India Hosts "Proud Islamophobe" Laura Loomer in New Delhi

Self-described "Proud Islamophobe" Laura Loomer was invited to speak this weekend at India Today Conclave, an annual conference sponsored by an Indian publication. Her speech focussed on what she calls "Islamic Terrorism". She also apologized for anti-India racists X posts. 

Loomer is known to be very close to President Donald Trump. In her social media posts, she is also known for viciously attacking India and Indians almost as much as Muslims. But at the conference in Delhi, she apologized for her anti-India posts. She also deleted most or all such posts prior to showing up in India. 

A Collage of Laura Loomer's anti-India Posts. Source: OpIndia

Loomer has described Indians as “third-world invaders” and questioned their place in the United States, claiming that America was built by “white Europeans.” She also mocked India’s sanitation practices. In one of the widely shared X messages, she questioned why Indians “still [defecate] in the water they bathe and drink from,” while another post mocked Indian immigrants as so-called “high-skilled” workers who supposedly come from a country without basic facilities. She also said Indians have a low IQ of just 76. 

It was her "proud Islamophobe" label and her views on "Islamic terrorism" that attracted many Indians to find her fit to be given a spotlight in the Indian capital. When X briefly made users’ countries of origin public, several prominent pro-Israel accounts were found to be run from India, according to France24. 

India has just 5.75% of global Twitter users but the country accounts for 55% of all anti-Muslim tweets, according to a report entitled "Islamophobia in the Digital Age" published by the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV) in 2022. It also found that the US, the UK, and India contributed a staggering 86% of anti-Muslim content on Twitter during a three-year period. It should be noted that both the US and the UK have a sizable  Indian diaspora infected by hateful Hindutva ideology. 

India Accounts For 55% of Islamophobic Tweets. Source: ICV


Individuals and organizations connected to the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) are active users of social media. They are working to promote India's divisive Islamophobic politics among the Non Resident Indians (NRIs) and their children. Hundreds of the RSS shakhas (branches) are now found in at least 39 countries around the world. Hindutva is a Hindu supremacist ideology inspired by 20th century Fascism and Nazism in Europe; it is very different from the ancient Hindu faith, according to American history professor Audrey Truschke who teaches Indian history at Rutgers University in the US state of New Jersey. Top Indian economists have raised alarm about it.  

 Active Twitter Users. Source: Statista

India has only 23 million Twitter users, 5.75% of 400 million Twitter users worldwide, but Indians generate more than half of all Islamophobic tweets in the world.  Numbers published in Twitter’s advertising resources indicate that Twitter had 3.40 million users in Pakistan in early 2022. ICV counted 15,766 Islamophobic tweets geolocated to Pakistan in a three year period.

Executives at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently told human rights groups that they wouldn’t release the full India Hate Speech study for their own security. An earlier 2020 company study concluded that Hindutva groups support violence against Muslims and Christians & should be banned from the platform, according to the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt of the Wall Street Journal story:

"Meta has for years faced criticism from rights groups and has been probed by authorities regarding the presence of hate speech on its platforms in India, where more than 300 million people use Facebook and more than 400 million are on its WhatsApp messaging service. Meta has said it invests significantly in technology to find hate speech across languages in India. In 2020, Meta’s safety team concluded that a Hindu nationalist organization in India supported violence against minorities and likely qualified as an organization that should be banned from Facebook, the Journal reported that year. Facebook didn’t remove the group following internal security-team warnings that doing so might endanger both its business prospects and staff in India". 


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