April 26, 2006
On April 26, columnist and author Mark Joseph, writing in the townhall.com website, spoke out in defense of Falun Gong practitioner Dr. Wenyi Wang, who was arrested after shouting some heartfelt messages to Chinese leader Hu Jintao during a ceremony on the White House lawn on April 20, 2006.
In his article, Mr. Joseph stated, "As a responsible citizen I'm supposed to be outraged at the actions of Wenyi Wang, the Chinese woman who disrupted ceremonies honoring Chinese President Hu at the White House last week. To be sure, I do generally have a position against such outbursts at least in those places where a constitution guarantees the right to free speech and freedom to assemble. But when it comes to people who live under brutal regimes that suppress free expression, I find myself rooting for the shouters..."
"...Courtesy in a democracy dictates that those giving the speech be allowed to do so uninterrupted. The opportunity to respond may come in a question and answer time to follow, or a letter to the editor of a newspaper, or standing on a sidewalk in front of the speaker's house with a picket sign. Those are just a few of dozens of ways to respond that are available.
"But in the case of dictators, there is no chance for citizen-to-dictator dialogue, so sometimes the only way to dialogue is to go to a public event and scream, as Miss Wang did so brilliantly.
"Speaking truth to power, the courageous Wang told Hu: 'Your time is running out... anything you have done will come back to you in this lifetime.'"
"The last time a leader was warned so dramatically and with almost the identical words, was when Belshazaar, the King of Babylon looked up from a big feast he was hosting to see the words 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin' mysteriously appear on the wall as though being written by an invisible hand. The King called in the Prophet Daniel to explain the message's meaning and was told: 'MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.'
"Miss Wang's outburst may not be on par with a direct warning from the hand of God, but it was certainly in the finest tradition of speaking truth to power. The idea that she should be punished and spend six months in jail for breaking a law that punishes one who 'intimidates, coerces, threatens or harasses a foreign official or an official guest or obstructs a foreign official in the performance of his duties' is ridiculous.
"Rather, Miss Wang should be given a large book contract and given one of those Kennedy awards for political courage."
"Although Chinese government censors made sure that her three minutes never made it to Chinese TV viewers, it's a good bet that the story of her courageous actions and message will spread like wildfire through Chinese society, whispered in back alleys and markets, and passed around on the Internet, perhaps in code. And its effect on Chinese society and those who dissent for freedom's sake, may be significant.
"Presidential historian Paul Kengor wrote of a similar situation when Russian dissidents learned that President Reagan had used the infamous words 'Evil Empire' to describe their captors."
"One day in March 1983, confined to his eight-by-ten-foot prison cell in Siberia, [Natan] Sharansky's jailers allowed him the privilege of reading the latest Pravda. There, splashed across the front page, was a condemnation of Reagan's description of the USSR as evil. Using Morse code, Sharansky tapped out the president's missive to the next cell, from where it was sent around the camp via walls and toilets. "We dissidents were ecstatic," Sharansky later wrote. "Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth-a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us...'"
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/MarkJoseph/2006/04/26/195016.html