The abuse is ‘something so chilling and appalling that a lot of people don’t even want to think about it,’ the co-chair of the summit said.
WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of religious believers “delegitimizes the regime,” Sam Brownback, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said on Feb. 2.
“How do you expect that we should have you run the world if this is how you treat your own people?” he told an audience of hundreds on the opening day of the International Religious Summit. “That’s the same thing with what’s taking place with Communist China, how it treats the Falun Gong is more than barbaric—forced organ harvesting.”
Brownback made the remarks alongside summit co-chair Katrina Lantos Swett and Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times.
Jekielek, who moderated the panel, has written a book addressing the issue.
“Killed to Order,” available for pre-order, examines the Chinese regime’s on-demand organ harvesting industry, which has targeted prisoners of conscience. One principal victim group is practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual group featuring meditative exercises and three core values: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Having seen an advanced copy of the book, Swett described the abuse as “something so chilling and appalling that a lot of people don’t even want to think about.”
“These kinds of barbaric and evil practices—they reveal the character, the underlying character of the adversary,” she said. “They are not an isolated sort of aberration. They are a revelation of the dark evil that lies at the heart of the Chinese communist regime, and their massive repression of every community of faith is another indicator.”
The annual summit, the sixth of its kind, gives a platform to policymakers and activists to promote religious freedom. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Michael Waltz were among the speakers.
Waltz elevated the matter to one of national sovereignty, telling the crowd at the summit that the United States will stand for everyone’s right to worship.
“This has always been, and will always be, a land of religious freedom,” he told an audience of hundreds at the International Religious Summit. “And for any country to think they can attack someone here, intimidate, attack, in some cases, even try to kidnap and take back to their country, is wholly unacceptable. We will not stand for it.”
By Eva Fu
