Producer of KNOCKING posts at my guest list, Barbara Anderson replies (page 6)

hawkaw

Q. How can I send mail to PBS?

A. Due to security concerns, please be aware that mail is screened. There generally is a delay in the receipt of letters or packages; if possible postcard or email correspondence is requested. We are interested in your comments and suggestions. You can send mail to PBS Headquarters at the following address:

Public Broadcasting Service
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, VA 22314

hawkaw

Okay folks ... this so-called producer would have Emails Ms. Cheryl Jones at PBS. This is here particulars:

Cheryl Jones
Senior Director, Program Development & Independent Film
PBS Headquarters
1320 Braddock Place
Alexandria, VA 22314
phone: (703) 739-5150
fax: (703) 739-5295
[email protected]

I say Email her with your complaints about this Knocking proposal.

hawk

hopetofade

Bump...

hawkaw

July 12, 2005

Cheryl Jones
Senior Director, Program Development & Independent Film
PBS Headquarters 1320 Braddock Place Alexandria , VA 22314

Dear Ms. Jones:

Re: Concern Over Open Door Productions Proposed Knocking Documentary for PBS

My name is ------- and I reside in ------ . I am a ------. In my spare time, I attempt to assist Jehovah’s Witnesses advocates who are trying to protect children from pedophiles. As a long time viewer of PBS, especially NOVA productions, I was taken back by recent information indicating that you have agreed to go ahead with a Jehovah’s Witnesses production titled “Knocking” by Open Door Productions who reside out of San Francisco , CA 94107 . It appears Mr. Joel Engardio and Mr. Tom Shepard lead the documentary and are working to air the documentary on PBS . From their Internet site called www.knocking.org I observed the following:

By fighting for their right to live and worship as they choose, Jehovah's Witnesses won legal victories that protected civil liberties and free choice for all Americans. By refusing blood transfusions, but insisting on medical care, Jehovah's Witnesses risked their lives in pursuit of new bloodless technology now used on all types of patients. By resisting Hitler and his Nazi army, German Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to the concentration camps and became martyrs.

On a Discussion Group I noted the following Internet Thread subject http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/93613/1.ashx . In this Internet Thread Mr. Engardio apparently stated the following:

The aim of KNOCKING is to give a general, non-Jehovah's Witness audience a fair look at a religious group that has long been misunderstood and relegated to cartoonish stereotypes. KNOCKING uses the real life stories of real families to humanize Jehovah's Witnesses

Fair enough.

However, in the same Internet Thread I noted the following comments from my good friends, Ms. Barbara Anderson from Tennessee and Mr. Alan Feuerbacher from Colorado who wrote to Mr. Engardio over this proposed documentary. Some of their comments (which I fully agree with) to Mr. Engardio are as follows:

It appears to me that KNOCKING will not “tackle” even one of the issues that I brought up which Jehovah’s Witnesses “grapple with,” although you said "...we are sensitive to the valid criticisms of Jehovah's Witnesses.” These valid criticisms, which you are sensitive about, must be the unreported and covered-up child molestation, the unfair disfellowshipping practices resulting in shunning, and the misrepresentations about the blood doctrine and the Holocaust. Apparently, you believe that these valid criticisms are too much “inside baseball” for the average viewer, so you will not touch them.
As you know, JWs practice shunning. Shunning is done on both formal and informal levels. The formal level entails both "disfellowshipping" and "disassociation". In the first case, a person goes through a trial of sorts and is judged unrepentant of some sin, and then formally expelled from the JW organization. In the second case, the person is declared to have removed himself from the JW organization. In practice, the two terms amount to the same thing -- shunning of the expelled person by all JWs. Informal shunning covers a range of possibilities, from a JW simply deciding not to associate with someone, to the Society's writing a letter to a family or congregation suggesting that a person be informally shunned.
In 2002, about a week before the [2002] NBC Dateline program on child molestation problems in the JWs aired, the Society directed the elders of three congregations to disfellowship four people who were prominently to appear on the show: Barbara Anderson , William Bowen, and Carl and Barbara Pandelo. The Society claimed to the news media that the disfellowshippings had nothing to do with Dateline.
Today it is a lie for the Watchtower Society ( WTS ) to claim that Jehovah's Witnesses abstain from accepting transfusion of whole blood, erythrocytes, leukocytes, platelets or plasma. Why? Because the WTS no longer forbids Jehovah's Witnesses from accepting transfusions of these so long as it is part of a “current therapy” and it is autologous blood. Examples of this include Jehovah's Witnesses accepting nuclear scanning of red and/or white blood cells. This process requires removal of a portion of red and/or white cells so they can be exposed to radioisotopes. The nuclear charged red and/or white cells are then transfused back to the patient for later scanning.

