UPDATE: More links to follow, bear with me.
UPDATE:Mr. Stix tells me that I wrongly used his name and not the name of the actual author, who is Federale.
I stand corrected and apologize for having used his name incorrectly. My apologies. I have made the correction in the piece. But my criticism still stands and since Mr. Stix thoroughly endorses Federale’s views, no great harm.
These are the dangers of trying to counter propaganda as soon as it launches. What happened is very simple, I saw the piece on Mr. Stix’s site and then rushed to rebut the original off my computer copy and paste. In the copy, I’d cut out the original author and only preserved the original link. I forgot to check. No nefarious motives at all.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Unbelievable what you can read on so-called major alternative blogs. The level of ignorance exhibited is frightening.
Read on for a supposedly daring expose of the diplomat story. It gets hardly one thing about the story correct.
At Vdare, one blogger, Federale, writes:
“There has been a major dispute in the news recently involving India and the United States. It is ostensibly about the treatment of diplomatic staff in both countries, but the truth is far more interesting.”
Lila: Actually, there was no dispute, as such. There was a flagrant breach of diplomatic protocol by the US Government which acted unlawfully, as it turned out, since the diplomat did in fact have immunity.
STIX
The true motive behind Indian outrage and the subsequent endangerment of the American diplomatic outpost in New Delhi is about anti-white racism, anti-Christian bigotry, and Hindu supremacism on the part of Indians, officials and outraged public alike
Lila: Hindu supremacism? Where? Indians tend to fawn on whites and India is one of the few foreign countries where the US consistently enjoys high approval….why, I can’t think, given the fact that the US has descended into a form of political madness in recent years and has been acting in an unfriendly way for a long time.
STIX
The second part of the back story is the issue of diplomatic immunity. As a consular officer, and not a diplomatic officer, Khobragade holds immunity only for official acts, of which visa fraud is not one. Espionage is, but not visa fraud.
Lila
Actually, although it wasn’t known at the time, she had been granted full immunity because of accreditation to the UN, for which she’d applied and which she then forgot about.
Stix
Here is where the case gets interesting and Americans learn another lesson on the perils of aliens…..
“…stripping and cavity searches…” Any experienced Federal agent would laugh hysterically at that one. First, the U.S. Marshals Service does not perform strip searches on its customer base. The first part of the procedure in the holding area in a Federal courthouse, is a search of the person arrested, even if the person was searched, and the arrestee should have been, by the arresting agents.
Standard procedure is a close search of the person, the placing of the searching Deputy U.S Marshal or Detention Enforcement Officer’s hands on the arrestees clothed body and the crushing and twisting of the layer of clothing in a top to bottom pattern, but not a strip search. And note here, the arrestee comes in physical contact with the searching official.
Lila: Since 2012 , strip-searches with visual inspection of the cavities have indeed become standard. The fact that this blogger doesn’t know about it is the problem. It’s also a problem that someone vents so pompously without having even tried to ascertain the facts. It’s finally a problem that he’s such a racist that he thinks the accused MUST be lying, because she’s an alien.
Here’s The Indian Express:
“While New Delhi is learnt to be particularly upset that Khobragade was allegedly forced to undergo a cavity search, sources said that a body cavity search in the US includes a visual or manual search of cavities such as nostrils, ears, mouth, navel, penis or vagina, and rectum.”
Since these are only “rapist vegetarians,” I don’t think that good Christians need to take them seriously. So let’s ask the good Christians at the State Dept and the US Marshals whether indeed they checked Dr. Devyani’s rectum for “lying to the government” on unproven allegations from a maid with a criminal complaint against her.
Here’s a report from other non-rapist non-vegetarians:
Asked whether Khobragade was strip-searched, the US Marshals Service(USMS) replied “yes,” adding that she “was subject to the same search procedures as other USMS arrestees held within the general prisoner population in the Southern District of New York.”
It confirmed that Khobragade was also held in a cell with other female detainees, amid claims she had been detained with drug addicts.
Here’s the 2012 decision on strip-searches on allegations:
Court records show Florence was subjected to an invasive strip and visual body-cavity search. He was then held for six days in the county lockup before being transferred to a Newark correctional facility, where, he claims, he was subjected to another more intrusive search before being placed in the general prison population.
STIX
Then the next lie from Khobragade, “repeated cavity searches.” Another laugh, as no cavity searches are performed on arrestees except in extraordinary circumstances, commonly with hardened criminals known to commit violence in custody or terrorism suspects.
