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 called "Islamic Terrorism". She also apologized for anti-India racists X posts. To further please her Indian audience, she also engaged in Pakistan bashing. "Pakistan's biggest export to the world is Islamic terrorism, and I don't believe the US should be cozying up to the Pakistani government at all," she said.
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.
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| 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. In her posts, she has referred to the “rape culture” in India. She asserts that 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.
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| 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.
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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10 comments:
Riaz Sb., with Hindutva's rise what used to be covert has now become overt. Islamophobia is nothing new in India it is just becoming more prominent.
Stories i have heard from my Indian relatives and other Indian Muslims (who were born are raised before the rise of present wave) tell how common hate was and how commonly they used to get abused.
G. Ali
‘I will not apologise’ says Laura Loomer on H-1B remarks, adds I will continue to be a voice for Americans workers - US News | The Financial Express
https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/not-anti-india-laura-loomer-addresses-h-1b-bad-blood-deleted-tweets-amp-visa-abuse-in-us/4172518/
Noting how “education in India is free” (which doesn’t actually stand true for college education), Loomer told moderators at the India Today Conclave 2026 that getting a degree in the US cost thousands of dollars. Speaking on behalf of “young Americans,” she suggested that their resentment towards foreign workers was justified especially since visa categories like H-1B tell them they’re “not the best and brightest.”
I must say I had never heard of this person before, much less that she visited an Indian media conclave. But it wouldn't be surprising since much of the north India-based media houses are known to have come under the thumb of BJP during the last decade, and who use them to propagate their politics. South-based English and regional language media houses routinely host other conclaves here with a very different set of speakers espousing a different political view.
As examples, these are conclaves that were hosted by "The Hindu" media group in Bengaluru last year, and another by "Mathrubhumi" - a Malayalam-language media house - in Thiruvananthapuram just last month.
https://www.thehindu.com/the-huddle/
https://english.mathrubhumi.com/features/mbifl-2026
Indian states outside of the "Hindi-belt" have their own political and societal dynamics where the Hindutva's "Hindu vs Muslim" narrative doesn't sell as in the north.
Vineeth,
"Indian states outside of the "Hindi-belt" have their own political and societal dynamics where the Hindutva's "Hindu vs Muslim" narrative doesn't sell as in the north.".
Yet, it is creeping in in the south too. BJP has gone from getting 6.6% votes in 1999 to 17% in 2024. The BJP coalition even won the local body elections in the state capital. I think it is just a matter of time before south is also infested with it.
G. Ali
Audrey Truschke
@AudreyTruschke
There's no way around the bitter reality -- The Loomer visit to India is a win for the racists.
Staging one audience comment, half-deleting tweets... None of that lands. What matters is that she used Indians, pushed Islamophobia, & got a stamp of approval from those she maligned
https://x.com/AudreyTruschke/status/2033187002808758494?s=20
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Rajdeep Sardesai
@sardesairajdeep
When spiteful racist language is used to target India and Indians, we get incensed. Yet when the same person resorts to the familiar ‘Islam is evil’ trope, we applaud. And forget that racism and communalism (and casteism) are cut from the same cloth of fear, prejudice, hatred and demonising the ‘other’. Now you know why it became so easy to divide and rule us?! Thank you for your attention 🙏
https://x.com/sardesairajdeep/status/2033190848008269984?s=20
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Brian Allen
@allenanalysis
Laura Loomer flew to India.
Before she left she deleted all of her anti-Indian tweets. Thousands of them. Gone.
She thought nobody would notice.
An Indian uncle (Raj Sardesai) noticed.
He read them back to her on camera.
Every one. Her own words. Her own bigotry. Directed at the people whose country she was visiting as a guest.
This is the woman who has the personal cell phone number of the President of the United States.
This is the woman who shaped immigration policy from Mar-a-Lago.
She deleted the evidence before crossing the border.
The internet is forever.
The uncle is a hero.
https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/2032864285563437350?s=20
G Ali,
BJP will have a presence in the southern states if only to serve as an alternative to those voters who are disillusioned with the traditional parties. But their scope for expansion in these parts is limited by several factors.
In Keralam, its religious demographics, with nearly half of the state's population being Muslim and Christian.
Tamil Nadu has never given much space to northern parties after the anti-Hindi agitation in the 1960s, and their politics is overwhelmingly based on Tamil identity than "Hindu".
I do not know about the scope for BJP in the two Telugu speaking states, but as of now the party is not the main contender in either Telengana or Andhra Pradesh. At best, it plays second fiddle to the regional parties there.
Karnataka is the only state in the south where BJP is strong, but even there as well as Maharashtra to its north the party has often struggled to reconcile the contradictions of its pan-Indian Hindutva ideology with the strong undercurrent of regional ethno-linguistic identities. Whenever the political talk happens to shift to Kannada/Kannadiga or Marathi identities, or the issue of "Hindi imposition" crops up, BJP finds itself on the back foot in both states.
Another case is West Bengal. Bengalis are as proud of their linguistic and cultural identity as the Tamils, but Mamata Banerjee's TMC party has virtually demolished the political base of opposition Communists thereby allowing BJP to occupy that space and position itself as the only viable opposition to her rule. As a result, eventhough BJP's traditional pitch of Hindutva, cow and Ram has limited traction among West Bengal's voters, the party manages to get the votes of those opposed to Mamata and TMC (including her former arch-enemies, the Communists).
As you can see, state-level politics in India is a lot more complex than a "Hindutva vs the rest".
Vineeth, never say never.
With all the might of state, media and social media BJP can bamboozle it's way in south when it wants to.
G. Ali
G Ali,
Unless BJP manage to create distinctly southern versions of Hindutva tailored for each of these states (not an easy task), or they declare an emergency and suspend the Constitution, I doubt it. As it stands, its north-biased propaganda machine has limited traction in the south. Southerners in general tend to be more conscious of their linguistic identities than religious ones.
I agree with Vineeth that BJP will have a hard time putting down roots in India’s Deep South!
Modi's Hindu Nationalist BJP party's appeal is the greatest among Hindus who closely associate their religious identity and the Hindi language with being “truly Indian.” In the 2019 national elections, 60% of Hindu voters who think it is very important to be Hindu and to speak Hindi to be truly Indian cast their vote for the BJP, compared with only a third among Hindu voters who feel less strongly about both these aspects of national identity.
https://www.riazhaq.com/2021/07/pew-research-two-thirds-of-hindus-say.html?m=1
Out of 5 South Indian states BJP is a force in Karnataka (where it has a running battle with the Congress to form a government) AP and Telengana. BJP is not significant in Kerela but RSS has a very old presence in the state and is allies with Christians in Kerela against Muslims.RSS modus operendi in Kerela is to hide in churches after beating up (or worse) Muslims for many decades and are actively sought by Christians in settling domestic disputes with Muslims.The BJP central government minister from Kerela in the previous government was a Christian KJ Alphons and it has many Christian and Hindu sympathisers in the state.It recently won a bye election in the capital of Kerela.
The Hindu Christian state level alliance has been very successful in Goa where BJP is in power and many ministers in the state government are Christians.So a functioning prototype of what can happen is already in place and being fine tuned.Watch this space.
Tamil Nadu will be the hardest but after the demise of Jayalalitha it has become something of a one party state under DMK sort of like Gujarat and BJP.
Historically it has been a running battle between AIDMK and DMK.BJP plan is to occupy the opposition space but it is a long term project..at least 10-15 years before BJP will be a significant political force in Tamil Nadu.The RSS is a very long term player in Indian politics it us unwise to underestimate it.
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