Tulsi is a Rising Star Despite Lies From Biased Media
Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media Contrives Controversy
The Motive
Pierre Omidyar continues his smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard through his personally funded media projects The Intercept and Honolulu Civil Beat, as well as having his reporters submit articles to left-leaning media outlets.
- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is the #1 opponent of failed, regime change war policy in our country today
- Tulsi is one of the very few American politicians who are 100% PAC free, she only accepts donations from American citizens.
- Pierre Omidyar, eBay billionaire, supports and has funded regime change war
- Periodicals that are financially supported by Pierre Omidyar, The Intercept and Civil Beat, have published multiple articles blatantly smearing Tulsi through bigoted attacks and deliberate misrepresentations of her positions and policies
- The latest attacks on Tulsi are so desperate that they not only are attacking Tulsi and her Hindu religion, they attack any American with a Hindu sounding last name who donates to Tulsi
- They identify such “Hindu nationalists” by castigating American citizens who donate to Tulsi, who are ”individual donors with names, according to an expert consulted by The Intercept, that are of Hindu origin.”
What is motivating these attacks? Americans are increasingly weary of regime change war policy that ends the lives of thousands of American sons and daughters while draining our national treasury of trillions of dollars, and creating instability and chaos internationally. Yet such regime change wars notoriously line the pockets of corporate interests, who have vested interests in such a destructive war policy.
eBay billionaire Omidyar funded regime change in Ukraine. He was essential to removing Viktor Yanukovych from power, funding Ukrainian neo-Nazi opposition groups to the tune of $335,000. He helped fund Viktor Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution by funding his right-hand man Oleh Rybachuk through a group of interlocking NGOs including Chesno and New Citizen. Chesno was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) 54%, Pierre Omidyar 36% other funders included the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), whose key funder is billionaire George Soros, and National Endowment for Democracy, which is largely funded by the U.S. Congress.
The head of Omidyar Network in India, Jayant Sinha, also helped elect Narendra Modi and ran for a BJP parliamentary seat of his own. After winning his election, Modi gave a speech calling for opening India’s e-commerce market to foreign companies such as eBay, whose largest shareholder is Pierre Omidyar.
Pierre Omidyar has also been charged with privatizing the Snowden leaks with the majority of the up to 200,000 files remaining unpublished. In the article, The Intercept Withheld NSA Doc That May Have Altered Course Of Syrian War it was proven that the Intercept withheld a document “which effectively destroys Washington’s “moderate rebels” narrative with its own internal documents, only after the U.S. government itself began to unravel that very same narrative”
Also one of the chief billionaire-backers of the “Resistance” is Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar has given hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cash to establishment Democratic Party candidates since 1999.
The Fact Check
In the latest smear article about Tulsi titled “TULSI GABBARD IS A RISING PROGRESSIVE STAR, DESPITE HER SUPPORT FOR HINDU NATIONALISTS” published in both Pierre Omidyar’s Intercept and Honolulu Civil Beat he continue a years-long smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard using association fallacies, speculation, and disinformation. The reason why Omidyar is behind these attacks is increasingly clear. Tulsi Gabbard speaks up against regime change and Omidyar financially supports regime change.
First, Soumya Shankar tries to tie the leader of the world’s largest democracy, Narendra Modi to autocratic regimes throughout the world, ignoring the fact that India is a secular democracy.
Then Shankar falsely claims that Modi was responsible for deaths in the 2002 riots that were triggered by the Godhra train burning where 59 religious pilgrims including 27 women and 10 children died in an arson fire inside the Sabarmati Express train near the Godhra railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat. The arson was committed by a mob of 1,000 to 2,000 people. India’s Supreme Court appointed a Special Investigating Team (SIT) found that Sourin Roy, the commander of the Muslim radical group “Harkat-ul Jehad-e-Islami” organized the attack. A court later convicted 31 Muslims for the incident and the conspiracy for the crime.
This was the trigger for the Gujarat riots where 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed. Modi declared a state of emergency with curfews knowing there would be trouble. The police were unable to stop the ensuing violence and over 200 police were killed while trying. In 2012, Modi was cleared by Special Investigating Team. The SIT also rejected claims that the state government had not done enough to prevent the riots.
