Fighting LTTE Women …. Looking Back from 2016

Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi, in Longreads, May 2018 where the title is “A Chance to Rewrite History: The Women Fighters of the Tamil Tigers” …… How during a brutal, 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers failed the women soldiers who sacrificed everything to fight for a sovereign state for the Tamil minority [with a NOTE from the Editor, Thuppahi at the end]

“We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015,” says Mansi. “And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together.” Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim’s dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s brutal, 25-year civil war. “Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about,” says Mansi. “You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews.”

Blake Foreshadows New American Approach to Sri Lanka … and the Rajapaksa Combo

Daya Gamage, in Asian Tribune, 12 May 2019, with this title “Robert Blake indicates Washington’s new approach to Sri Lanka”

Robert O’Blake, former (2006-2009) American ambassador to Sri Lanka and onetime assistant secretary for South and Central Asian Bureau (2009-2012) of the US Department of State indicated how Washington would approach Sri Lanka having seen the deteriorating security situation in this South Asian nation – which could affect Washington’s military design in the Indo-Pacific region – while assessing the rapidly changing political environment possibly favoring the return of the Rajapaksas.

Double Standards among Liberals in the West: No RAGE from Sri Lankan Horrors in Contrast with Reaction to Christchurch

Brendan O’Neill, in Weekend Australian, 27 April 2019, with this title “Hierarchy of Victimhood: The slaughter of Christians elicits grief not outrage “

Where is the anger over the apocalyptic barbarism visited upon Christians in Sri Lanka? Where is the fury? Where are the tweets and blog posts and viral videos offering solidarity to Christians and slamming the bombers as a members of a global fascistic movement? Such wrath has been notable by its absence, or at least its rarity, in the aftermath of the extremist slaughter that killed at least 253 people, the majority of them Christians marking the resurrection of Christ at Easter Sunday ­services.

Yes, there has been sorrow. And there has been some very strong media coverage. People want to know the stories of those who were killed, and feel the pain of the those they left behind. But rage? There has been very little.

A woman is overcome with grief during a funeral for a victim of the Easter Sunday attack on St Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka. Picture: Getty Images

Waleed Aly’s Violent Misreadings of the Sri Lankan Scenario on DISPLAY

Waleed Aly, in The Age,  25 April 2019, entitled “The Sri Lankan attacks are uniquely senseless”

Every terrorist attack in which innocent people are killed is devastatingly tragic. Every one of them is heinous. But what we’ve seen in Sri Lanka this week exists on a rarefied level of depravity. Of course, there’s the supreme violation of slaughtering people in worship – now an established feature of terrorism and particularly Islamic State’s violence in places like Egypt or the Philippines. Then there’s the nauseating symbolism of the day itself. Easter Sunday: perhaps the holiest day on the Christian calendar, but more than that, the day Christians mark the resurrection. The very idea of life’s triumph over death deformed into a day of death above all else.

Catholic nuns and others participate in a vigil outside Sacred Heart Cathedral in remembrance of victims.CREDIT:AP

Ivan Amarasinghe slaps the BBC for Misleading Aspersions

21^st April 2019

Director General, British Broadcasting Corporation,  BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London W1A 1AA

cc. Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Prime Minister <mayt@parliament.uk> ………  Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Opposition ……..<jeremy.corbyn.mp@parliament.uk>………Rt Hon. the Lord Naseby <amnaseby@btinternet.com>

Dear Sir

Misleading information and racially biased innuendoes by the BBC on the Sri Lankan Bombing Incidents today

As a peace loving Sri Lankan Sinhala and a Buddhist domiciled in the United Kingdom, it was with great sadness and dismay that I listened to the surreptitious, covert and even overt underpinnings of implied accusations on the majority Sinhala Buddhist community by your BBC  news presenters and the reporters on the above subject.

CR de Silva’s Appraisal & Report on Amarasingam’s Study of Tamil Activists in Canada

Chandra R. de Silva:  “Report on Amarnath Amarasingam’s Pain, Pride and Politics: Sri Lankan Tamil Activism in Canada“ — being a Reader’s Confidential Review of a Book Mss sent in response toa request from the publishers …. a book that has since appeared in print as  under the imprint of the University of Georgia Press (2015)

Gotabaya in Legal Gunsights: One, Two, Three …

ONE = Sanjana Hattotuwa: “The Candidate,” in Island, April 2019,

“The lie is revealed. There was no summons served. The photo depicts a lookalike of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The FBI is engaged in an effort to ascertain who produced this false information”. The Facebook Page with this content originally in Sinhala also featured a screenshot of a news story from a leading private electronic media institution. This TV channel, with pages on Facebook in both Sinhala and English that regularly generate very high engagement, ran a story which strongly suggested news of Gotabaya Rajapaksa being sued in the US was false and incorrect.