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Genocide of Muslims in Myanmar continues
Even though in 2012 the UN described Myanmar's Rohingya community as one of the world's most persecuted minorities, the plight of Muslims in Myanmar is still a largely ignored issue.
Since September 2012, Buddhist monks in Myanmar have been massacring Muslims and rallied in support of Myanmar’s President Thein Sein's proposal to expel them to another country claiming they are not citizens. This ludicrous assertion is made despite the fact that Rohingya have lived in the country for many centuries.
As armed gangs of Buddhist fanatics continue to ethnically cleanse Rohingya Muslims, mainstream global media continues to present the massacre in Myanmar as ethnic tension rather than an ongoing genocide. On March 25, Associated Press (AP) reported that “anti-Muslim mobs rampaged through three more towns in Myanmar's predominantly Buddhist heartland over the weekend, destroying mosques and burning dozens of homes despite government efforts to stem the nation's latest outbreak of sectarian violence. President Thein Sein had declared an emergency in central Myanmar on Friday and deployed army troops to the worst-hit city, Meikhtila, where 32 people were killed and 10,000 mostly Muslim residents were displaced. But even as soldiers restored order there after several days of anarchy in which armed Buddhists torched the city's Muslim quarters, the unrest has spread south toward the capital, Naypyitaw.”
Even though it is well known that the Buddhist religious establishment in Myanmar actively incites violence against Muslims, Western media outlets and think-tanks continue to constantly repeat a dubious narrative with little evidence of how ethnic tensions flared in Rakhine State after the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman – blamed on a Rohingya Muslim. This description of events in Myanmar fits the narrative constructed several decades ago by the Western media. The Western media has been systematically cultivating an artificially positive image of the Buddhist religious establishment in order to use it as leverage against China through the Tibet issue. Western powers successfully created an image of Buddhist monks as the “most peaceful humans on earth.” This artificial narrative assisted Western imperialist regimes in fostering anti-China sentiment within their own societies and abroad.
Another revealing aspect of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar is the fact that violence against Muslims reached unprecedented levels after the US established ties with the military junta in 2012. Prior to last year’s embrace of Myanmar’s military rulers by the EU and US, violence against the Rohingyas was not part of official state policy. Taking into account that over the past several decades the US government has directly (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen) or indirectly (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc) participated in oppressing and killing Muslims, Washington’s involvement in the ethnic cleansing process in Myanmar cannot be excluded.
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