Why does the WTS persist in teaching Jehovah's Witnesses and the rest of the world that Jehovah's Witnesses abstain from blood when it knows perfectly well that Jehovah's Witnesses use products from blood all the time? Given that the WTS requires Jehovah's Witnesses to respect Jehovah's Witnesses for literally using everything from blood so long as it is sufficiently fractionated first, why does it impose any prohibitions on using blood under threat of congregational shunning?

Additionally, on the subject of blood and regarding your advertisement for KNOCKING, exactly how does an instance of one of Jehovah's Witnesses utilizing the best medicine has to offer--your show's example surgical technique--address a religious teaching that in many cases forbids Jehovah's Witnesses from utilizing the best medicine has to offer? For your program to accurately illustrate the cause of complaint regarding the Watchtower Society's blood doctrine, it will have to examine one of the many instances where it leads to avoidable disability or premature death because this is the area where objections lay. No one objects to Jehovah's Witnesses or anyone else taking advantage of advanced medical procedures.

Regarding the Holocaust, please read, JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND THE THIRD REICH, SECTARIAN POLITICS UNDER PERSECUTION by M. James Penton (http://www.freeminds.org/sales/books.htm). The author, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Lethbridge, Canada, speaks five languages and translated released German archival documents from the Nazi era. He proves without a shadow of a doubt that the leaders of German Jehovah's Witnesses, some of whom died in the camps, "were from the beginning quite prepared to support the Hitler government." The Witness propaganda has led people to believe that they "were united in their opposition to Nazism and did not collude with the Third Reich," but Mr. Penton proves otherwise. Jehovah's Witnesses' leaders were not politically neutral, and even the number of Jehovah's Witnesses that supposedly died in the camps was fictional.

And, last, but not least, if you read the attachment I sent along with my first e-mail, which contained a lecture I gave, you know that I complimented the leaders of Jehovah's Witnesses for their fight for civil liberties for their organization, yet, they prohibit freedom of speech and freedom of religious thought for their members. It is this that causes divided families. There is no "common ground" when people are punished for disagreeing with their religion and when their families remain within the religion.

If your aim "is to give a general, non-Jehovah's Witness audience a fair look at a religious group that has long been misunderstood and relegated to cartoonish stereotypes," why don't you also give a non-Jehovah's Witness audience a fair look at former Jehovah's Witnesses and interview some of the tens of thousands of us so everyone can hear what we have had to endure at the hands of "misunderstood" Jehovah's Witnesses because we either left their organization or were disfellowshipped for "apostasy" as I was.

Based on the above, I am very concerned that this upcoming documentary is ignoring some of the basic problems with the Jehovah’s Witnesses including the pain and suffering endured by little children. Based on the information I have read, I believe the proposed documentary will not accurately reflect what the Jehovah’s Witnesses and its parent corporation called the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York are all about for the American and Canadian Public.

I have reviewed your editorial standards. I note the following:

Documentaries are to be fair in order to not mislead the public
Documentaries must be accurate using factual evidence (ie. JWs do actually accept blood transfusions unlike what this producer suggests)
Documentaries must have objectivity presented in a neutral way
Documentaries must be balanced
Documentaries must not have unacceptable production practices that invent or add elements or never make choices that mislead or deceive the audience (such as the false JW Holocaust claim, abstain blood claims or producers ignoring shunning)

As Mr. Feuerbacher of Colorado properly noted in this comments on the Internet Thread , a bout 1994, CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Company) produced a documentary called "Children of Jehovah" for it’s The Fifth Estate show, which largely consisted of interviews with young people who quit, or were expelled from the JWs, and whose parents shunned them. One can hardly keep a dry eye watching this film. All of this shunning, of course, is done at the direction of Watchtower leaders. In January 2003 the CBC ’s The Fifth Estate then ran a documentary about the serious Child Abuse issues in this religious group that showed how it covered up the abuse and protected the pedophiles, survivors and advocates were and still are silenced by the shunning and how these pedophiles actually go out and “knock” on the public’s door. I should know seeing I assisted the The Fifth Estate in their 2003 documentary.

