The mainstream media in the UK along with various Islamic and Leftist groups, including some of Britain’s most infamous Islamic grievance mongers, have all been going full tilt recently talking up the plight of the Muslim Rohingya people who are residing in Burma. The Rohingya are a people with a chequered history, with a record for both good and bad actions to their name. For example they fought for Britain against the Japanese but also have a bad reputation in Burma for crime and latterly jihad. The bulk of the Rohingya originated from majority Muslim areas in the East of British India and are closely linked culturally with the Muslim peoples who make up modern day Bangladesh. Some Rohingya claim that there has been a Rohingya presence in Burma for much longer than that. It’s true that there has always been some migration into the area which is now Burma from India, but it sped up and increased during the time of the British Empire.

The Rohingya are not considered by the Burmese government to be citizens of the country. In effect they are considered to be stateless. The Burmese don’t want them and neither are the Bangladeshis seemingly prepared to accept them, at least not at present or without some incentive. The Rohingya, both the half-decent ones and the bad ones, are both trapped in the same situation and it’s a bad one for all of them.

There are very few people out there, especially people who are reasonable, who would deny that the Rohingya are facing a serious bout of violence aimed at them by the Burmese military. The dominant narrative of the Rohingya situation ie the one put by the mainstream media, leftist activists and various Islamic grievance mongers, is one in which the Burmese have turned on these poor dispossessed Rohingya people in a violent and racist manner.

The BBC for example, has concentrated on overtly and covertly blaming the Burmese government for the Rohingya’s plight and is carrying harrowing tales of the journey of the refugee boats from Burma and the inevitable drownings that accompany such crossings. The BBC are also going into full shroud waving mode over the lack of aid that is reaching those Rohingya who do manage to reach Bangladesh.

Sky News has also got on board the ‘poor oppressed Muslim refugees’ bandwagon and has published comment pieces supportive of the Rohingya and critical of the Burmese government. In one piece Sky Diplomatic Editor Dominic Waghorn said that it was a ‘tragedy’ that the Burmese State Counsellor and Nobel Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi had not spoken more loudly in defence of the Rohingya. He also took some exception to the phrase ‘Rohingya terrorists’ which was used by Aung San Suu Kyi in a statement in which she warned about ‘misinformation’ that was being put out about the Rohingya situation.

As noted before in the introduction, as well as the mainstream media promoting the ‘poor oppressed Rohingya’ narrative, there has also been the involvement of some pretty unsavoury groups and individuals who are also pushing this line. The Tell Mama group for example, a group that has had a lot of criticism for dishonesty and dubious ‘hate crime’ statistics, has been very enthusiastic in republishing pro-Rohingya media articles on their social media outlets. The involvement of this group in promoting this pro-Rohingya narrative is unsurprising as they’ve never seen an Islamic victimhood bandwagon that they’ve not wanted to join.

Also promoting the Rohingya case has been Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, in January she highlighted the alleged ethnic cleansing that is going on in Burma. According to Hansard, Baroness Kinnock also criticised Aung San Suu Kyi for not having taken ‘any initiative to ensure full and equal citizenship rights of the Rohingyas”

From reading the many and various reports that have come out of Burma about the situation in Rakhine state and what is happening to the Rohingya, I conclude that the Rohingya are being subjected to some pretty harsh treatment by the Burmese military. It’s right that reasonable people condemn those attacks where innocent civilians have been deliberately targeted by the military forces of Burma. I believe that we can do this and take this moral stand, whilst at the same time recognising that there is another narrative here and one that is not being promoted by the usual suspects of the political Left, various Islamic grievance mongers and mainstream journalists.

The other narrative is that these Rohingya do not have a pleasant culture or one that fits in well with the majority Buddhist culture of Burma and the Burmese want this culture gone from within their borders. This may seem to us to be a tremendously racist or xenophobic attitude but, with Burma we are not dealing with a Western country, we are dealing with a society which, as the White Sun of the Desert blog puts it so well: ‘in that part of the world one’s race or tribe counts for quite a lot.”

White Sun is probably correct in their statement that those from the Western liberal Left who lauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she was struggling against the Burmese military junta arrogantly assumed that she would be ‘one of them’ and would have the same ‘minority rights’ mindset as they did.

White Sun said:

There are a lot of people expressing their disappointment in Ms Suu Kyi , presumably for failing to leap to the aid of the Rohingyas. I expect those who are disappointed don’t know much about the Burmese or Asians in general, and those who do aren’t surprised in the least. I confess I don’t know much about Asians and nothing about Burmese, but in that part of the world one’s race or tribe counts for quite a lot. From what I can tell, Ms Suu Kyi’s original beef was with the ruling militia which was oppressing ordinary Burmese, and she wanted things to change – for the benefit of Burmese. Did she care about other minority groups out of adherence to some universal standards of human rights? In hindsight, obviously not. Alas, the wet lefties in the west who wrung their hands for years as Ms Suu Kyi languished under house arrest simply assumed she was just like them. Funnily enough, being Burmese and not American or European, she isn’t.

