Last Saturday, hundreds of Tibetans gathered in Paris in support of the Dalai Lama, who has been criticized on social networks due to the release of a video that, according to his supporters, has been misinterpreted and exploited by Chinese propaganda. Protesters gathered in front of the headquarters of France Télévisions to denounce the media and television networks that have reproduced Chinese propaganda instead of doing their job as journalists. Participants in the demonstration carried Tibetan flags and portraits of the Tibetan spiritual leader.
The protest was organized by six associations in response to hostile reactions to the broadcast of a video showing the 87-year-old Dalai Lama asking a child in English, “Can you suck my tongue?” before sticking out his tongue, which provoked laughter from those present. The video was recorded on February 28 during an audience with the spiritual leader in McLeod Ganj, a suburb of Dharamsala in northern India, where he has lived in exile since the failure of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese Communist rule.
The Buddhist leader later apologized to the boy and his family, explaining on his Twitter account that he often jokes with people innocently and playfully, even in public and in front of cameras. The exiled Tibetan community in France considers that there was a misinterpretation of the video and regrets the circulation of decontextualized facts that deeply saddened and hurt the Tibetan community in France and around the world.
According to Françoise Robin, a professor at the French university Inalco (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations), the Dalai Lama’s joke is an expression used by Tibetans to play between adults and children. When children ask adults for something and the adults have nothing left to give them, they say, “Eat my tongue.” The scholar added that Tibetans consider the Dalai Lama their hope and their pride and that “we badly misunderstood the pain that this manipulation caused Tibetans.”