The Producers cannot ignore the information in these CBC documentaries along with the NBC Dateline Documentary of 2002 as well as published books by learned authors and Professors such as James Penton. To do so would be biased in my opinion and not provide the American and Canadian public with a true idea of what the Jehovah’s Witnesses including their leadership is all about.

In order that any documentary meets PBS’s high quality standards, it would be wise for PBS and the Producers of Knocking to consider Ms. Anderson’s following comments that she made in the above Internet Thread:

Interview and report on some of the thousands of husbands and wives of Jehovah's Witnesses who are in court fighting to see their children because Jehovah's Witnesses (and their Witness attorneys) don't want "worldly mates" to have any influence in the raising of their children.

Interview and report on some of the thousands of relatives of Jehovah's Witnesses who watched their loved ones die because of the Watchtower Society's misrepresented blood policy.

Interview and report on some of the 1,800 victims of child sexual abuse (committed by Jehovah's Witnesses pedophiles), who have approached just one Texas law firm [Love and Norris]. And how about talking to some of the over 4,000 people who have contacted www.silentlambs.org about their molestation within this organization, almost all unreported to the authorities. And what about mentioning the over 20,000 files kept at Watchtower headquarters that describe each mostly unreported accusation of molestation in the congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States and Canada.

Interview and report on the children of Jehovah's Witnesses who are emotionally pushed to baptism, some as young as seven years old, and, who, by the time they are teenagers, are disfellowshipped and shunned by their families and the only friends they ever had just because they committed some rebellious "sin." Let some of them tell you what their lives were like on the streets. And let them tell you about the psychological damage and need for therapy because of the self-loathing and guilt because they couldn't live up to the religion's demands. And, if the dead could speak, you could interview some who have committed suicide because they could no longer endure the isolation of shunning.

I hope PBS will continue to meet its high standards of reporting. As one who has worked with many American news organizations such as but not limited to Ms. Laurie Goodstein at the New York Times and many Legal Counsel such as Ms. Kim Norris of Love and Norris to help child abuse survivors and their advocates from the Watchtower, I hope that this documentary will not in anyway mislead or deceive the public in the harm that is created by this religious group’s leadership.

Yours truly and take care,

xxxxxxx

c: Lesli Rotenberg, Senior Vice President, Brand Management, Promotion and Media Relations - Katherine Lauderdale, Senior Vice President and General Counsel - Cindy Johanson, Senior Vice President, Interactive and Education - Pat Hunter, Senior Vice President, Programming Services - Jacoba Atlas, Senior Vice President & Co-Chief Program Executive - Pat Mitchell, President & Chief Executive Officer - Knocking.org - Ms. Barbara Anderson , Tennessee

hawkaw

BTTT

Sorry about my formating on the above letter. But hopefully you will get what I wrote and how I formatted it.

hawk

hawkaw

For instance, the young man who does a groundbreaking bloodless liver transplant has opposing family members who come to the hospital to see first-hand that the new bloodless technology works.

hmm ... Typically, white blood cells are usually transferred along with the organ from the donor to the new patient. I wonder if the producer asked the question (or should ought to have asked the question) if any white blood cells were transferred to the new patient and ask what the patient thought about that since the WTS prevents a transfusion of white blood cells but seems to allow organ transplants that will have white blood cells from a donor .....

outoftheorg

Hawkaw

I will never be able to put into words, how very much I respect and admire you and your actions.

You are a fine and honorable man, the world needs more like you.

If the internet and a forum like this and people like you and Barbara Andersen were here around thirty years ago, I would probably still have an intact family.

I have e mailed pbs and talked to the local Idaho state pbs reps, about these issues.

I ENCOURAGE EVERYONE on this forum to phone or email or snail mail these people listed above and in A RESPECTFUL CALM COLLECTED way to state their reasons, that more information is needed to really describe the jw's correctly and completely.

Outoftheorg

I say Email her with your complaints about this Knocking proposal.

t

Producer of KNOCKING posts at my guest list, Barbara Anderson replies

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