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Ex-diplomat deletes tweet linking WSJ with Soros for critical Modi piece. Here's why
Investment magnate George Soros wields enormous influence over American politics and has been criticised for commenting on Indian democracy.
India's former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal was involved in a heated exchange on social media after he wrongly claimed that Wall Street Journal (WSJ) was owned by controversial billionaire-philanthropist George Soros. Referring to an opinion piece in The WSJ titled 'Can America Rely on Modi’s India?', the ex-diplomat said no effort was made to balance the article and the author, Sadanand Dhume, had strung together a litany of smears.
“WSJ is owned by Soros. Explains the anti-Modi virulence of article. No effort to introduce any balance in it. Strings together a litany of smears. No honesty, only hate,” Sibal wrote.
To be sure, The Wall Street Journal is a division of Dow Jones, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
While many called out Sibal's factual error, some users also accused him of promoting anti-Semitism.
Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic, alleged that Sibal's tweet was a handy example of antisemitic conspiracy masquerading as his criticism.
"Soros has become such a bogeyman on this site that you now get random people around the world repeating completely fictitious antisemitic conspiracies about him (like "Soros owns the Wall Street Journal and uses it to target India") without even knowing that's what they're doing," Rosenberg wrote.
Sibal rejected the allegations asserting that Soros's religion had nothing to do with the criticism and pointed to external affairs minister S Jaishankar's remarks where he had called Soros “old, rich, opinionated and dangerous”.
“Why distort the argument? If you or he bash India as you do shall we say you are anti-Hindu?” he asked.
The former foreign secretary, however, deleted his tweet linking the newspaper with Soros and said the internet “latched on to my error about WSJ’s ownership” instead of the tweet's “substance on WSJ's hit job to diminish” the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the United States.
