Aren't you forgetting somebody, Mr Trump?
By John Welford
@indexer (4852)
Leicester, England
November 14, 2018 2:09am CST
One of Donald Trump's latest tweets acknowledges that Diwali is currently being celebrated across the world as well in the United States.
Or, as he puts it, it is being celebrated by "Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains".
So what about the Hindus, then? Not a mention of them, which is odd given that this is largely a Hindu festival!
If I were to ask the question "Can he really be so ignorant?" I would have to admit at the outset that I already know the answer - yes he could!
So either he really does not know that Hinduism is the third largest world religion (not much smaller than Islam in terms of number of adherents - and we all know that he has certainly heard of the latter), or he is being fed "fake news" by his staff.
And just to set the record straight, Diwali is only celebrated by a small proportion of Buddhists, and Sikhs and Jains represent much smaller proportions of the world population than Hindus - there are over a billion Hindus but only 30 million Sikhs and 4 million Jains.
Your next contribution to general ignorance is eagerly anticipated, Mr Trump!
4 people like this
5 responses
@indexer (4852)
• Leicester, England
14 Nov 18
Yes, that is a surprise. Does that suggest that he looked it up in a hurry on Wikipedia and got some of the info he needed but not all of it?
Not many people outside India have heard of Jainism. It just so happens that I regularly walk past a Jain temple in Leicester, so the name is not strange to me, but this is one of only two Jain temples in the entire country, so I would not expect all that many people to know about them.
