Hinduphobia, Lies and Bias in the Spheres of Academia and the Media
(Taken from ‘A Hindu’s Guide to Advocacy and Activism’)
“For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ~JFK
The five top television companies in India are owned by either Muslim or Christian factions and continuously misrepresent Hinduism and Hindus. This causes anti-Hindu sentiment and abuses to Hindus.
Media outlets that are specifically Christian in the US also seem intent on demeaning Hindus and denying them their humanity by representing them as savage, backwards, superstitious, fascist and casteist. One has said that India is, “the pig pen of the East” and that Hinduism is, “one of the world’s most dirty and dignity destroying religions.”
They have further said that “Hindus don’t believe in forgiveness, have no morals, take pleasure in the suffering of others and engage in domestic violence.” Some others have reported that “yoga in the US will corrupt its population.” and that “Hindus gain supernatural powers from Satan” and that “Hinduism is demon worship”.
During the Hindu festival of Diwali in 2021, soon before the Pope was to meet with PM Modi, the Vatican released a message to Hindus regarding what the Catholic News Agency and the Pope called, “Hindu `hyper-nationalism”. Though Vatican City is a Catholic state and theocracy, while the Indian government is a secular democracy. The Pope certainly doesn’t want to see any sort of Hindu with identity or empowerment.
The author of this biased and demeaning article, is the usual Hinduphobic Christian supremacist who does not have a brain capable of understanding Hinduism, Indian history, politics or culture. She ignores the fact that the Indian government is one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse in the world and that India is the world’s largest democracy.
Vatican city is but one of fifteen Christian nations that vilify Hindus, and do not want India to also have an official (Hindu) religion in its government or nation. They demonize Hindus for wanting the same thing they already have and are so proud of. They don’t want India to be recognized for its dharma. A Hindu India would bring wealth, empowerment and inspiration to Hindus worldwide. Christians obviously don’t want to see that. They like their Hindus voiceless, poor, docile and uneducated.
Due to such Christian bigotry, hypocrisy, myopia and intolerance, Hindus face discrimination in India where they are the majority, and of course in the West where they aren’t. Hindu students face xenophobia and bullying in Western schools. Imagine what it must be like for an Indian Hindu student to attend classes in a school that won’t even allow the purely physical aspects of yoga to be taught, due to a school board and PTA that says it’s “devil worship”. These Christian supremacists are so dumb, they want to exorcise exercise.
Due to the Hindu-hating propaganda of these expansionist religions, over twenty-five Hindu temples in America have been ransacked in the last twenty years. Many Hindus and Sikhs have been attacked and killed by Christians mistaking them for Muslims. Remember, these aren’t the most intelligent people in the world we are dealing with. Many still falsely think that Hindus took down the Twin Towers.
The mainstream media in the US and Europe tends to coddle Islam and Muslims, while vilifying Hinduism and Hindus by creating and perpetuating false and negative stereotypes. I truly don’t understand their unexplainable love affair with all things Islam. They back the false narratives that Hindus are dirty, violent, misogynistic and discriminatory. At the same time, they portray Islam as a peaceful religion followed by innocent darlings. Until the next soon-to-be-forgotten Islamic terrorist attack, that the media will blame on mental illness.
Just one of many examples of anti-Hindu rhetoric happened in 2019. A Muslim reporter for leftist radio station NPR stated that, “If Hindus gave up Hinduism, they could solve all their problems. What with all the piss drinking and dung worshiping”. Western liberal media outlets are among the worst offenders. NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Yahoo News and the Independent, seem to print anti-Hindu articles daily.
“The media is the most powerful entity on Earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent…to make the criminal look like the victim and the victim look like the criminal because they control the minds of the masses.” ~Malcolm X
Social media is also biased against Hinduism and Hindus. If a Christian, Muslim or atheist posts photos of cows being brutally slaughtered at Hindu groups, they are not considered to go against Facebook’s community standards. If a Hindu uses the word “Muslim” and the word “insane” in the same sentence, he or she is put in Facebook jail for a month. If you’re Hindu, your very existence seems to go against Mark Zuckerberg’s “community standards”.
How do haters use Facebook and Twitter to promote false anti-Hindu sentiment? On October 29th 2021, a photo of one hundred Muslim women in burkas began to be mass-circulated throughout social media, along with a story. It claimed the women were medical students in India who raised pro-Pakistan signs. It claimed that Hindu nationalists in India’s government canceled their degrees for doing so.
