Mediacide in Myanmar: Militant Buddhism's toll on Rohingya Muslims

It's Time We Ask, why is this being allowed in Burma?

People are dying silently in Myanmar and the west is refuses to pay attention. The situation tears at the hearts of Human Rights activists who are sick of the killing.

(SALEM) - The Genocidal patterns of militant Buddhists are increasingly claiming large swaths of humanity, sweeping remains into unmarked mass graves. We're familiar with the term 'Democide' in reference to today's brand of western diplomacy; which involves smashing people like Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Libyans and Syrians to smithereens. Now we're confronted with Mediacide which war criminals love and embrace. They kill innocent people and the American 'news media' keeps its mouth shut, thus allowing the acts to take place; hence 'mediacide'.

An international truce monitor examines the bodies of two youth abducted in the Sri Lanka Army-controlled area. Photo TamilNet

Three years ago, it was Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus and Christians; 160,000 people were murdered and disappeared while the U.S. government, which knew what was taking place, tragically remained silent and only tried to resolve the crisis through diplomatic back channels with the Sri Lanka Sinhalese Buddhist government which miserably failed. We wouldn't even know that if it weren't for Wikileaks.

Now it is the Rohingya Muslim's turn to die at the hand of Buddhist religious extremists in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, a place of long simmering ethnic tension.

In this case it is the Rakhine Buddhists doing the killing. Local sources say there are not two groups fighting in the Rakhine State; armed and well trained Rakhines are killing unarmed Rohingya and that is it.

Critics of American silence are registering their complaints loudly in press all over the eastern world, though Americans are hearing next to nothing and most don't even know what it is they are ignoring. That is the power of western media- or a lack of it as the case may be, and I hope that it leads to media groups themselves being at the center of the protests. They are failing in America. Genocide is the worst human crime possible.

Advocates of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma see the power of the west as complicit in the slaughter. After all, it is U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama who are normalizing relations with this country without insisting that years of Human Rights violations are addressed. We lamented this at the time of Clinton's recent visit and now we are watching the Rohingya Muslims die as a result of the American desire to do business but not fix humanity. The western journalists' lack of criticism is unnerving to say the least.

Those watching this political silence should note that the Sri Lankan Genocide of Tamils went from being ignored, to becoming the subject of a set of extremely powerful documentaries produced by Channel 4 in the UK titled, 'Sri Lanka's Killing Fields' which blew the lid off of the Government of Sri Lanka's (GoSL) attempt to keep their dirty deeds; war crimes and crimes against humanity, hidden from view.

Salem-News.com is one of, if not the only western news organizations to heavily publicize the photos and videos of the slaughter of Tamils before the Channel 4 documentaries were released. The stories receive considerable traffic every day; even those from 2010 and before. Since the terrible acts of the GoSL were exposed, the country has been taken to war crime court in Geneva. The pressure is not going away, only building, and it has only grown with intensity and this will happen with the Rohingya Muslims too, even if it takes time and more people have to suffer and die first.

When it does happen, Americans will issue statements about how tragic it all is and yet their silence will be the reason it was allowed to go so far out of control.

What the World is Saying

In Sarajevo, Bosnia - Nasmiya Bokova, journalist and deputy chief editor of Muslimanka magazine, criticized the United States and its Western allies for not responding to the massacre of Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar. As a country who claims to human rights defenders, Bokova says the attitude of the U.S. and Western countries is astounding.

"It was shocking that Western countries, particularly the United States, which claims to fight for human rights does not react to these events," Bokova said in an interview with IRNA in Moscow.

We published the words of Aung Aung Oo early this morning, who is a Rohingya Muslim in Burma with big questions for U.S. policy makers:

"Why are you keeping silent? You entered Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places without a UN resolution, why don’t you want to interfere in the Arakan State? Shall I accuse you of a double standard?"

More poignant and biting, was the comment:

Three of my friends had been trying to take photos and they got some which were sent to international media, after then all of my friends lost their lives, even I don’t know how they were killed.

On 27 July 2012, MuslimMatters.org wrote:

Considering how little the American media, and to only a slightly lesser extent their international counterparts, have covered this latest outbreak of violence between Buddhist nationalists and minority Rohingya Muslims, you are squarely in the majority if you have no idea that dozens have been butchered and hundreds have attempted (unsuccessfully) to flee their homeland.

All while the world remains silent.

The only problem with that may be that the numbers of dead have reached well into the thousands according to many local sources we are in contact with, but media access is zero.

Without addressing Burma specifically, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times this week that calls attention to the lackadaisical position the United States has taken with respect to Human Rights:

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Al Franken and Tim King in Afghanistan

Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine who follows stories of Marines and Marine Veterans; he's covered British Royal Marines and in Iraq, Tim embedded with the same unit he served with in the 1980's.

He holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing from traditional mainstream news agencies like The Associated Press and Electronic Media Association; he also holds awards from the National Coalition of Motorcyclists, the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs; and was presented with a 'Good Neighbor Award' for his reporting, by the The Red Cross.

Tim's years as a Human Rights reporter have taken on many dimensions; he has rallied for a long list of cultures and populations and continues to every day, with a strong and direct concentration on the 2009 Genocide of Tamil Hindus and Christians in Sri Lanka. As a result of his long list of reports exposing war crimes against Tamil people, Tim was invited to be the keynote speaker at the FeTNA (Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America) Conference in Baltimore, in July 2012. This is the largest annual gathering of North American Tamils; Tim addressed more than 3000 people and was presented with a traditional Sri Lanka ‘blessed garland’ and a shawl as per the tradition and custom of Tamil Nadu, India.

The notorious list comprising Tim's ancestors includes Pedro de Alvarado, the lieutenant of Hernando Cortez of Spain; King Phillip IV, Eleanor of Aquitaine and William the Conqueror. Perhaps most interestingly, King John; the dark force in the story Robin Hood, and also the last Spanish governor of California, a real person fictionalized as the arch rival of the character in Zorro, are in reality both Tim's multiple-great grandfathers.

Tim at his family ranch in Chino, California.

Others include a Confederate officer in the U.S. Civil War and a decorated 'hero' of the Mexican-American War and the so-called 'Indian Wars'. In fact on the east coast, Tim's lineage with the Slaughter and King families, pre-dates the Mayflower and several members of his family were soldiers in the Revolutionary War. He says his family's past; some of which is very dark; some quite chivalrous, presents a certain responsibility, and that in part drives his desire to see that people in today's world are not exploited or allowed to suffer in silence as victims of Human Rights violations, as people of previous times were.

In a personal capacity, Tim has written 2,026 articles as of March 2012 for Salem-News.com since the new format designed by Matt Lintz was launched in December, 2005. Serving readers with news from all over the globe, Tim's life is literally encircled by the endless news flow published by Salem-News.com, where more than 100 writers contribute stories from 23+ countries and regions.

Tim specializes in writing about political and military developments worldwide; and maintains that the label 'terrorist' is ill placed in many cases; specifically with the LTTE Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, where it was used as an excuse to slaughter people by the tens of thousands; and in Gaza, where a trapped population lives at the mercy of Israel's destructive military war crime grinder. At the center of all of this, Tim pays extremely close attention to the safety and welfare of journalists worldwide. You can write to Tim at this address: tim@salem-news.com. Visit Tim's Facebook page (facebook.com/TimKing.Reporter)