Read the rest of the White Sun of the Desert piece via the link below:

http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/?p=5504

The ‘disappointment’ expressed by the liberal left at Aung San Suu Kyi’s failure to defend the Rohingya is an indication of both their intellectual and political arrogance in assuming that she was like them and their inability to see that it’s a case of different strokes for different folks. Suu Kyi did care about the ordinary Burmese being oppressed, which is partly why she got political support originally, but she is showing that she cares more for the Burmese people than those who some see as Muslim squatters. The fact that someone like Suu Kyi may be more concerned with the rights and security of the Burmese, rather than a sometimes troublesome minority, is something that does not compute for the liberal Left and is a challenge to their narrative.

There’s another interesting article out there about the Rohingya situation and another that challenges the ‘innocent Muslims oppressed by nasty Buddhists’ schtick and that is from PJ Media, a US conservative leaning outlet. In the article entitled: ‘I don’t accept the narrative’, PJ Media’s Patrick Poole spoke to a retired State Department diplomat who had served in Burma, who told a different story about what is going on in Burma. The former diplomat said that Suu Kyi had been working hard to bring peace to Rakhine State but it has been Islamic violence that has scuppered any chance of a long term peace deal.

PJ Media said:

Much of the international criticism has been directed at Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s foreign minister and state counsellor — as well as the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her peaceful resistance campaign against the country’s longtime military junta rulers. She is now accused of indifference to the Rohingyas’ plight, with some calling for her Nobel Prize to be revoked:

But Priscilla Clapp — a 30-year State Department diplomat who served as U.S. chief of mission in Myanmar from 1999-2002, and now is a senior adviser at the U.S. Institute for Peace — is pushing back on the claims of the media and human rights groups.

In a Thursday appearance on France 24, Clapp said that Kyi had been working with a United Nations commission led by former Secretary General Kofi Annan on peace efforts in the region. According to Clapp, the recent large-scale attacks by foreign-funded Islamic terrorist groups targeting Myanmar’s security forces, which sparked the current crisis, were purposefully timed to derail those efforts.

Clapp was preceeded by a France 24 correspondent pushing the accepted international media version of events — that Kyi’s security forces are entirely to blame — to which Clapp replied:

I simply don’t accept the narrative that we just heard.

Ms Clapp may have more of a handle on the truth of the Burmese situation than has the lefties, the left press and various activist types. The reality as I see it, is that neither side in this conflict has completely clean hands. Without doubt the Burmese military are on occasion behaving in a quite brutal fashion towards the Rohingya but the Rohingya are not quite the innocents that they are being made out to be. Over the last few years there have been reports and rumours of incidents where Muslims have assaulted Buddhists in shops, have poured petrol over and immolated a Buddhist girl and of rapes committed by Muslims in Burma. Many of these reports and rumours have incited riots against Muslims in which both Muslims and non-Muslims were killed.

Some counterjihad writers have published lurid details of the alleged criminal activities and bestial violence that Muslims have subjected non-Muslims to in Burma. One particular site is detailing forced conversions, child rapes, Islamic mob violence and tales of how Buddhist girls forcibly converted to Islam are being coerced into desecrating famous Buddhist symbols. If only a part of the negative stuff that has come out about Burma’s Muslims is true, then it makes them look less like pure victims and at the very best as partial perpetrators of the current problems.

Anti-Islamic riots can occur in Burma at any time because of perceived provocations by Muslims such as treating Buddhists badly or engaging in sex crime or forced conversions. What appears to be happening in Burma is that this nation’s Muslim minority hasn’t exactly gone out of their way to not stoke up hatred towards themselves. This in turn has fed Buddhist nationalism and calls by Buddhists for even greater violence to be directed at Burma’s Muslims.

When you get behind the tales told about the Rohingya situation by the shifty Islamic activists, the verified left-wing journalists and the members of the political classes; you start to see something that is much less black and white then we are being told. The Rohingya and other Muslims in Burma are not unadulterated victims as we have been told but may well have contributed by their crappy behaviour and attitudes to their current unpleasant situation. The Buddhists on the other hand are neither angels nor monsters. The Burmese Buddhists are at the same time both defenders of their families from Muslim violence and perpetrators of violence against Muslims. It needs to be said that both the Muslims and the Buddhists have carried out and incited violence in Burma and that this violence has afflicted both innocent and guilty alike on both sides of the religious divide.

