English Portfolio Entry no. 3

BBC, Scientologists battle on Web about documentary and shouting reporter

By ROBERT BARR

LONDON (AP) - The British Broadcasting Corp. and the Church of Scientology are both using the Internet to air a dispute in which a reporter shouts angrily at a church official while researching a documentary scheduled for broadcast Monday.

John Sweeney's outburst came as he was interviewing Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, who had previously objected to Sweeney's use of the word "cult." Sweeney was captured by BBC's Panorama program and Scientology video cameras during a rant which continued for about 40 seconds.

"I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe," Sweeney said in a story posted on the BBC News Web site.

"I apologized almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened, but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it (my temper) to my boss, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss, the director-general of the BBC," Sweeney said.

The Church of Scientology, whose members include Hollywood stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise, shadowed the Panorama team with its own camera crew.

A church spokesman denied that Sweeney apologized, and said the organization was putting its own documentary about the dispute on the Internet.

Mike Rinder, a Los Angeles-based spokesman for the Church of Scientology, said he had taken the documentary to the BBC.

"Not one of them would look. The arrogance that has been displayed in this is a little beyond comprehension," he said.

The first clip on the Scientologists' documentary shows Sweeney describing the BBC as sometimes "hideously hidebound" and hampered by bureaucracy. "There are people there who claim salaries who frankly are morons," he says.

Excerpts of the Scientologists' documentary have been posted on YouTube, apparently taken from one of the 100,000 DVDs of its program that the church distributed, Rinder said.

Another clip on YouTube, from the same documentary, shows Sweeney at a movie premiere shouting at Travolta, "Are you a member of a sinister brainwashing cult?"

The BBC offered links to its footage and its own news report on its Web site.

Panorama's editor, Sandy Smith, said Monday he was "disappointed" by Sweeney's outburst but added that the Church of Scientology has "no way of dealing with any kind of criticism at all."

Rinder said it was not the first time that the church had made its own recordings of reporters doing stories about it.

Sweeney refused an invitation to visit the church's headquarters in Florida, Rinder said.

"When we found that he was refusing to literally come inside the building, it was at that point that we went, 'OK we better document this,"' Rinder said.

Sweeney said his outburst came while he was touring a Scientology exhibition in Los Angeles, "Psychiatry: Industry of Death." The exhibit included a mock-up of a Nazi torture chamber, he said, adding that he lost it in the "Mind Control" section of the exhibition.

"I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a 'bigot' by star Scientologists, brainwashed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock-up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."

Rinder said the material in the exhibition came from psychiatric archives. "It's all documentary and its all on video, that's why we did it," he said.

Before reading the article below, PLEASE watch the videos below. They really help in a better understanding of the situation.

Scientologists’ audio manipulated video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J8-Zfzd55E&mode=related&search= documentary, pt 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0UZ7xeni28&mode=related&search= documentary, pt 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPnoqGHhmWc&mode=related&search= doc pt 3 (this one has the original footage)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39mRWMR142U&mode=related&search= doc pt 4

It is usually assumed, nowadays, that making extremely loud and dissonant noises with one’s voice as an expression of a particularly heightened rage is a trait displayed only by women. (Yes, feminists, another noble cause for you to fight for!) It would also be considered very surprising to see a man dressed in tie and jacket screaming like a banshee in a public place.

It is also surprising that a religion which dictates with no basis whatsoever that an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" called Xenu, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in Douglas DC-8 airliners (NO joke here, please), stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, causing their souls to cluster together and stick to the bodies of the living, causing all sorts of physical ailments, can exist in a world where I am seriously inclined to think most humans posses lumps of fat in their heads called brains. (Welcome and that was your crash course into Scientology, the 100000-member religion of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, founded by the science fiction writer Ron Hubbard. Don’t laugh. They’ll sue you like the PAP. )

It is then that I find this article about a male BBC reporter screaming at a highly-ranked scientologist so disturbingly interesting. (for a sudden realization that I lack a better phrase.) Humorous innuendos aside—yes, I admit that I find scientology, frankly, a religion lost in the stone age. Yet, even as I express my personal disbelief in this private medium of a blog, I think there is fundamentally wrong about a BBC reporter losing his cool at a member of a different religion so drastically in the course of his work—a supposedly objective and unbiased profession, I might add.

I believe that both parties involved in this dispute have proven to be equally at fault—the reporter, for losing his temper, and the Scientologists, for their extremely disgraceful reaction, as well as the precedents that they set for this scene to occur.

The Humanist would condemn Sweeney for his disrespect for other’s religions, (read: pseudoreligion, cult, classified in Germany alongside Islamic Extremism and Organized Crime as a National Threat) and, indeed, my stance must share several similarities with the humanist. Every human being has a connate, inalienable value, and hence his personal beliefs, which on a philosophical level (sorry for sounding so arsty-fartsy here, but I think that ultimately what has to be said has to be said) he cooses in order to infuse his life with a higher meaning, have to be respected as a tenet of his person. To mock or show disregard for a person’s religion, then, would amount to a slur of the person’s personal choice as to how he defines his life—a decision that, I personally believe, can be attained logically, but is also very much a personal, one. I am not saying here that one cannot express disagreement with another's religion—it is just that I believe that this must be done with respect and understanding for the other party involved. And quite certainly Sweeney’s corybantic reaction does not fulfill this criterion.

And yet, I feel that we must understand that Sweeney was dealing with a person who believed in a religion that must have looked nothing short of preposterous to him, was being very stubborm about pressing a point, and who belonged to a organization whose members had been harassing and trailing him for a very long time, not to mention having a notoriously Western-Jihadist like history. Under such circumstances, I think that is it all too easy for a person to lose his fragile hold on his temper, and that even if we do not forgive Sweeney, we must at least empathize with him.

This does not in any way imply that the scientologists are not to blame for anything at all. They were certainly people who did NOT empathize with Sweeney in any way—in fact, they went on a personal revengeful putsch against the BBC and Sweeney, going so far as to tamper with the video they released by making Sweeney’s shouts impossibly loud, and even distribute 100000 copies of this video to various scientologists. Steps to reconciliation? If anything, they are flagitiously seeking to widen what was a mere misunderstanding to something far worse out of nothing but spite. And who says reciprocity is justice? In many cases reciprocity serves as a convenient excuse for a malevolent counterblow to satisfy one’s vindictive, almost sadistic pleasure at seeing what was done to you being inflicted back upon the person who did it to you. Justice? Hardly.

As Ravi Zacharias, a logician and Christian Apologist once said: “The worst part about slinging mud at others is that you get your hands dirty in the process.”

Now that this fight starts to take on a distinctly puerile but malevolent form on the internet, I think that it is time to call a halt to this ultimately petty squabble of two parties trying desperately to protect two immensely fragile egos. Sure, a reporter lost his cool and shouted, but please do not forget that whatever someone’s profession, one must judge someone both according to the ideals of the profession, and according to his human connate propensity to let his emotions override good judgment. Get over it, both of you.

Mistakes are mistakes, nothing more. Do not make them worse by deliberately using them as stumbling blocks to halt progress simply for the sake of satisfying your own desires. If everyone in the world refused to settle disputes but rather pursue their own personal “morally right, only-according-to-justice” tirades, this world would not be worth living in.

My message to the two parties is this: Get over it, and stop trying to make yourself appear more stupidly stubborn than the other. Forgive, and please do try, like civilized people, to forget.

(500 words)

excellent readings on scientology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_the_legal_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White ----this operation was the largest largest program of domestic espionage in U.S. history. The Church of Scientology merely said that its members were convicted of stealing "photocopy paper"