01: The American Hindu Defamation League AHDL) is already making itself known as a protector of Hindus in America after only recently getting off the ground.
The organization was recently started by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America organization. Last spring the AHDL led a protest campaign against the rock group Aerosmith for making a sacrilegious portrayal of Lord Krishna. After the group’s CD cover showing Lord Krishna with a cat’s head and a women’s torso was released, the organization sprang into action. It launched an “all-out” offensive against the CD, through its World Wide Web site, encouraging visitors to bombard its producer and distributor Sony and its subsidiary Columbia as well as Aerosmith with letters, e-mail, and phone calls.
Although Aerosmith apologized, the AHADC is still pursuing the issue, pressing for a recall of the CDs and focusing on other sacrilege toward Hinduism on the CD, including an obscene depiction of the god Ganesha.
(Source: Hinduism Today, July)
02: Those on the far right have often been viewed as the bearers of conspiracy theories. But author David Icke demonstrates that conspiracy can thrive in the New Age movement as well as the far right.
On the lecture circuit and through his books, Icke has made a name for himself as he claims to find conspiracies in many of the familiar places: among the Rothschilds, and Rockefellers and in the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission. Icke is also said to have anti-Semitic tendencies , “without ever quite getting there.”
He often refers to the centerpiece of anti-Semitic literature, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though he substitutes UFOs and the Illuminati for Jews as the main conspirators. The New Age element comes into the picture with Icke’s vision of a collective spiritual awakening, where humans would break of out of a herd mentality and celebrate a diversity of lifestyles.
(Source: Gnosis, Summer, 1997).