On the 2nd of November, the Thomson Reuters Foundation posted an interesting and important thread on X about attacks against journalists and how important it is to investigate these attacks if free speech must prevail. In that thread, they spoke about an important aspect of this campaign to silence voices that the establishment might not agree with – Lawfare.
🎙️ At #TC2023, we convened experts to discuss how to mount a co-ordinated defence against this "lawfare".@USAID’s @laurenseyfried shared the role governments can play in addressing these attacks and finding effective solutions. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/yVdks9Hhsj
— Thomson Reuters Foundation (@TRF) November 2, 2023
The thread spoke about how the law is being misused to stifle voices and free thinking by autocracies and democracies. For the past decade, I have observed in awe and amusement the shenanigans of the Left media establishment. What they wish to hold others accountable for, is par for the course when it comes to the left establishment silencing anyone who dares to disagree with them, or worse, call them out on their bold-faced lies. They want others to foster critical thinking and honour the freedom of speech of journalists, but, the rule applies only to those who the Left establishment deems worthy. They want others to be tolerant, but, only towards those whose intolerance they deem acceptable and just. They want the truth to prevail, however, only the truth which is convenient to their agenda. They want journalists who speak “truth to power” but only as long as it is to the powers they detest and certainly, only as long as THEY are not the powers being spoken the truth to.
Staying true to form, while they waxed eloquent about media freedom and ‘lawfare’ on the 2nd of November, on the 3rd, they did exactly what they claimed democracies and autocracies must not – fired a ‘cease and desist’ notice for an article published by OpIndia a year ago about how a Reuters journalist was lying through her teeth to blame Hindus for Islamist violence in Leicester.
When I read the notice first, I could not help but chuckle. I almost could not believe that I would have to give credence to this whiny invocation, dressed up as legal intimidation. The notice essentially declared that we need to pull down the article if we wish to avoid a legal entanglement simply because they said so. “It defames us”, they whined, without providing any explanation or reason as to how it defamed them.
In merely 6 paragraphs, Thomson Reuters Foundation laid bare, effortlessly, just how delusional they truly are. While I would ordinarily send this notice to the trash, I find it necessary to write about it publicly today – para by para. Not because they deserve a response to their delusions of grandeur, but because our readers need to know about the little games the global left media plays to ensure their shenanigans are not spoken of.
‘We advance media freedom – just not yours’
The first para of the notice reads, “We write to you from the Thomson Reuters Foundation. We are a global news and information services company, which works to advance media freedom, foster more inclusive economies and promote human rights. Our journalists report from the ground in more than 70 countries on critical issues ranging from climate change to socio-economic inclusion”.
It is perhaps a function of the make-belief world they live in or just age-old trickery that they employ – but to start a ‘cease and desist’ notice to a media platform by claims of advancing media freedom would be hysterically funny if it was not downright dangerous. That Thomson Reuters Foundation truly believes they fight for media freedom while attempting to intimidate a digital news platform only proves that they truly do not believe that any media platform has the right to voice opinions that they do not agree with or facts which are inconvenient to their narrative.
Essentially, when they say that they fight for media freedom, they mean that the media that panders to their narrative should have the unequivocal and unquestioned right to spread fake news, downplay jihadi violence and paint the victims as the perpetrators. When they say they promote human rights, they mean that they are the authorities who have the ordained right to decide which humans have a right to life and dignity and which don’t.
Let us take a look at a case study to understand how committed Reuters is to the protection of human rights.
In 2021, a Sri Lankan man Priyantha Kumara was tortured and burnt to death by an irate Muslim mob that believed rumours of blasphemy. The incident took place on Wazirabad Road in Sialkot, where the workers of private factories attacked the export manager of a factory and burnt his body after killing him. In the video, the irate mob can be heard chanting “Nara e Taqbeer” and “Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah”. Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah essentially means “Here I am at your service, O Messenger of Allah”. Other slogans that could be heard as the fanatics burnt the man to death were ‘gustakh-e-nabi ki ek hi saza, sar tan se juda sar tan se juda’. Hours after this brutal murder, the video of which had gone viral, the mastermind of the lynching was heard gloating over the murder amidst chants of ‘Nara-e-Taqbir’, ‘Labbaik’ and ‘Allah hu Akbar’.
