[Falun Dafa] Sara Effner – Stop CCP’s Forced Organ Harvesting

Anyone considering going to China for an organ should know that it's likely going to be coming from an innocent prisoner of conscience from Falun Gong or even other groups, but Falun Gong is the largest targeted group. My name is Sarah Effner. I grew up in Missouri near a small town. I started practicing Falun Gong in April of 2000, a little less than a year, I mean, after the persecution began. I actually heard about Falun Gong while I was studying in China. I saw a lot of footage on the TV that was kind of trying to paint Falun Gong in a negative light, and I didn't understand why. I thought it was a small group in Beijing until I came back to the United States, and I learned that it was 100 million people who were practicing it, not a small group in Beijing. Then my father, who studied Chinese medicine, met someone who was teaching in a nearby town, teaching Falun Gong, and he invited him to come give a Falun Gong seminar in our small town. I watched the lectures, and in the first three sessions, I realized that it was exactly what I was looking for. It was something that helped me look inside, give up attachments, improve myself. There's actually no membership in Falun Gong, so it wasn't about being a part of a group. It was about improving as an individual and staying within society and having that connection in the world. Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is an ancient spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition. Falun Gong combines meditation and gentle exercises, similar to yoga or Tai Chi, with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, or in Chinese, Zhen Shan Ren. Falun Gong practitioners aspire to live by these principles in their daily lives. In traditional Chinese culture, the process of perfecting and refining the mind and body is called cultivation. Our modern language uses the word Qigong to describe this. What differentiates Falun Gong from other forms of Qigong is its emphasis on one's morality, character, and the cultivation of virtue. I heard a story about a person who was in Tiananmen Square, and he wasn't a Falun Gong practitioner, and he did some stretching. He was just stretching out, and the police, because he was already being persecuted, came over to stop him from practicing Falun Gong in Tiananmen Square, because that's what some practitioners would do to appeal. And the man just cursed at the policeman, and then the policeman immediately let him go in China, because they knew he wasn't a Falun Gong practitioner, because that's not the behavior of a Falun Gong practitioner. And that just speaks so much to their characters. A lot of people, when they hear about organ harvesting, they think of the black market, and think, you know, organs are stolen, sold for profit on the black market. They don't realize that the Chinese government has selected Falun Gong for elimination, because it grew to be 100 million people. And that as soon as the persecution began in China, China's organ transplants skyrocketed. And that was in conjunction with Jiang Zemin's statement that he wanted to completely eradicate Falun Gong in three months, by destroying them physically, financially, and destroying their reputations. Anyone considering going to China for an organ should know that it's likely going to be coming from an innocent prisoner of conscience from Falun Gong, or even other groups, but Falun Gong is the largest targeted group. In the process of talking to the legislators about the Falun Gong issue, and having people from our state who've been persecuted in China tell their stories, they were so moved. One of the chairmen of the committees that we spoke to, and that heard the personal stories of the victims, at the end, he said, this is why we do government, to stop these kind of atrocities, to stand up against this injustice. It doesn't matter that it was the atrocity originated in China. When they heard what someone had gone through under the communist regime, without the freedom of religion, without freedom of belief, they felt so good that they could actually do something. Although Congress has adopted multiple resolutions condemning these abuses, the Falun Gong Protection Act, S. 817, if enacted, will mark the first binding U.S. legislation to hold perpetrators accountable. This bill requires the president to impose visa and property blocking sanctions on foreign persons that have knowingly and directly engaged in, or facilitated, the involuntary harvesting of organs in China. The communist government does not want this to pass. And I think that's another reason why they're ramping up their efforts to confuse people about the Falun Gong issue, with negative reports about Falun Gong and Shen Yun in the New York Times. So it's really, really important that people don't get distracted by that, and to miss the opportunity to get this organ harvesting bill passed. And so I would say, for people who understand the issue, to encourage others to learn about it, and to write their senators asking for them to co-sponsor it, if they haven't already. Of course, vote for it. But the real hurdle is before the vote. It has to move forward. In order for it to move forward, they have to know that the people care. So people really need to voice their support for the Falun Gong Protection Act.