not be normal tomorrow. So on July 20th, 1999, President of China at the time, Jiang Zemin, ordered to eliminate Falun Gong after he found out that a hundred million people were practicing a spiritual discipline that was not controlled by the state. He shouted, don't you think that our Marxism, materialism, and atheism can't beat that spiritual stuff aired by Falun Gong? He then mobilized the entire society to persecute Falun Gong. He unleashed a multi-billion dollar relentless propaganda campaign that blanketed the country and also created an extra-legal police force called the 610 Office with absolute power that hunts down arrests and can even kill practitioners without trial. On July 21st, 2000, Li Jie was arrested from his workplace after he mailed letters to colleagues and friends asking them not to believe the terrible lies that the Communist Party was spreading about Falun Gong. For this, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. They tortured him daily, demanding that he renounce his faith. He was punched in the face, kicked and beaten. He was electrocuted all over his body, forced due to heavy slave labor and forced to stand motionless for hours and beaten and electrocuted if he moved. He was stripped naked outside in winter and had freezing water poured on him and left to freeze until his clothes turned to ice. These methods repeated day after day. He was on the verge of death, coughing and urinating blood. His lungs were damaged and he gained serious kidney problems. But Li Jie tells me that the psychological torture they used on him to try to get him to renounce his belief was 100 times worse than the physical torture he suffered. For the past 17 years, the whereabouts of millions of Falun Gong practitioners in China is unknown. Thousands have been reported killed in police custody. The United Nations states that two-thirds of all torture cases reported are that of Falun Gong practitioners. A February 2017 Freedom House report details how Falun Gong continues to be subject to widespread and severe human rights abuses. And a 2016 US Congressional Executive Commission on China report states how extreme physical and psychological abuse continues against Falun Gong, including electric shock, force-feeding, beating, sexual abuse, as well as the harassment and arrest of lawyers who defend Falun Gong. Even more evil is the evidence uncovered by independent reports that detail how the source of up to 1 million organ transplants over the span of 15 years may have been harvested from murdered Falun Gong practitioners to fuel the Communist Party's multi-billion dollar transplant trade. The Communist Party is responsible for terrible, unspeakable crimes against humanity and it's their number one mission to now hide these crimes. To do this here in Canada, among other campaigns, the Communist Party is sending fake, irrational emails disguised as Falun Gong to our elected officials to manipulate them to think that Falun Gong practitioners are bizarre and unstable and that the Communist Party may be justified in its persecution. They are targeting the moral consciousness of our MPs who may turn their backs on victims of terrible crimes due to these emails. It's a diabolical plan that's attacking our government officials here on Canadian soil to further silence the voice of the victims. In 2004, from the support of Amnesty International and the support of all parties in Canada, Li Jie was rescued to Canada to reunite with his wife. There are currently 11 practitioners with Canadian ties suffering in China, in prison, and on February 19th, 2017, Ms. Chen Sun, a 50 year old Canadian citizen, was abducted for practicing Falun Gong and is currently being held in a Beijing detention center. We are happy to have Li Jie here with us today, and we thank and we're very grateful for Mr. Anderson and Mr. Jennings for giving us the opportunity to raise awareness of the atrocities happening to Falun Gong in China and their lack of freedom of belief. We hope that forums like this can continue so we can bring more awareness to the situation and hopefully save more lives.