With strategically placed donations, Omidyar has placed himself in the rare position of being able to support both the national security state and at least part of its self-proclaimed opposition. In the eyes of the former element, that might be precisely what makes him so valuable.
This is the concluding part of our series exploring billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyars broad sweep of influence over global media and surveillance enterprises. Part 1 examined Omidyars use of investment to build a vast and tangled web of influence in NGOs and media outlets around the world; Part 2 illuminated his involvement with regime-change networks and the surveillance state.
Flinging accusations of cultism while funding the Dalai Lama
Since pumping $100 million into a network of news outlets, fact-checking sites, film projects and press-advocacy groups, Pierre Omidyar has emerged as one of the most quietly influential media funders in the country. All along, he has kept out of the spotlight, avoiding the scrutiny and attack campaigns that have followed other politically influential oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and George Soros.
Omidyar lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, far from the American mainland. From there, he courts famous gurus and wields his media empire against a Hawaiian lawmaker who has emerged as the most outspoken opponent of the national security state and its militaristic agenda.
The billionaires target is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a military veteran and member of Congress from Omidyars primary state of residence, Hawaii. Gabbard recently announced a long-shot campaign for the White House centered on mobilizing opposition to U.S. regime-change wars and interventionism.
Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast and former editor of The eXile, who produced a series of investigations on Omidyars media activities, described the billionaires attacks on Gabbard as very particular to Hawaiian politics and Omidyars love for the military-intelligence world. If you chart their respective political trajectories, Ames continued, youll see that Tulsi [Gabbard] has learned from her past mistakes and moved left on major issues, while Omidyar has moved gradually to the right which is where he was already aligned overseas.
This December, The Intercept published an article entitled, Tulsi Gabbard is a rising progressive star, despite her support for Hindu nationalists. It was one in a long series of sharply critical pieces leveled at Gabbard by Omidyar-backed publications. Omidyars local Hawaiian outlet, the Honolulu Civil Beat, promptly re-published the article.
This article homed in on Gabbards relationship with American supporters of Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India and leader of a party, the BJP, that has stoked lethally violent attacks on Muslims in the past. The article based its case partly on the arguably bigoted assertion that Gabbard had many donors with names that are of Hindu origin. It noted only in passing that Gabbard had recused herself from attending the 2018 World Hindu Congress, a gathering that has been criticized as a global hub of Hindu nationalism. Three weeks after publishing the article, The Intercept published an apology for a parenthetical sentence about donations to Tulsi Gabbard from individuals with names of Hindu origin, as identified by an expert.
One local resident griped a few years ago about two articles published on the same day in Civil Beat in 2015 that tied Gabbard to Modi and the BJP, and another that profiled rumors of Gabbards involvement with a group it paints as an even more cultish offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement called the Science of Identity Foundation.
That Omidyars outlets publish so much material criticizing Gabbard on the basis of her connections to the BJP raises serious questions of hypocrisy. Jayant Sinha, a former member of Omidyars five-member global executive committee and managing director for the Omidyar Networks India branch (whose shady financial practices were detailed in the Panama Papers), is a member of Modis cabinet and oversaw the effort to put Modi in power while heading the Omidyar Network in India. Sinha, in fact, used Omidyars funding to bankroll a series of anti-corruption campaigns through local NGOs that helped subvert the Indian publics faith in the ruling center-left Congress Party. In July, Sinha honored eight men who were convicted of lynching a Muslim cattle trader by placing wreaths of marigolds over their heads after they were bailed out of prison.
And there is no shortage of irony in a paper owned by Omidyar wielding charges of participation in a cult against Gabbard. The billionaire is himself a devoted follower of the Tibetan spiritual leader Lhamo Thondup, better known as the Dalai Lama, who was previously the head of a relatively minor Buddhist sect until it was exploited by the CIA as a weapon against communist China.
Tibetan Buddhists seek a return to theocratic feudal rule in the plateau and believe the Dalai Lama is psychic, capable of divination, and the embodiment of the deity Avalokite[vara, or the lord who gazed down at the world. The Dalai Lama himself says that he learned through his own psychic dreams that he would live to be 113 years old.
Christine Chandler, author of the book Enthralled: The Cult of Tibetan Buddhism, writes of her six-year-long experience in the sect:
It was not until I managed to extricate myself from these lamas and their guru-worshipping influences, that I realized I had actually been in an authoritarian, thought-controlling cult, that disguises itself as representing the highest teachings of the Buddha
that uses the same techniques and engages in the same destructive behaviors found in the most dysfunctional of sexually abusive family systems: those that use religion to justify their abuse.
In 1996, the Dalai Lamas administration admitted to getting $1.7 million a year in funding from the CIA during the 1960s. More recently, he has participated in forums of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a U.S. government-funded NGO that promotes regime change across the globe through grants to opposition civil-society and media outfits.
I love President Bush, the Dalai Lama declared in 2002. The spiritual leader has also been an ardent defender of Israel, remarking that the side of Palestine is dry and not green. They should use the skills of the Jews and live together. The Dalai Lama has appeared at several of the Hindu World Congress conventions and effusively praised the Hindu nationalist grassroots movement known as the RSS.
Like the CIA before him, Omidyar has been a generous donor to Dalai Lama institutions, financing the Dalai Lamas 2012 trip to Hawaii and other initiatives to promote the Tibetan spiritual leader. Omidyar | Dalai Lama
Omidyar (upper right-hand corner) is seen with his personal security detail in 2012 escorting the Dalai Lama through Honolulus airport. YoutTube | Screenshot
In 2011, the Omidyars gave more than $50,000 to the Tibet Fund, an NGO and the main conduit for cash flows from foreign donors and foreign governments to the privately-funded Central Tibetan Administration. This India-based quasi-government-in-exile is a largely astroturfed national-identity project, complete with an anthem, flag and various media organs that, according to author Lynn Pulman, claim that the Chinese government intends to eradicate the Tibetan race. The administration calls on the Tibetan diaspora to maintain the greatness and vitality of Tibetan race and national culture. USAID awarded it $23 million in 2016.
Omidyars fellow media mogul, Arianna Huffington who launched a site in partnership with Omidyars other news venture, the Civil Beat has also fallen under the influence of the Dalai Lama, as evidenced in part by her prolific pro-Dalai Lama tweets. She has also been photographed with the Dalai Lamas gatekeeper in America, Lama Tenzin Dhonden, on multiple occasions.
Omidyars right hand at eBay, Jeffrey Skoll, honored the leader with the Global Treasure Award at the 2016 Skoll World Forum and gave a speech hailing his Holiness the Dalai Lama as in heart and spirit a kindred soul to social entrepreneurs. Pierre Omidyar | Dalai Lama
Pierre Omidyar, Arianna Huffington, and the Dalai Lama in a photograph tweeted by Huffington
The sex cult and slave plantation
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