Arakan News Agency
Radical Buddhists? Violent monks? Ethnic cleansing? Concentration camps? And now, mass graves? What’s happening in Myanmar is terrible, but it should be impossible. At least, so far as Islamophobes would have it.…
The genocidal campaign for the elimination of a people, the Rohingya, has been gathering steam in Myanmar since 2011, but counter to common stereotype, the victims are Muslims, and their attackers include Buddhist monks.
The extremist movement behind some of the worst violence, “969,” claims the Rohingya are outbreeding the majority, attempting to conquer and subjugate Myanmar’s Buddhists. If that language sounds familiar, it should.
It’s a rehash of Islamophobia’s favorite talking points: Creeping Shari’ah! Demographic time bombs! (Asian) Eurabia! While Bill Maher and friends insist Islamophobia is just made up—even as they are guilty of it—969’s words and deeds are not idle exercises in televised talking points, jokes at the expense of Muslims, merely designed to earn laughs.
Many of the most trite and common arguments deployed by anti-Muslim bigots are used in Myanmar to encourage, justify, and accelerate ethnic cleansing. The Intercept found that recently some Rohingya have been arrested for membership in a terrorist movement, the “Myanmar Muslim Army,” which doesn’t even exist. Last year, the New York Times revealed Muslim concentration camps, the intention of which should be obvious.
As the violence escalates, Rohingya have begun to flee, paying thousands of dollars to flee on leaky boats. Of the country’s approximately 1 million Rohingya (numbers vary, in part because the government’s censuses permit no such identification), some 100,000 have already fled, and nearly 140,000 are displaced.
The unluckiest are sold to human traffickers, who extort their families back home for more money. They seem to be the source of mass graves found near the Thai border. Thousands more are stranded at sea. David Pilling called the Rohingya the “Jews of Asia”. The Economist said the Rohingya may be “the most persecuted people in the world.”
They are painful evidence Islamophobia is real, and can be lethal. But it’s also a means to understand just how sloppy, inaccurate and dangerous Islamophobia can be. Just try turning things around.
Source: Quartz
