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HAF slams western media for whitewashing Kashmir attack
“A rebel fights authority, a militant targets the state, and a terrorist deliberately targets and kills civilians to spread fear for ideological or religious aims,” she said.
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Staff Reporter1
- Thu, 24, Apr 2025
- 15:09 EDT
- 134
Suhag Shukla / X
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) strongly criticized leading Western media outlets for what it described as “whitewashing” and “gaslighting” coverage of the April 22 terror attack in Kashmir, where at least 26 Hindu tourists were killed.
According to survivor accounts, the terrorists — from The Resistance Front (TRF), an offshoot of the Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba — specifically targeted Hindus, demanding that victims identify their religion by producing ID cards or reciting Islamic verses. Those identified as Hindu were executed, while others were reportedly spared to spread the message.
Also Read: Modi vows to pursue Kashmir attackers to 'ends of the Earth'
HAF’s executive director, Suhag Shukla, condemned the Western media’s portrayal of the attack, accusing outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, Reuters, and Associated Press of downplaying the religiously motivated nature of the killings.
“Yesterday in broad daylight, terrorists from The Resistance Front, a Lashkar-e-Taiba offshoot, took credit for storming a meadow in Pahalgam and murdering at least 26 tourists, seeking out Hindus with chilling precision in the worst civilian massacre in Kashmir since 2008,” said Shukla in a video statement.
“The headlines should be simple: ‘Hindus massacred in Kashmir by Islamists in a terror attack claimed by a Pakistan-backed terror group.’ But what do we get? A masterclass in whitewashing, gaslighting, false equivalencies, and revisionist history,” she added.
Shukla pointed out that many reports referred to the perpetrators using euphemistic terms such as “militants” or even “rebels,” which, she argued, obscures the intentional targeting of civilians based on their religion.
“A rebel fights authority, a militant targets the state, and a terrorist deliberately targets and kills civilians to spread fear for ideological or religious aims,” she said.
She also criticized the BBC for referring to the victims as “non-Muslims,” calling it a deliberate erasure of the targeted Hindu identity. “Please spare us the neutral terms and erasure,” Shukla said.
Drawing attention to the historical context, Shukla emphasized that this attack follows a decades-long pattern of Islamist violence against Kashmir’s indigenous Hindu population. She cited the killings and mass exodus of over 350,000 Kashmiri Hindus during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as numerous attacks on Hindu pilgrims visiting sacred sites such as Amarnath and Vaishno Devi since 2000.
“These attacks are neither rare nor random,” she said.
“Legacy media's whitewashing and spin don't just insult the victims. It enables the very forces behind these atrocities,” she said. “If you can't call out terror for what it is, maybe you shouldn't be reporting on it at all.”
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