The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has slammed top Western news outlets like New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters and AP for what it called a “shameful and deliberate erasure” of the religious targeting involved in the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir.
In the ghastly terror attack, selectively targeted against the people of the Hindu religion, 26 tourists were killed by terrorists affiliated with The Resistance Front, a known proxy of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Suhag Shukla, Executive Director of HAF, issued a searing statement taking aim at the international media’s treatment of the incident.
“They downplay terrorism. Sanitize it. Hide the victims’ religious identities. Call terrorists ‘militants.’ Put ‘terror attack’ in sneer quotes. This isn’t just a tragic story—it’s deliberate erasure,” she said.
“Let’s get this straight,” she said, “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.”
Shukla said that the nature of the attack left no ambiguity.
“The headlines should have written themselves: Hindus massacred in Kashmir by Islamists in a terror attack claimed by a Pakistan-backed group,” she said.
Instead, she argued, major media houses like The New York Times, CNN, BBC, Reuters, and Associated Press had diluted or distorted the framing.
“Across the board, you’ll see patronising sneer quotes around ‘terror attack’ and sanitised references to the killers as militants,” she said. “Some even have the gall to call them rebels. For the record: 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.”
Killed for their religion
Citing eyewitness accounts, Shukla underlined that the killings were ideologically driven.
“Terrorists demanded victims identify their religion—forcing them to show IDs or recite the Kalma—and murdered them if they were Hindu. They deliberately spared their wives and children to report the message of hate,” she said.
One specific detail that drew her ire was the BBC’s description of the victims as “non-Muslims.”
She called it an act of deliberate minimisation.
“The intent here is as clear as it is old: target, murder, and terrorise Hindus for an ideological and religious war. Please spare us the neutral terms and erasure,” Shukla said.
Targeted anti-Hindu violence
Shukla argued that the Pahalgam massacre is part of a broader and ongoing pattern of anti-Hindu violence in Kashmir, which she said is either ignored or softened by international media.
“Attacks on Hindus in Kashmir by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists are neither rare nor random,” she said, referring to the forced exodus of over 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits in the late 1980s and ’90s, as well as targeted killings of Hindu pilgrims at religious sites like Amarnath and Vaishno Devi.
She also cited systemic discrimination against Hindus in Kashmir prior to the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. “Before then, indigenous Hindu Pandits—already ethnically cleansed—were legally barred from reclaiming property.
Kashmiri women couldn’t pass property to their children if they married outsiders. Indians from outside the region couldn’t settle there,” she noted. “And yet AP and Reuters describe those seeking to return as ‘outsiders’? Would they call a Californian moving to Pennsylvania an immigrant?” she asked.
LeT controls TRF
Shukla further detailed the operational link between Lashkar-e-Taiba and The Resistance Front.
“Pakistan’s intelligence agency bankrolls, trains and directs them. TRF’s Falcon Squad is trained in L.E.T. camps in Pakistan. Their propaganda machine runs on L.E.T. networks—all to push Islamabad’s anti-Indian, anti-Hindu agenda,” she said.
In her concluding remarks, Shukla made a damning indictment of the international media’s role in shaping public discourse.
“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.”
