Writer: Atheist Republic
Subject: And Suck My Tongue
Link: newsletter@atheistrepublic.com
Link: Forcing Kid To Suck His Tongue
And Suck My Tongue
The Dalai Lama sparked controversy after a video of him kissing a boy and asking him to “suck my tongue” at an event in Northern India went viral. The event was organized last February by the M3M Foundation in the hillside city of Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lives in permanent exile. The viral video showed the young Indian boy approaching the 87-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner before asking if he could hug him.
The Dalai Lama invited the boy to the stage, pointed to his cheek, and said, “First here,” prompting him to hug and kiss him. Afterward, he pointed to his lips and said, “Then I think finally here also,” to the boy before pulling his chin and kissing him on the mouth. “And suck my tongue,” The Dalai Lama said after a few seconds, poking his tongue out.
The religious leader issued an apology through a statement in which he “wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused,” adding that he “regrets” what he did. Some of the Dalai Lama’s supporters spoke against the criticism, claiming they were misinterpreted under a “Western lens.” In Tibet, culturally, showing one’s tongue is considered an act of respecting and greeting people. Namdol Lhagyari, a Tibetan activist in exile, tweeted, “Bringing in the narrative of other cultures, customs and social influence on gender and sexuality to interpret Tibetan way of expression is heinous.”
‘Suck one’s tongue’ absolutely not custom of Xizang; Dalai’s ‘amicable image false’ — Global Times
The Dalai Lama has sparked huge public uproar after video of him kissing a boy on the lips and then asking the boy to “suck my tongue” at an event in northern India went viral and drew wide criticism, with many netizens condemning the action as inappropriate. Experts said that sticking out one’s tongue at others could be a traditional way to greet people in Xizang region (Tibet) of China, but asking people to suck one’s tongue is by no means an accepted form of etiquette.
The incident, which reportedly took place in late February at a temple in Dharamshala.
The Dalai Lama later apologized. In a statement Monday, the office for the Dalai Lama said he “regrets” the incident and he “wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.”
In a video that has gone viral, the boy approached a microphone at the event and asked the Dalai Lama: “Can I hug you?”
The Dalai Lama told the boy to come up to the platform where he was seated. Motioning to his cheek, he is heard saying “first here”, after which the child kissed him and gave him a hug.
The Dalai Lama kept hold of the boy, saying “I think here also” and then planted a kiss on his lips. “And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama then said, sticking out his tongue, forehead to forehead with the boy.
As the video spread across the internet, Dalai’s act was widely condemned by many netizens, saying it “inappropriate”, “scandalous” and “disgusting.”
“His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement said.
Some Western media tried to downplay the vulgarity of such an act of the Dalai Lama. Citing the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, CNN reported that sticking out one’s tongue is a sign of respect or agreement and was often used as a greeting in traditional Tibetan culture.
Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that asking others to suck their tongues to show politeness is by no means a custom in Xizang, and that such rhetoric is essentially an attempt to cover up the Dalai Lama’s hideous behavior. The Dalai Lama has been trying to present himself as a figure close to the people, but the purpose is to maintain his influence and ultimately achieve the goal of splitting the country, experts warned.
According to CNN, in response to the incident, a Delhi-based child rights group, Haq: Center for Child Rights condemns “all forms of child abuse.” It added: “Some news refers to Tibetan culture about showing tongue, but this video is certainly not about any cultural expression and even if it is, such cultural expressions are not acceptable.”
“How kissing an underage boy is ‘playful?’ That’s gross and the Dalai Lama should be accused of pedophilia. There are no valid excuses to do that to any kid in the world, no matter ‘the culture’ or religion,” a netizen using the handle ‘UnTalFredo’ said on Twitter.
ECONOMYNEXT – China’s embassy in Sri Lanka has slammed Tibetan Buddhist leader Dalai Lama, who is living in exile in India, after a video went viral where he apparently asked a asked a small boy to kiss his tongue.
The 87 -year old 14th Dalai Lama has been living in India, and speaking against the annexation of his country by China.
Footage of the uncomfortable incident which took place in February, according to foreign media, showed the moment the Tibetan spiritual leader invited the boy on stage during a charity event at his temple in Dharamshala, India.
In the video, the boy asks the Dalai Lama something and the Buddhist leader responds and asks him to come before the spiritual leader first asks the boy to kiss him on the cheek, before pointing at his lips.
The Dalai Lama video is a gift to propagandists — Coda
Millions of people around the world have watched in disgust as a globally renowned spiritual leader revealed himself to be…just another creepy old man. The video of the Dalai Lama, the 87-year-old leader of Tibet, kissing a young boy and asking him to “suck his tongue” was filmed in February at an event that brought together around 100 school students in a temple in Dharamshala, in northern India.
I’ll describe it to you so that you don’t have to watch it: One of the students in the audience asked the Dalai Lama if he could hug him. The octogenarian invited the boy to come up to the stage. As the boy leaned in toward the Dalai Lama to pay his respects, the Dalai Lama planted a kiss on the boy’s lips, then put his forehead against the boy’s, stuck his tongue out and said: “Suck my tongue.” The boy moved away while the Dalai Lama giggled and pulled him in for another hug.
The Dalai Lama’s office issued an apology, and media outlets around the world were quick to resurface the 2014 BBC article that explained how sticking your tongue out, while rude in most cultures, is a greeting in Tibet. Lhagyari Namgyal Dolkar, a Tibetan activist and member of the Tibetan parliament in exile, stretched the bounds of credulity to “argue” that the Dalai Lama’s bizarre behavior could not be interpreted through a “vividly westernized” lens.
At a time when the United States has been demanding that China restart talks over Tibetan self-determination with the Dalai Lama, this video is proving to be a gift to Chinese propaganda. The state-funded Global Times almost immediately argued that the video “raises concerns about the Dalai Lama’s private life” and that the only reason we don’t know of other occasions when he must have “asked someone to kiss his tongue publicly” is because of his “carefully crafted” image in the Western media.
“After decades of channeling funds to the Dalai Lama (via the CIA and associated organizations) as part of an ongoing campaign to weaken and destabilize China, will Western liberals finally feel a bit of buyers’ remorse?” asked a Western influencer who runs a pro-China platform called Friends of Socialist China.
But it’s not just Chinese propagandists who seized on the video to promote their political agendas. In the United States, right-wing conspiracy theorists have been pushing a dark fantasy about a pedophilic global elite, mostly comprising Democrats and Hollywood stars. Vladimir Putin echoed some of these themes in his rambling state of the nation speech in February, when he said that in the West “the perversion that is child abuse all the way up to pedophilia, are advertised as the norm.”
Unsurprisingly, on Twitter, if you search for “Dalai Lama,” among the top entries are tweets from accounts with names like “End Wokeness” and close to a million followers that compare Joe Biden to the Dalai Lama and use the video to encourage you to draw the conclusion that Biden, like the Dalai Lama, a celebrity darling, touches children inappropriately.
‘The Dalai Lama video is a gift to propagandists’ does not even cum close to point to the underlying intention with the reactions – poor hoi polloi needs to be properly whipped into a frenzy to hate each other with a vengeance, that is what this is all about!
Always divide and conquer, only that keeps the PTB where they are! Done! Lets find the next divisive issue or make one up, the mob needs to be red hot with hatred for each other, nothing less will do.
BTW: ‘The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget, that certain other sets of people are human…”