(Clearwisdom.net ) Note: This speech was one of many delivered one evening as city officials considered writing a letter to their Sister City in China where the persecution of Falun Gong is taking place.

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen:

I would like to try to give a sense of the scope of this persecution, although hard as I try, I won't likely be able to fully do so.

Technically speaking, what the Falun Gong practitioners in China are suffering is genocide according to the definition of the 1948 U.N. Convention Against Genocide.

The meaning of the word "genocide" encompasses some of our worst nightmares. What characterizes many genocides is a loss of life on a scale that is incomprehensible, and human suffering that can never be compensated for. It would seem that the occurrence of genocide also necessitates international silence and apathy, since after the Jewish Holocaust, the words "never again" have been an unfulfilled promise with genocides recurring in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere.

The genocide of Falun Gong practitioners is different from these other ones. It does not involve a mass cleansing of human bodies, although the death toll is high and the real death toll is still a dark mystery to all of his sitting here. Rather it is a mass effort to purge people's spirits, to "transform" them. If they are killed along the way, "so be it."

Here is one example from a Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize winning series:

"The day before Chen Zixiu died, her captors again demanded that she renounce her faith in Falun Dafa. Barely conscious after repeated jolts from a cattle prod, the 58-year-old stubbornly shook her head. Enraged, the local officials ordered Ms. Chen to run barefoot in the snow. Two days of torture had left her legs bruised and her short black hair matted with pus and blood... She crawled outside, vomited and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died ..."

In a recent interview, Falun Gong founder Mr. Li Hongzhi said, "All we're asking is to have some space that allows us to follow our beliefs, and to have our personal freedom to do our practice, that's all. We're not after anything beyond that."

In fact, more and more people in China are realizing that Falun Gong is not against the government and that practitioners are being unjustly and brutally persecuted. This campaign is something that has been forced upon the people of China from the very beginning. It has been caused by the jealousy of a dictator who doesn't care for the suffering of his own people.

For the sake of the Chinese people, and our friends in our Sister City, I trust that the city council will not be apathetic to genocide. We have the opportunity to speak up and to help.

One last thought is that there are a lot of excuses that might be given not to do something (for example saying that our country has a history of serious human rights violations as well). Nonetheless, rights abuses in one country don't justify rights abuses in another country.

Ladies and gentlemen, you don't have an obligation to help, but you have an opportunity to help. One day in the future, the full facts of this persecution will be revealed to the world and we'll have to think back about what we did during this time. Maybe then our grandchildren will ask us what we did to try to stop all this. They might ask, "You were a Council member, or you were the Mayor at that time. You had a Sister City with China and an opportunity to help. What did you do?"

Thank you.