Sir, I was intrigued recently (August 20th) to see not one, but two articles on my religion, the Church of Scientology, in The Irish Times. It is only regrettable that neither article was very accurate, to say the least.
The current wave of religious xenophobia against Scientology by the German Government has reached a farcical level with the attempted boycott of the film Mission Impossible simply because its star, Tom Cruise, is a scientologist! Fortunately the German public has voted with its feet the film reached No 1 at the box office.
At last, the persistent government attempts to deprive scientologists of their constitutional rights are being exposed to a world wide audience. The pathetic attempts by politicians to justify their bigotry by denigrating this religion merely highlights the hole they are digging for themselves.
They claim that scientology is not a religion, and that therefore their discrimination is legal. This ludicrous contention is utterly contradicted by all the international religious scholars who have studied this church (for example Dr J. Gordon Melton, Dr Massimo Introvigne, etc) and all the countries across the globe who fully recognise Scientology to be a bona fide religion from the US to Albania, Russia to Italy, Hungary to Australia, etc.
Indeed the German Government has been totally condemned for its sectarianism by two separate United Nations Human Rights Reports, by the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe(CSCE), the US State Department, and the US Senate. This is the first time since the second World War that Germany "has been so cited, and revealingly, it has coincided with the rise of fascism once again in the home of the little corporal.
The propaganda of Bonn does not obscure the prejudice. It's high time that the European Community took Helmut Kohl and his cronies to task we don't need a rerun of the 1930s. Yours, etc., Clancy Road, Finglas East, Dublin 11.