Now, those who claim to promote human rights should have been irate about the gross abuse of human rights in Pakistan – not Reuters. Instead, here is the headline they chose to go with.
By the headline of Reuters, one would think that this was a mob murder by “factory workers” due to some other reasons and not religious fanaticism.
While Reuters tried to downplay the brutal murder of the Sri Lankan man in Pakistan, where lynching over blasphemy charges has become a familiar sight, the paper had maligned Hindus when locals had killed Mohammad Akhlaq.
The headline that Reuters had chosen at the time was, “Hindu mob lynches Indian Muslim rumoured to have killed a cow”. Mohammad Akhlaq was killed in Dadri because of a rumour that he had stolen a cow and slaughtered it. While communal colour was given by the media to the case, the reality is that in rural India, killings over cow is far more about livelihood than about religious sentiments attached to cows. Cows are often the source of livelihood for several people in rural India and when the cow is stolen and slaughtered, more than religious sentiments, it is the livelihood that gets affected.
While Reuters shames Hindus constantly, not only did they shield the mob violence in Pakistan today, but they also tried to whitewash the attack against Hindus in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh, which is at least 91% Muslim-dominated, Hindus were being persecuted simply because they dared to be Hindu and pray to Maa Durga. As Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh started celebrating Durga Puja, Muslim mobs vandalised at least 20 pandals and desecrated the idols. After a false rumour of the Quran being desecrated, several more Durga Puja pandals were vandalised and over 150 Hindu families were attacked.
While Hindus were being massacred, Reuters wrote an article talking about how Bangladesh was rallying behind Hindus. In fact, Reuters had also called the blind attack a “clash”, insinuating that Hindus and Muslims had “clashed” and that the attack was not a one-sided assault on Hindus.
OpIndia, therefore, rejects the idiotic assertions that the Thomson Reuters Foundation upholds media freedom or fights to further human rights. They don’t. What they do is fight for their and their coterie’s right to spread misinformation, and fake news and silence the voices of those who disagree with them. What they do is choose which victim deserves to live and which victim’s brutal murder is par for the course. What they do is downplay the murder of Hindus and revel in watching them burn while shielding the Islamists who unleash violence on Kafirs. They may be a “global news and information services company“, but they should stop patting themselves on the back for doing a fair job at it.
“Your article discredits integrity and credibility”
In the second para, TRF says, “It has come to our attention that you have published an article titled “Reuters journalist blames Indian Hindus for Islamist violence against Hindus in Leicester; Scroll amplifies the fake narrative” authored by Dibakar Dutta and published by OpIndia online on 7th October 2022 (“At-issue Content”). We have examined the At-issue Content and find it to be grossly abusive, false and defamatory, which discredits the integrity and credibility of our journalist Rina Chandran and our organisation”.
Let me place on record at the very outset that if the OpIndia article in question has “come to your attention” after over 1 year of its publication, TRF must concede that they are not very professional, not very good at their job and not very bright either.
We would also contend that simply because TRF says so, does not mean that the journalist Rina Chandra or TRF itself has any integrity and/or credibility. We categorically believe that neither Rina Chandran nor TRF has the integrity or credibility they imagine, and therefore, our article cannot possibly impugn what does not exist in the first place.
‘Defamatory and malicious arguments’
TRF in their notice further says, “The At-issue Content alleges that Rina “has a history of peddling fake news” in addition to other allegations which are defamatory and malicious. Through your publication, you have made several false allegations against our journalist thereby damaging the reputation of our organisation and its journalists. Our journalists conduct themselves with utmost professionalism and integrity and adhere to the Trust Principles which strictly demand that they act at all times with integrity, independence, and freedom from bias. Any attempts to tarnish the reputation of our journalists are taken seriously”.
Firstly, TRF took a year to wake up to the article on OpIndia and therefore, I find it a little hard to believe their claim that “any attempts to tarnish the reputation of our journalists are taken seriously”. If TRF was as serious as it claims to be, it would not be sleeping for a year. Since it is not my job to correct what is clearly broken at TRF as an organisation, I would move on and discuss what OpIndia actually covered.
The article that TRF is hopping mad about (1 year after its publication) is one where we covered how Rina Chandran, a Reuters journalist, blamed Indian Hindus for Islamist violence at Leicester, based on fake news spread by Islamists, and how Scroll had amplified this false narrative peddled by Chandran and Reuters.
