Especially interesting to me, is that Asher (while claiming to be a Buddhist) also seems to be a gratuitous defamer against Gordon Thomas as a "racist bigot" and other inflammatory derogation more consistent with marxist rhetorical attacks.
Based on your linked story, the picture apparently surfaced only in March of this year, according to the ICT itself....and now they are alleged to be of dated origin.
Well put. I am a Tibetan Buddhist and when I ran across Asher's blog doing research on an e-mail forward of the article mentioned I sent it to my teacher for comment. He guffawed and said he discredits himself in two sentences. Here they are...
I am a Buddhist practioner in the Tibetan tradition. I have been a social activist.
The second sentence, in essence, says "I am not a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner."
I am a political activist but the basis for that is that I'm an American not that I am a Buddhist. I also consider being a political activist a quite different thing than being a "social activist" which is just double speak for utopianist. Any serious first year student should be able to grasp the concept of samsara well enough to know that a utopian state is not possible. If it were then everything the Buddha taught would be entirely false in which case it would be kind of stupid to practice Buddhism. His little screed about "the truth" is rather enlightening too after he turns around and insults people he has obviously never listened to (Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh) and relies on his own unsourced innuendo and guilt by association to "refute" the article in question.