Burmese authorities and members of Arakanese groups have committed crimes against humanity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan State since June 2012, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
The 153-page report, “‘All You Can Do is Pray’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State,”describes the role of the Burmese government and local authorities in the forcible displacement of more than 125,000 Rohingya and other Muslims and the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Burmese officials, community leaders, and Buddhist monks organized and encouraged ethnic Arakanese backed by state security forces to conduct coordinated attacks on Muslim neighborhoods and villages in October 2012 to terrorize and forcibly relocate the population.
Pamela Geller, responding to a critic:
Pamela Geller ?@Atlasshrugs
Hoax: http://archive.org/stream/RohingyaHoax/RohingyaHoax_djvu.txt … RT @ahmad_zaheer: @pamelageller How comes u dont mention plight of Muslims in Burma? r u a blatant Islamophobe?
22 Apr 13
Geller’s link takes us to a text entitled Rohingya Hoax, by “Mating Tha” and published by the “Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association” in New York in 2009. Other sites name the author more accurately as “U Maung Tha Hla”. Details about this person are scarce, although according to one site which has reposted part of the text:
Maung Tha Hla, who is the author of The Rakhaing, companion of the periodical Rakhaing Guardian, is the founder president of the Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association of the United States of America.
He served twenty years with the Burma Foreign Service, which he quit during the tenure of office of Deputy Permanent Representative of Burma to the United Nations Organization.
This may raise suspicions, but the rhetoric of his self-published tome speaks for itself:
The paltry subterfuge of an imaginary people was hyperbolized in so much profusion that it has profoundly suffused into confusion of the general public, people of the Western world in particular. No wonder that the image of fictional Rohingya, which was feigned to attain the legal status of immigrant Bengali Muslims, gained favour of apologists and liberal ists. Adapted to a culture of deceit the Chiftagonian separatists gussied up their claim in fancy and finesse, distorting nebulous events of history convenient for the Rohingya chicanery. The purveyors of lies did not need facts to hoodwink the general public, It is pretty simple to spot the wile, if one would only go back to history.
Rakhaing, a traditional Buddhist land, has been in the Islamic phantasm for centuries. Rambunctious as it has been in the time since the demise of monarchy, the woeful state of affairs of Rakhaing, to the gravest extent imaginable, was aggravated by transplant Chittagonian Bengalis who toyed with the idea of gaining dominion over the land, which the Muslims had failed to materialize in the past centuries; but their aspiration, the sequel of long-run objective to fulfill the Islamic inspiration, did not die. They continued to activize the growing breath of the preordained ambition in capricious strategy and freakish tactics.
And so on. Even allowing for poor English, it’s clear that this is not a work that can contribute in any way to a morally serious assessment of the conflict in Burma.
Geller’s use of the word “hoax” here is superficially clever; if challenged on details about anti-Rohingya violence, she can claim that she was referring merely to historical claims rather than to the reality of current events (even though her source material is a joke). However, as I noted last July, Geller takes the view that violence in Burma is the inevitable result of “Muslim immigration”; prior to that, she expressed support for militant anti-Muslim Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka.
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