On October 4th 2022, in a propaganda piece published in ‘Context’ (a media platform run by Thomas Reuters Foundation), Chandran alleged that disinformation, which supposedly originated in India, was the cause of Hindu-Muslim unrest in Leicester city in England’s East Midlands region.
“Rumour had it that a Muslim girl had been kidnapped and a Hindu temple had sent masked thugs into combat,” she wrote, without mentioning that both these rumours were conceived in Leicester and disseminated by the Islamists living there. Opindia reported how Islamists had blamed the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) for supposedly trying to kidnap a 15-year-old Muslim girl. A Hindu man was dubbed as a paedophile and his address was leaked on Facebook, as part of the onslaught. Later, it turned out to be fake news.
Indian Hindus and Hindus in general even from Leicester had nothing to do with the conception or spread of this fake news. It was on the 12th of September that the rumours of the kidnapping had been conceptualised and spread – it was not by Hindus – but by Majid Freeman – the Al Qaeda and ISIS supporting Jihadi who Reuters and Chandran seem to be shielding by blaming Hindus.
In our article that TRF has taken umbrage to, we wrote, “The ‘brown sepoy’ shrewdly pointed out the fake stories without specifying the group that spread it in the first place. For the fake abduction story of a Muslim girl, she conceded that it was debunked by the police without mentioning that Islamists deliberately spread it to create a foundation for violence against Hindus”.
We stand by this assertion.
“…Police took to social media themselves, saying they had fully investigated reports of three men approaching a teenaged girl in an attempted kidnap, and found no truth whatsoever to the online story,” she had written.
Rina Chandran in her article mentions that the kidnapping story turned out to be completely false, but fails to mention, as we wrote, that it was Islamists like Majid Freeman who started the rumour. She mentions the rumours instead in an article blaming Hindus insinuating that it was the Hindus who started this rumour.
In our 2022 article, we further wrote, “Opindia had also reported how Islamists tried to mainstream the conspiracy theory that ‘truckloads of RSS workers’ were brought to Leicester by a travel agency named ‘Angel Tours’, with the support of a local Hindu temple.“Fact-checkers also found no truth to claims that gangs of masked thugs were bussed into Leicester,” Rina Chandran wrote, again without mentioning the community that was at the helm of this fake news”.
This is literally not a figment of OpIndia’s imagination. We have quoted Rina Chandran verbatim and pointed out the holes in her theory that the Leicester viokence was fuelled from fake news which was spread by Hindus – Indian or the ones in Leicester.
Further in the article, we counter the strange “fact-check” that Rina Chandran seems to have relied on. Essentially, she relies on Logically analysis to claim that fake news originated from India. Logically had based their assertion on the fact that according to them, most “tweets about Leicester violence” came from India.
“Some 80% of tweets with geographic coordinates, or geo-tagged information, were connected to India, Logically said,” the Reuters journalist wrote. While this might be true, there is no reason to assume that those 80% geo-tagged tweets actually contained fake news. We countered saying, “Given that the Hindu population in India is close to a billion and that the community was concerned about the atrocities committed by Islamists in far-off Leicester, it explains why most tweets demanding justice for Hindus were from India”.
We stand by that assertion and believe that Rina Chandran relied on such dubious data only to blame Hindus and shift focus from the Islamist violence without any integrity or professionalism that TRF claims its journalists have.
In fact, a UK Hindu reached out to us subsequently and revealed that a professional service had emailed her saying that only 20-25% of the total tweets were geo-tagged.
I have an old email quote from a professional service about exporting tweets for me on Leicester. He said there were 200K and only 20-30% had geolocation. Fyi, that's still not solid proof of geolocation since you can put anything and twitter doesn't check it.
— 𑆩𑆳𑆬𑆴𑆤𑆵 Sarah L Gates (@SarahLGates1) November 8, 2023
We perused the email that Ms Sarah Gates was referring to and the professional service did indeed confirm that only 20-25% of tweets had a geotag – which also does not prove anything since on Twitter, a user can tag any location and it is not necessarily authentic.