A Google reverse image search, exposed these posts as being false. The photo was actually from 2017 and was originally attached to a story about Muslim women actually being more free to acquire college degrees in India, than in Pakistan. Of course, anyone with an agenda can use social media as a tool for propaganda and discrimination. It is however used disproportionately against Hindus, their allies and their advocates. Using anti-Hindu false news is nothing new. It certainly predates the advent of social media.
This last Christmas of 2021, Western news outlets shared the story about twelve Hindus who disrupted a Christmas celebration in India. They did this to portray Hindus as intolerant of Indian Christians. What they don’t mention is that Christians in India often preach that their inquisitions in India either didn’t happen or that they were good, because they civilized the “Hindu savages”. They are like the modern Nazis who deny the Holocaust ever happened. These news outlets also fail to mention the fact that millions of Indian Hindus join in on the Christmas festivities and wish Christians many a “Merry Christmas!” In April of 2020, a Christian mob of 200, beat two Hindu priests and their driver to death. The American press was silent.
These Western news outlets or those who produce them, sit up in their high castles judging India, Hinduism and Hindus. Most of these people only have a superficial and bigoted understanding of Hinduism, have never visited India and mostly likely don’t even know any Hindus. They are, but neo-colonialists.
What colonialism has done in the world in the last 500 years to various innocent people is nefarious, to say the least. Are they proud to have conquered, settled and exploited large areas of the world? They should concentrate on their own crimes against humanity instead of degrading Hindus who by comparison, have been historically peaceful and accepting of diversity.
Why don’t they print articles about American-Christian intolerance? They placed 120,000 Japanese in concentration camps. They live in a nation built on the savage annihilation of its native people. They massacred the indigenous peoples mercilessly and put the survivors and their descendants on reservations.
Then the new Americans abducted Africans and used their slave labor to further build their nation. It took Americans almost 250 years to realize slavery was wrong. What Americans have done and continue to do to its African and Native citizens, is horrid beyond description.
The owners, editors and writers of these American and European newspapers should focus on their own problems instead of fabricating stories about Hinduism, Hindus and India. Americans in general should focus on their own problems and stop trying to police the world.
These Western newspapers and broadcasters seldom cover stories involving Hinduphobia, Hindumisia or the persecution of Hindus. They do not report when Hindus are murdered by Muslims in places like Pakistan, Indonesia, Kashmir, West Bengal or Bangladesh. They either have a love affair with Islam, or they just don’t want their headquarters to be suicide-bombed.
They do not report when Hindu temples and Hindu icons are destroyed in Muslim-majority countries. They do not report when Pakistani Hindu girls are kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam and forced to marry some old Muslim man. Yet, say a Muslim man rapes a Hindu girl in a rural, unpoliced area of India, and Indian Hindu men seek vigilante justice, beating the rapist. This story will make the news in the West, and the Hindu men will be portrayed as vicious Islamophobic villains.
The truth is that Muslims have more rights, wealth and happiness in India than they do in America, or even in some of their own countries led by Islamic governments. There are more than 300,000 mosques in India, compared to 2,770 inthe US. Indian Muslim men are allowed to marry four wives in India. We’d never see that in the US.
Despite India’s violent past with invasions and Muslim rule, and despite there being over 500 radical Islamic cells in India, the Indian government has not had an all-out Muslim ban. The US has banned Muslims from entering its country and obtaining citizenship. So is it India or America that treats Muslims badly? If there were as many Muslims in the US as there are in India, there would be an American, Christian vs. Muslim civil war.
The PEW Research Center conducted a study from 2019-2020. It showed that an overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims thought Indian culture was the best in the world. This study conducted over 30,000 face-to-face interviews and found that 89 percent of Indian Muslims and Christians, felt very free to practice their religion. It also found that 85 percent of Indian Hindus thought that respecting other religions was especially important to being truly Indian. So all in all, Indian Muslims feel more free to practice their religion in India than they probably do in America.
Western academia along with Jesuit schools in the East, teach a false history of India. Many deny the viciousness of India’s Muslim invasions. Many deny the oppressive nature of India’s former Muslim and British rule. Many deny the genocidal actions of these rulers. They teach the Aryan invasion theory as fact, even after DNA and archaeological evidence has shown it to be false. The first thing American high schools teach about Hinduism in World Religion classes, is the myopic and false narrative that Hindus are casteists.
In September of 2021, cowardly anonymous bigots organized their ‘Dismantling Global Hindutva’ conference which was supposedly sponsored by numerous American Universities. The word ‘Hindutva’ is used by Hindus to refer to anything that has the qualities of Hindu spirituality, philosophy and culture. Western media and academia has appropriated this word and turned it into something anti-Hindu.