Lila: Cavity inspections are indeed performed. I believe that Wayne May, the anti-terrorism unit chief who was behind the set-up of Khobragade, might also be behind the Marshals’ insistence on stripping Khobragade. Her father has already indicated that there was a simmering dispute between the Ministry of External Affairs and the US Embassy in New Delhi. What must now happen is journalists must find out if the Marshals photographed the procedure (which they surely did) and with whom they have shared it. I suspect the recorded images have been kept for blackmail purposes, as that is also standard operating procedure with the intelligence services these days.
STIX
Of course, high caste Hindus are outraged apparently most of all by the arrest itself.
Lila: She is from the lowest caste – the Dalit and her position and her father’s position are seen by many as a triumph of the reservation (affirmative action) system in India, whatever you think about it. Thomas Sowell has written about it critically.
STIX
Khobragade was not the first Indian consular officer to be arrested for visa fraud relating to domestic servants.
Lila: Yes, there is a history of visa fraud because the laws against trafficking which grant easy visas to people making such accusations have enabled the fraud. Of the previous two cases, one was amended with half the charges retracted. Both cases were suspect and the diplomats felt they were the victims of fraud and extortion.
Stix:
And there is the rub: the mere touching of a high caste Hindu by an untouchable. For the uninitiated, Hinduism is a very primitive religion, untouched, shall we say, by modern considerations of ethics or reason.
Lila: Stix must be a propagandist asked to put out such rubbish. She wasn’t merely touched, as Professor Juan Cole among many others has admitted. “Baring of the labia” is not touching clothes. She was a Dalit, not a Brahmin. And Hinduism is one of the oldest, most sophisticated and intellectual religions in the world, the mother of all religions, in the opinion of many great scholars.
STIX
It is a religion based on ritual purity and the avoidance of pollution. At the center of ritual purity and pollution is caste. Ritual purity is maintained primarily by avoiding physical proximity or touching of lower castes who are polluting to a higher caste, and in the case of the Untouchables, avoiding even their shadow. In the caste system, all persons not Hindus are Untouchables, especially foreigners.
Lila: Yes, there are social aberrations among Hindus, but many of these have been and continue to be corrected. The blogger is embarrassing here in his ignorance. Foreigners are not untouchables in Hindu culture. The maid herself is a lower-caste convert but may well have been originally a higher caste than Devyani, for all we know. Syrian Christians are usually quite well off and not discriminated against.
STIX
The U.S. Marshals official who had the temerity to touch a high-caste Hindu committed a grave offense in Hinduism and was insulting to all high caste Hindus, especially the Brahmins who dominate India’s politics and government. (By the way, in violation of the caste system, as political power is supposed to be exercised by the Kshatriya caste.)
Lila: Brahmins do not dominate India’s politics. India’s government is chock-full of minorities at the highest level, far more than the US’s. She has a Sikh Prime Minister, has had a Muslim President, and has an Italian Catholic national leader. There are Dalit state ministers and women hold powerful positions. Many of India’s Brahmins have long emigrated to escape the universal affirmative action program. Caste has been critiqued, ameliorated, fought, and debated for more than a century with great success, and some failures. It would be like saying that America had made no progress on slavery, even if you were to equate caste and race, which would be incorrect.
STIX
To those with a religious or philosophical system, such an incident would be viewed rationally, as Christians do. A rational person would clearly understand the close association of arrest and search. It is no controversy at all.
Lila: The utterly contemptible blogger thinks that there’s nothing barbaric about having your privates examined because of an arrest.
STIX
For Christians, truth and love are the primary philosophical aspects of their belief systems.
Lila: Yes, Christian truth and love are in full display in this abominable piece of propaganda against a religion and a country. Christian truth and love are behind the global spy state that loots and murders with a rapacity Genghis Khan would have envied. Yes, it’s all Christian.
STIX
The other is personal responsibility for one’s actions in life. No Christian can be affected by the mere presence or touch of another person. There is no ritual purity or pollution in Christ, there is only eventual judgement by God for one’s behavior. A shadow has no effect on one’s moral being, unlike the Brahim who becomes polluted by the proximity of an Untouchable.
Lila: There are no educated Indians who believe that someone’s shadow “pollutes.” You might find uneducated people in the villages who believe it. On the other hand, come to New York City, to the liberal elites, and you will find some thinking on those lines.
STIX
And the Hindus know the truth about the failure of their belief system, which is why Hindus reacted so strongly to the mere touch of an Untouchable on a high caste Hindu.
