Thousands Protest Scientology In Canada, US, UK, Australia and More

by Rob Walker | February 11, 2008 at 11:20 am | 1301 views | 3 comments

Amsterdam Anonymous Scientology Raid 10 February 2008

After a video by anti-scientologist group anonymous broke across the net last month, a number of things happened. First, Scientologists flipped out (one member even claimed the masked video posters were 'cyber-terrorists') and demanded videos be removed from youtube, etc. As this was happening, Anonymous released a 45 minute video of Tom Cruise talking about scientology and well, generally acting pretty weird, to put it mildly.
Citing copyright issues, Scientologists have gotten the video removed from google and youtube, however it is still easily found on liveleak.com and a number of other sites.
On Feb. 10, organised on the anniversary of the day Lisa McPherson died under scientologist care, thousands of protesters in dozens of countries organized peaceful protests outside Scientology headquarters.

Masked demonstrators gathered outside London's Church of Scientology in protest against the organisation.
The group, called Anonymous, said they wanted to highlight the organisation's "inherent flaws" and "fight for freedom of knowledge and information".
The City of London Police said about 200 people took part in the peaceful protest in Queen Victoria Street.

An Australian newspaper printed a giant photo of protesters, however they edited out the words 'Tom Cruise' and 'Lisa McPherson' from the print publication, but left the online version intact. You can see the difference in the image on the right. We're waiting to hear back from the newspaper's editorial team on why they chose to alter an image for publication.

The number of protestors in cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London, Manchester, Dublin, Stockholm, New York, Detroit and Washington were put at between 6000 and 8000 on an internet forum used by members of the group.

All this is happening just as an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise is coming out.

"I just thought the Scientology was just like an add-on to his life and he just paid lip service to it," Morton says.
"What I didn't realize was how absolutely to the bone this is in him, and in a way it helps to explain why he's so suspicious of the outside world. Scientology is controlling, it's dominating, it's their way or the highway. They believe that only they have the answers to all the problems in the world, and in a way it kind of meshes quite nicely with his own fairly authoritarian character. It's a good fit."

There are a huge number of youtube videos
of the protest, too many to list. There are unconfirmed reports of
protest members being followed home and receiving legal threats,
despite being masked during the protests.

The Church of Scientology slammed the protests, quoted as saying: "Anonymous is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry.

"It is Anonymous that has repeatedly attempted to suppress free speech through illegal assaults on church websites so as to prevent internet users from obtaining information."