Anti-Dalai Lama Shugden Group continues their campaign and spins the facts endlessly

Over the last days some people sent me new links about the activities of the International Shugden Community (ICS) / New Kadampa Tradition (NKT).

It might be a total waste of time and energy to follow their irrational, distorted and factual incorrect slander campaign. Because links and a new post were sent to me and in case you are interested, here an update …

The NKT was able to post a pro Shugden article in “The London Economic” which seems to be a self-made “news site” which posts bits from here and there. I had no time to read the article but it was said that they wrongly claim I had made the images for the CTA of Tibetan Shugden followers (which is a blatant lie as most of what NKT/ICS say). The NKT website www. arebuddhistsracist. com states that it is “our latest article on The London Economic” which makes clear who the source of the article in this online newspaper is. The anonymous author of that article, Indy Hack, pretends to be a journalist and compares the Dalai Lama with the British pedophile Jimmy Saville on his twitter account  and he links there to the NKT website www. arebuddhistsracist. com. Ok, this is how they invent propaganda in the guise of “news”.

Also propaganda in the guise of “news” has been further spread on YouTube by the NKT/ICS/Kelsang Rabten. I briefly glanced through it and recognized that they claim wrongly (what else can be expected than wrong, distorted, semi-true, and untrue information or blatant lies) on minute 6:11 that there were lists of Tibetan Shugden followers in the past and that people on the list were murdered. Total fiction. Nobody from the Shugden people have ever been murdered (except “impure” Shugden practitioners by Shugden himself according to the highest Shugden authority, Trijang Rinpoche). In real life, Shugden people are accused by the Indian police of triple murder and in an evil minded conspiracy Shugden people attempted to murder the assistant of Trijang Chogtrul Rinpoche (a Shugden proponent) in order to blame the CTA/Dalai Lama for that murder (see Bultrini.)

To make it short. The confusion, hate and misinformation of the ICS/NKT are endless and it is a waste of time to go into detail in my opinion. However, for those who still need analysis, here is a GUEST POST (the author is known to the blog owner) that analyses the latest YouTube video of the NKT/ICS.

@NKT/ICS: I made screenshots of what you posted in the context of this post. Even if you change some of your distorted propaganda due to this post (as you did in the past), I have the evidence. It is you who are lying and not the Dalai Lama or me as you wrongly claim.

There are also two new pieces with respect to Shugden. One is a summery of the CTA position & one comes from the background of the CTA:

• Pro-China group harming cause, says Tibetan leader – Naresh K Thakur , Hindustan Times
• A HEARTFELT APPEAL TO ALL THE FRIENDS OF TIBET AND TIBETAN PEOPLE

GUEST POST

The Falling Standard of the NKT’s International Shugden Community Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles in India or Novice Theravada Monks in Burma?

(A Critique of Lies and Misinformation in ISC’s “Exiles in Exile” youtube video)

The latest NKT-created International Shugden Community video presses all the right emotional buttons to ready the troops for the protests they are presumably planning in Germany. Sadly, it contains no compelling evidence and deliberate misinformation. One wishes the NKT ground troops would demand a higher standard from the people who deliver them the “facts”. But why worry about facts when you can manipulate people’s emotions with footage of seemingly suffering children?

Would NKT use and manipulate images of suffering children in order to influence their followers? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

One of the opening scenes from the video is seemingly impoverished child monks begging for food on a dusty throughfare. Such footage would seem to confirm that monks were left homeless because of the Shugden issue. But actually, the footage presumes ignorance on the part of New Kadampa followers of other Buddhist traditions. This is because the footage comes not from Tibetan monasteries in India but a traditional Theravada Buddhist alms round in Myanmar (Burma).

It would be good for NKT followers to get to know more about other Buddhist traditions. They should know that in the Theravada Buddhist countries of South and South East Asia, young novice monks going through a period of temporary monastic training. Part of this is the tradition involves participating in the Pindabhat- or alms round, walking the streets with robe and alms bowl so the laity can make offerings of food on which they depend for their sustenance.

That the NKT lied and used footage from Burma is demonstrable for two reasons. Firstly, the robes of the child monks. In figure one you see the two piece robe style being worn by Tibetan monks, with a lower garment and upper shawl covering the vest. In figure two from the ISC video you see the one piece wrap-around Theravada robe and alms bowl uniform of Burmese novices.

Figure 3 continues with a  screen shot from the video showing a man in Myanmar, wearing the traditional Burmese lower garment called a longyi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyi). Figure 4 shows a Burmese women in a ladies’ longyi putting food in the almsbowl of one of the child-monks.

This deliberate manipulation by NKT to attempt to poison public opinion against the Dalai Lama and mobilize their members in protest against him is part of a larger no-holds barred campaign. It relies on emotion instead of evidence, and presumes that people will not dig deeper behind the images they present.

The video continues with wild accusations and claims from people such as Geshe Jangchub Gyaltsen, who teaches at PRC-linked (include link to photo) Ganchen Tulku’s centre in Italy. Readers may remember his assertion from a previous video that the current Dalai Lama is false because he comes from a poor Tibetan village in Amdo province, and the other candidate was from a wealthy aristocratic family in the capital of Lhasa.

Geshe Jangchub remarks that after protests against the Dalai Lama between 1996-1998 the situation was “very intense” so Gangchen Tulku arranged for him to come out of hiding in India to Italy. One wonders considering there was a gap of many years between those protests and when he arrived in Italy, if his assertions are not exaggerated. It is also notable that despite the Geshe’s assertions, there is no video, photographic or documentary evidence showing that his claims of stone throwing etc. are true.

The video then makes the claim that the Central Tibetan Administration “made a list of hated people and lastly even murdered them”. Who was murdered? Where? Indeed, there are no names, dates, police reports, physical evidence or photographs. Does this mean that the NKT and International Shugden Community are now willing to lie about murder to give their campaign an urgency it does not deserve?

Considering they lost their case in the Delhi High Court and Amnesty International didn’t find reasons for taking up actions, and in light of the new lies in their propaganda, it would seem so.