HAIFA, Israel—A rally was held in front of the Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv on July 20 to call for an end to the 24-year persecution of Falun Gong in China.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that teaches the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance along with five slow-moving meditative exercises. The practice’s popularity shot up in China during the 1990s, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million adherents by the end of the decade.
Viewing the popularity of the practice as a threat to its authoritarian control, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated a sweeping campaign aimed at eradicating it on July 20, 1999. Since then, adherents have been subjected to violent arrest, torture, forced labor, live organ harvesting, and other physical and financial means of persecution that continue today….