This further information only strengthens our stand. Essentially, Rina Chandran wrote an entire article blaming Hindus for misinformation, mentioning fake news incidents by Islamists without mentioning that they were spread by Islamists, and a data set that only talks about how many tweets originated from India – whereas, only 20-25% of the total tweets about Leicester were geo-tagged (data which is in itself not reliable).
In the article, we have furthered innumerated some instances of her anti-Hindu bias, based on her own tweets.
TRF certainly can’t hold us responsible for pointing out Rina Chandran’s anti-Hindu bias based on her own writing. Perhaps if they think it dents the journalist’s and their fictitious credibility, they should ask Chandran to be more mindful before publicising her own hateful opinions.
It is in this light, that we would like to assert the following:
- The article is not ‘grossly abusive’. It is factual.
- There are no false allegations in the article – the article on OpIndia quotes Rina Chandran verbatim.
- The article is not defamatory – we contend that the TRF journalist has no ‘fame or reputation’ for the article to defame her. Further, we assert that the truth is the ultimate defence to defamation. If TRF believes that Rina Chandran’s own words and writings defame her or the institution, they should take it up with their journalist – not us.
- TRF would not know what “integrity and credibility” means even if they hit them in the face. We cannot impugn what does not exist.
“We demand”, TRF says. “Request denied”, we say.
In the 4th paragraph, TRF writes, “We demand you to immediately: (i) permanently take down, the At-issue Content, and any adaptations of it or any other similar statements which contain defamatory content pertaining to us or any of our employees, from any and all print and electronic media platforms; and (ii) cease and desist from making, circulating or publishing any malicious, and/or defamatory statements, imputations, insinuations, or allegations, pertaining us or any of our employees, either orally or in writing, through any print, or electronic media platforms”.
As the editor-in-chief of OpIndia, I would like to categorically state that we reject these “demands” by TRF. We are not taking the article down. We are not taking down its adaptation in the form of a Twitter thread we published. And we will not refrain from pointing out the lies, misrepresentations and anti-Hindu bias that TRF seems to harbour.
The article that TRF has taken umbrage to can be read here in full.
The Twitter thread based on the article can be found here:
Reuters' journalist Rina Chandran has come up with a propaganda piece to whitewash the violence perpetrated by Islamists in Leicester.
— OpIndia.com (@OpIndia_com) October 8, 2022
To do so, she has pinned the blame on Indian Hindus for violence against Hindus, living in Leicester.
Thread:
(1/n) pic.twitter.com/wVi5d6PVwT
Bring it on, we say
Finally, TRF writes, “In case of your failure or any delay in implementing both (i) and (ii) above within a period of ten (10) days from the receipt of this letter, we reserve the right to pursue appropriate legal proceedings”.
I am going to try and level with TRF. Recently, a report suggested that they had journalists embedded with Hamas – a terror organisation which massacred 1400 innocent Jews – murdering them, raping them, beheading them – including little babies.
In the reports published by wire agencies, there were photographs depicting a burning Israeli tank and a lynch mob brutalising an Israeli soldier. These photographs were clicked by photojournalists Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih. Shockingly, the report alleged the photograph of lynching was mentioned as the “photograph of the day” by Reuters editors in the editorial database.
You are a news organisation that thinks it is appropriate to post an image of a soldier getting lynched as an “image of the day” by “journalists” who probably had prior knowledge of the Hamas terror attack against Israeli civilians.
You are a global news and information services company which tried to whitewash the Islamist violence at Nuh against Hindus, you pinned down dissenters while pontificating on democracy – remember Jose Vega, Kynan Thistlethwaite and Sam Nettnin? You spoke about an Indian gangster’s political affiliations but not his criminal past simply because you dislike who India voted to power – remember Atiq Ahmad? You feasted on the dead and revelled in Hindu cremations during COVID. You got a Chinese company to fund an article praising an opposition party in India, amounting to internal interference. While you whitewash Islamist violence against Hindus, your journalists came to our country and occupied palatial bungalows in Kashmir. You lie. You obfuscate. You whitewash Jihadis. You revel in the sight of dead Hindus.
I would humbly suggest that you focus on ensuring that you don’t collaborate with Hamas terrorists disguised as journalists instead of asking OpIndia to ‘cease and desist’ from reporting about your shenanigans.
As the editor-in-chief of OpIndia, I reject your demands and ask you, politely, to go squat in a cactus patch.
