Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008
How He Sees It Now
By Jonathan Mirsky
It is open season on the Dalai Lama and not just for Beijing, for whom he is 'a monk in wolf's clothing,' or for Rupert Murdoch, who dismissed him as a 'very old political monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.' During his trip to London in May, when I met the Dalai Lama three times, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown declined to receive him at 10 Downing Street, as Tony Blair had done; earlier, Foreign Secretary David Miliband urged both China and the Tibetans 'to show restraint.'[1] When the Dalai Lama visited Oxford, the head of one of the institutions where he spoke, who has connections with China, stipulated that the name of the place must not be used in news reports; nor could a picture be taken of the outside of the building while the Dalai Lama was there. (The Dalai Lama spoke without such limitations elsewhere at Oxford.) The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, once the paper's Beijing bureau chief, recently wrote:
Feature, 1637 words
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