Hindutva celebrates Hinduism as the world’s original spiritual tradition, and India’s people as the world’s oldest surviving civilization. Hindutva is like a shield for Hindus to use in their defense against all the attacks they face. These academic bullies are opposed to that.
The word ‘Hindu’ came from a mispronunciation of the word ‘Sindhu’ by Persian invaders. This term refers to the people who lived in the Indus valley of ancient Bharat and to their descendants. The term ‘tva’ means ‘quality’ or ‘aspect’. It is used to describe the characteristics and various facets of people, places and things. So to be against Hindutva is to be opposed to all things Hindu, and to be opposed to a race of people who make up one-eighth of the world’s population.
Currently, the largest public university system in the US, California State and others has added “caste” to its anti-discrimination policy. This may seem fine and fair on the surface. No sort of discrimination is good. Such policies are however stemming from a misunderstanding of what “caste” is and is not. They single out Indian students and staff. They enforce undeserved labelling of all Indians. They portray the like, as ‘caste oppressors’ and opportunists. These policies only increase discrimination against Hindus and those of Indian descent. They increase false, negative stereotypes and stigmas.
These policies project false views. If a Hindu student is successful, it is now just because he or she must be of a “higher caste”. If a Hindu professor gives an Indian student a failing grade, it is now due to the professor being of a “higher caste” than the student. Hindus on campus now fear discussing their religion with others. They fear wearing traditional Indian clothing. Even Hindu holidays, festivals and celebrations are being portrayed as casteist. These policies are an extension of the colonial view of caste. They are an extension of Hinduphobia and racism. They discourage Indian Hindus from their own heritage and identity.
Some readers may have heard of sensationalist, bigot and academic fraud, Audrey Truschke. This “hatemonger” is an associate professor of South Asian studies at Rutgers University in Newark New Jersey. Rutgers is more famously known as “Racist Rutgers”, because they keep Tawdry Audrey on their payroll, and give her a pulpit to spew her anti-Hindu hate speech.
Truschke is a denier of Indian Hindu genocides enacted by Islamic invaders. She has said ridiculous and venomous things: that the January sixth insurrection at the US capital was organized by Hindus, that Indian Hindus should not be allowed into the US, that Americans shouldn’t trust a people who worship “300 million gods” or a “God with an elephant’s head who rides a mouse”. She also said that Sita referred to Rama as “a misogynist pig”, in our Ramayana. She’s implied that Hindus are associated Nazis because we use the swastika symbol, and she’s said that our Bhagavad Gita promotes mass murder.
Truschke is known more for her hate of Hinduism and therefore Hindus, than she is for her academic prowess or accuracy. She seems to have developed a personal problem. According to some Indian news outlets, Truschke’s father-in-law Nathan Rehn and husband Thane Rehn had both been caught violating their visa agreements in India, where they were missionaries.
They were known to support a mission in India known as Bless India until 2012, when they withdrew their support due to what they called “sin issues”. We all can easily imagine what that means, as Christian missions and orphanages in India are well known for rampant sexual abuses of Hindu children. It seems Truschke’s family has been in this crooked conversion business for quite some time. Is it possible that all her anti-Hindu vitriol is her way of enacting a sort of preventative damage control, just in case it turns out that her husband and father-in-law were involved with these “sin issues”?
Tawdry Audrey’s constant hate speech is spewed regularly on social media and in her classroom. It has negatively affected Hindus, including her own students at Rutgers. It has affected them psychologically, socially and economically. White Christian supremacist groups in America now consider her an ally. Still Jonathan Holloway, president of “Racist Rutgers” continues to put this anti-Hindu racist up on a pedestal and continues to give her a bully-pulpit. When this results in physical attacks on Hindus, let’s be sure to let the media know who is at fault.
All know, that if Truschke were anti-Christian, she would have been fired immediately. All know, that if she were anti-Muslim, she’d probably be dead. Yet no one seems to care about Hindus, though she is or was being sued by the Hindu American Foundation and other such organizations.
With the left-of-center media in the US and Europe constantly spreading negative, false and myopic narratives about Hindus and Indian politics, and with their love affair with Islam, it’s just a matter of time before we see more hate crimes and terrorist attacks against Hindus in the West on the streets or in temples. When it happens, we know who to blame.
Sean Bradrick is an Ayurvedic counselor and writer living in Omaha, Nebraska USA. Author of ‘A Hindu’s Guide to Advocacy and Activism’.