Then Soumya Shankar tries to tie the Hindu-American Foundation to the RSS and other Indian organizations when it is a politically agnostic and non-partisan organization which is a Hindu American advocacy group fully based in the U.S. “HAF is not affiliated with any religious or political organizations or entities. HAF seeks to serve Hindu Americans across all Hindu religious traditions regardless of race, color, national origin, citizenship, caste, gender, sexual orientation, age and/or disability.” They have also published an article to refute a previous Hindophobic article.
Then it gets really weird, Shankar draws association fallacies that Tulsi supports “authoritarians abroad, including Modi, Sisi, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad” This is not unusual for people that seek more war to say that Tulsi, who is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee somehow supports the leaders of countries with which she is tasked with investigating and working to improve relations between the U.S. and these foreign countries.
Shankar then baselessly tries to say that Hindu Americans who have supported the first American Hindu in Congress are pro-Modi and that she has “publicly cut ties” with some, without providing a scintilla of proof.
In 2014 Tulsi was invited by a local Indian-American community organization to speak at their event in Atlanta. Tulsi did not receive any monetary compensation for attending and speaking. Hindus are the dominant group in India but a religious minority with very little voice in the US. It is bigotry to suggest Hindu Americans shouldn’t advocate for themselves politically because of the misdeeds of the BJP or others in India.
This article the bases the idea that she has received support from Sangh Parivar based on the fact that “800 individual donors with names, according to an expert consulted by The Intercept, that are of Hindu origin” How exactly is this not xenophobic? Are all people with names “of Hindu origin” necessarily Hindu nationalists? Do all people with Hindu sounding names support Modi? Could you imagine if they had said the said similarly about the newest Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, that she was connected to terrorist groups because some of her donors had Arabic sounding names? Under this same logic, the author, Soumya Shankar could also be said to be a Hindu nationalist because of her Hindu sounding last name.
This is simply Hinduphobia at it’s worst. Hinduphobia is no less insidious than Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or any other bigotry.
Later in the article, Shankar presents The World Hindu Congress(WHC) as an example of distancing herself from the Sangh affiliates. The WHC is organized by Hindu-Americans. When it first was announced in 2017 the guest list included a variety of Hindus and spiritual leaders including the Dalai Lama. Tulsi was invited to be the chair of the event. The guest list published originally appears to be a wish list, when those people could not make it, quite a few political leaders from India were invited, including controversial character Mohan Bhagwat.
Contrary to their claims and the claims of the article, Tulsi resigned from the 2018 World Hindu Congress days after Bhagwat became involved and several months prior to OFMI calling on her to do what had already been done. Tulsi campaign immediately reached out to OFMI seeking to clarify the inaccuracies of the articles they were publishing yet no response was made. They claimed they made her do step down and continue to use logical fallacies to blame her for things that happen in India. The Organization for Minorities is criticizing another’s religious freedom. This is the height of hypocrisy.
This same attack was sent via email to all Democratic Party of Hawaii members, during the recent primary election, it is clear that this mainland group was coordinating with someone here in Hawaii, most likely a candidate in the race who has access to the voter list and emails of Democratic Party members.
One of Tulsi’s supporters reached out to her campaign to clarify if the campaign had contacted OFMI to correct this misinformation they are spreading: Tulsi’s campaign manager Erika Tsuji responded with,
“Unfortunately, this is mudslinging and Hinduphobia at its worst. Sadly, rather than celebrate love and aloha as Tulsi tries to do every day (and was demonstrated in her unifying keynote address at the Muslims for Peace Conference: https://youtu.be/HQ6_YdIsGi4), this group is more interested in spreading lies, hate, and division. We have reached out to OFMI to correct the misinformation, but they have been unresponsive because they are not interested in the truth — they only want to spread lies and are providing a great disservice to the people of Hawaii in their attempts to influence our primary election.”
If you want to know Tulsi’s stance on religious freedom, please watch Tulsi’s keynote speech at the 2016 Reason Rally. This speech goes into depth as to how she strongly stands for secularism and religious freedom for all:
I encourage you to learn more about Tulsi Gabbard and not fall for logical fallacies and nonsense.
Note: The Intercept published these notes of admission of guilt:
“Update: January 10, 2018
This piece has been updated to include a comment from Rishi Bhutada that he provided after publication.
Editor’s Note: January 25, 2019
A previous version of this article included a parenthetical sentence about donations to Tulsi Gabbard from individuals with names of Hindu origin, as identified by an expert. The sentence was intended to show Gabbard’s broad base of support in the Hindu-American community, given her standing as the first Hindu in Congress. We did not intend to question the motives of those political donors. We apologize for any such implication, and we have removed the sentence.”
