On an evening in November 2015, Paris became the scene and target of one of the most brutal attacks against the city in French history. In a succession of deliberate assaults, terrorists from the group known as ISIS (Islamic States of Iraq and Syria) ripped the city apart and threw it into panic and chaos. By the time they finished, over 130 lives had been lost, and over 300 injured. In just one evening, senseless and barbaric suicide bombings and mass shootings in the streets shocked the world.

ISIS proudly claimed responsibility for this barbarity and showed itself to be most wicked when it revealed that the attacks were not in retaliation to any harm that the French had inflicted upon them nor were they part of an ongoing war between ISIS and the French people. ISIS set its destruction upon Paris because it wanted to terrorize the world and instill fear in the hearts of the people and Paris gets them this attention.

ISIS soldiers summarily executing their captives.

This callousness and blatant disregard for human lives has become synonymous with ISIS who regularly publishes disturbing videos showing its fighters punishing, torturing and killing scores of unarmed prisoners and civilians. This is after all the group that has not hesitated to post a video of its militia locking a captured Jordanian pilot in a cage, dousing him in flammable liquid and burning him alive. ISIS’s list of atrocities include selling captured women and young girls as sex slaves, massacring innocent people while they were praying, and throwing gay men off buildings as punishment for their sexual preference. At this time, it would be extremely difficult to find a more sadistic and cruel band of terrorists.

Pope Francis has condemned ISIS’s cowardly act and warned that “the road of violence and hate does not resolve the problems of humanity.” However, even as the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution declaring that all able states should join in the effort to stop this extremist horde of killers from inflicting further harm and terror, ISIS found a friendly voice in the 14^th Dalai Lama who ironically has been touted for the last half a century as a man of peace.

The Dalai Lama insisted that the citizen states of the world, including those who have fallen prey to ISIS’s tyranny should listen, understand and have respect for ISIS.

To be sure, the Dalai Lama said in an interview reported on Monday by the Italian daily La Stampa, that the proper response to ISIS’s atrocities which have included beheadings, bombings and tortures is to try to respect them and try to understand them. In essence, the Dalai Lama’s statement endorses ISIS’s agenda of terror and justifies their extreme, cruel and coercive methods as legitimate tactics in negotiations. Not only is this completely insensitive to the thousands who have perished and suffered unnecessarily in the wake of ISIS’s tyranny, it is also an encouragement for ISIS and other terrorist networks to continue in their heinous, baneful and murderous ways.

An ISIS member slitting the throat of a man he captured. The Dalai Lama says acts like this deserve understanding and respect.

This is not the first time the Dalai Lama has stood with very dangerous people and criminal networks. In the past, he had also counted as his friend the shady leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, Shoko Asahara whose character and purpose the Dalai Lama had vouched for. The Dalai Lama endorsed the cult as a peaceful group looking to spread greater understanding and social wellbeing. Shoko Asahara’s group would later go on to kill thirteen innocent people and harm thousands in a Tokyo subway by releasing the nerve gas sarin.

What should be worrying to his friends, allies and supporters is how the Dalai Lama has consistently consented to terror being inflicted upon innocent people and oppressors and tyrants using heavy-handed tactics against others to get their way. He said of ISIS, that dialogue with the terror network is the only way and that “one has to listen, to understand and to have respect for the other person and that we have to do it with our heart [and] be compassionate…” If this speech sounds familiar, it is because the Dalai Lama has used and reused these lines for as long as the world has known him since he burst into the limelight. The lines sound very much like what a Buddhist saint might say, except the Dalai Lama doesn’t apply the same counsel he advocates.

The Dalai Lama himself is personally behind one of the most barefaced oppressions of human rights in the 21^st century, a charge he denies but which was proven to be true as stories of his religious apartheid against a Buddhist sect began to emerge over twenty years ago. In 1996 the Dalai Lama unexpectedly announced that a Tibetan Buddhist deity the Gelugpas had been propitiating for almost four centuries was henceforth outlawed. The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the exile government of the Dalai Lama went on record to demonize the deity and went as far as to criminalize its practice. No logical reason has ever been given for this radical move that is nothing short of a flagrant breach of Shugden Buddhists’ constitutional and human rights which the CTA should be protecting, not infringing since it professes to be a democracy. In a series of appalling moves, the Dalai Lama and his government suggested that all loyal Tibetans and Buddhists should set themselves upon those who practice Dorje Shugden as a mark of their loyalty to the Dalai Lama and hence the Tibetan cause.

To whip up negative sentiments against the Shugden believers, the Dalai Lama arbitrarily declared that Dorje Shugden is a malevolent spirit and its believers, demon worshippers. This is notwithstanding the fact the greatest scholars and spiritual masters of Tibetan Buddhism have historically recognized Dorje Shugden as an enlightened being.

The Dalai Lama preaches tolerance and yet he and his government-in-exile arbitrarily regard those whose religion they oppose as criminals.

There were no dialogues nor discussions for Dorje Shugden practitioners despite in-depth examinations and debates being the traditional method the Gelugpa school resorts to, to settle canonical disputes. To date, tens of thousands of Tibetan Shugden worshippers and up to four million Shugden believers around the world have been affected. Monks who refused to be coerced into damning Dorje Shugden were expelled and in the communities around the world, Shugden believers were shunned, marginalized, taunted and in a number of cases, physically harmed. The Dalai Lama’s illegal religious ban turned the streets in the Tibetan exile towns into scenes more reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid and America during the segregation years.

For a spiritual leader and a Nobel Peace laureate to malign another person’s faith is delinquent to begin with. But to do so in private and yet presume to lecture others on how to resolve conflicts arising out of differences in culture, creed and religion is offensive, deceptive and makes a mockery of the problem the world now faces with the looming threat of ISIS. The Dalai Lama would have us believe that terrorists and murderers are worthy of respect and understanding, but not peaceful and benevolent Buddhists.

Shugden Buddhists have done nothing wrong or illegal other than to keep their faith for which they are regarded as criminals. In the meantime, those who are clearly criminal such as ISIS are upheld. This incongruity is revealing and says that the Dalai Lama is anything but a ‘simple Buddhist monk’, the tag he carefully cultivated and built a following on. If the Dalai Lama sincerely believes that,

One has to listen, to understand, to have respect for the other person, regardless

and that

there is no other way

and in addition, that

…those who are intolerant harm their own faith…

then his dialogue with Shugden devotees is long overdue, especially now that the Dalai Lama has acknowledged that the intolerance he fostered and spread worldwide for over twenty years has harmed the very religion he is supposed to represent and protect. For the Dalai Lama to refuse to do so puts him at risk of being regarded as disingenuous as he is increasingly being accused of.

Click to enlarge