Lila: Hinduism is the most intellectually compelling of the great religions, despite the much greater organizational power of Christianity. It is Christianity which is slowly becoming Hinduized. The New Age with its “Laws of Attraction” and “You become what you think,” its energy medicine, its yoga, and its meditation, is popular Hinduism, adopted by Westerners without attribution, even while they disparage and undermine the culture from which it arises. Hinduism is the only major religion, beside Christianity, which accepts the divinity of Christ, as an avatar. Islam and Judaism do not, as, for them, it would be blasphemy to call a man a god.
STIX
Hindus became enraged to hide what they knew to be true, the farcical nature of Hinduism: its ritual obsessions and its moral vacuum devoid of any introspection, intellectual reflection, and its obviously ridiculous pantheon.
Lila: One might equally ridicule communion as a cannibal ritual, Mary as a pregnant teen, the Catholic church as a refuge of pedophiles, or bring up stories of angels dancing on pins and weeping statues.
STIX
No one considers the gods of the Greeks, Romans, or barbarians of Europe to be anything other than an inadequate attempt to deal with the vicissitudes of life and explain the natural world around them. One does not accept that Zeus, Hera and Athena existed. They were creations of unenlightened minds.
Lila: I see. Concepts like moira and hamartia and hubris were unenlightened. I suppose Stix is unaware of how much of Greek paganism and eastern thought/symbology actually ended up being adopted by Christianity.
STIX
However, Hindu India is the only major society that retains such a primitive religion of hundreds of gods that need appeasing.
Lila: This is an embarrassment. He hasn’t even turned to Wiki to understand that Hinduism has never been simple polytheism.
STIX
And in its irrationality, Hindu India has gravely threatened U.S. diplomatic personnel by withdrawing security around the American Embassy in New Delhi.
Lila: Hinduism has the most highly developed and varied philosophical systems, next to which Western philosophies are actually very limited and unsatisfactory. And security was never withdrawn from the embassy. Some additional traffic barriers were removed. Security was in fact stepped up.
STIX
Clearly such an over-reaction is based on an inferiority complex, and rightly so, as India is close to a failed state, where slavery is widely practiced and plagued by caste violence.
Lila: The reiteration of the term “slavery” is so striking that it must be connected to the NGO -instigated , Bill Gates-backed “modern slavery” meme, which is the basis of the new color revolution aimed at India.
Stix prattles on about “caste violence” while the state he lives in rampages around the globe, destroying economies, mass murdering whole populations, spying, surveilling and brutalizing its own population.
STIX
But these actions by the Indian government were, of course, an actual violation of diplomatic protocol and legal obligations that India has under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which requires the host government to protect diplomats from attack. Such is their religious hatred of Untouchables, India will violate solemn agreements it has signed.
Lila: Madness. India has done no such thing, but nice try at spinning public opinion. It will work with the reading public of VDare,which must be semi-literate to stomach such fare.
STIX
This is hardly a nation the United States should allow immigrants to this country from. Is there no reason in India? Apparently not. They do not even understand the notion of and limitations of consular immunity.
Lila: The good thing about the incident would be if the US corporate presence picked up and left. And could American universities stop begging Indians to sign up, because you can’t open a paper in India without their ads begging for Indian students. …who, unlike many others (hint), pay their way.
STIX
Of course, Sangeeta Richard may be a Christian, given her last name, or at least a descendant of mixed-race stock, which in India makes one an Untouchable as well.
So, I don’t see why Indians are so upset. Apparently a cheap domestic servant was more important that ritual pollution. But ritual pollution is more important that truth and justice, as well as not as fun as burning American untouchables in effigy. Not to mention that high-caste Hindus are outraged that a lower caste got to America before them.
Lila: I’ve already addressed these idiotic errors. Mind you, this is not a high-school student. He’s a widely read blogger, because he “dares” to tell the truth about the ongoing victimization of whites. I kid you not.
That is insularity, folks. I won’t call it racism, because I think racism needs some level of awareness behind it. People like this are so ignorant and wrong, it’s almost funny.
An entire article on the popular VDare site, which is read by millions of conservative, white nationalists. But no such piece in the mainstream. You have to ask if people like hm are intentionally feeding propaganda, not just error, to inflame the most flammable part of the population.
STIX
The real question though remains, do we as Americans want immigrants like this, obsessed with ritual purity and pollution, bringing such behavior to the United States?
Is this misogyny, violence, and anti-Americanism something the United States needs?
Lila:
Apparently, if you don’t like your women being stripped and having their private parts inspected as standard procedure, that makes you an anti-American and a misogynist.
Actually, America is consistently highly regarded in India, which, given all this, might not be a good thing. A bit of anti-Americanism might be just the thing for India to regain real independence in its policies.
“… The most famous Leaker… “? No, Snowden is a whistleblower.
Reply