As we can see when we delve into the Burmese situation in a little more depth, the one-sidedness of the media, Islamic and leftist political narratives start to show themselves as being highly biased towards one side in this communal conflict and that’s the Islamic side. There seems to be no attempt by the mainstream media to have any balance in their reporting, much of what I’ve seen is very similar and ominously so, to the sort of bent reporting that we saw during the start of the European Islamic migrant crisis. We have the same ‘tales of refugee horror’, the same pictures of drowned migrant children that are calculated to tug at the heartstrings of soft-hearted Westerners. Unfortunately in the case of the European migrant crisis, the people of Europe, instead of taking in desperate and grateful refugees, ended up also taking in violent thugs, rapists and greedy chancers. The ‘children’ that we were told were in need of rescue following the publicity over the drowned child Aylan Kurdi, often turned out to be bearded men of military age, some with close connections to Islamic terror and terrorists.

Because of the false narrative put out by the media, the Left, iffy ‘citizens’ groups and various Islamic entities, Europe got landed with some seriously dangerous individuals from probably some of the most hate filled and violent cultures on earth. In Europe we were comprehensively conned by the authorities and pro migration groups about the issue of asylum seeking and migration. We did not get, as we were told we would get, the best of the best, the doctors, scientists and entrepreneurs of the Islamic world as ‘refugees’, instead we got the dregs. Many will look at the clarion calls for assistance to the Rohingya and notice that these calls look suspiciously alike to previous ‘refugee’ campaigns and say ‘I won’t get fooled again’ by this over-emotive reporting and campaigning.

The troubles in Burma are plainly an inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict which has been stoked by both sides, therefore it is dishonest and foolhardy to focus on the Muslim Rohingya and treat them as innocent victims, who are as pure as the driven snow. The Burma situation is one where the Muslims are deeply unpopular, sometimes for valid reasons and sometimes for less than valid reasons. It’s obvious that the Rohingya in particular are especially hated and there are indications that the Rohingya by their behaviour, may have at the very least contributed to this hatred.

If we accept that this is a two-sided rather than a one-sided conflict, then we need to ask how can this problem be solved? Muslims and Islam are without a doubt unpopular in Burma and knowing how Islam has made itself unpopular elsewhere, it may well be that there are damned good reasons for Islam being disliked. If this problem is to be solved and the greatest number of lives, both Muslim and non-Muslim, are to be saved, then we need to ask is there any lasting security benefit in pressing the Burmese to give citizenship to the Rohingya? A policy of incorporating Rohingya into Burmese society forcibly under international pressure, may merely defer communal violence to a later time, not solve the problems altogether.

A better, longer term solution may be some form of population exchange, with those Buddhists currently resident in Bangladesh moving to Burma and the Rohingya Muslims being moved to Bangladesh. I know that population exchanges are unpopular among the modern political classes and are in some cases against international law, but it may be the best way of diverting mass deaths, both of Buddhists and Muslims in a conflict that shows no sign of abating. The Rohingya are disliked and unwanted in Burma and this is a condition that the Rohingya may or may not have brought upon themselves but if the priority is to save lives in the region then maybe the Rohingya should be assisted to move to Bangladesh? Maybe when Burma is free of what some see as a particularly dangerous Islamic threat, then things might calm down somewhat.

Of course Bangladesh doesn’t want to be burdened with these Rohingya any more than the Burmese do, but it is Bangladesh where these Rohingya hail from and for the sake of peace, to Bangladesh they should return. However, I do not think it is fair to ask a poor country like Bangladesh to shoulder the entirety of the burden of the returning Rohingya and I feel it would be a good use for part of the aid budget of the former colonial power Britain, along with other Western nations, to give resettlement grants to Rohingya moving permanently to Bangladesh and a fixed term per capita funding package to the Bangladeshi government in order to offset the extra costs incurred by absorbing the Rohingya. Helping the Rohingya re-establish themselves in Bangladesh and helping to turn down the tension in Burma, would be a far better and more positive use for part of the UK overseas aid budget than paying to create an ‘Ethiopian Spice Girls’ band.

If the Muslims of Burma and especially the Rohingya have behaved as badly as some Muslim minorities have behaved elsewhere in the world both in the West and the East, then it’s probably understandable to a certain extent that Burmese Buddhists want these Muslims either gone or under draconian control. Forcing the Burmese government to don the happy clappy dunce’s cap of multiculturalism by keeping the Rohingya and giving them citizenship, may play well in places like the United Nations and among Leftist politicians and the media, but it may ensure equal or greater violence in the future. This violence will, like previous outbreaks, be of the tit-for-tat variety where Muslim provocations are met with Buddhist violence, followed by retaliatory violence coming from Muslims. I fear that forcing the Muslims on Burma will have bad outcomes. It may perpetuate the violence in the region and maybe the best way to solve the problem is to remove the cultural irritant, which is in this case the Muslims of Bangladesh who reside in Burma.

Anybody who is human and humane would be shocked and moved by the horrific tales of the violence that is being meted out to the Muslims by the Burmese military but we need to remember that this violence is in response to Islamic violence, aimed fairly and squarely at disrupting peace efforts. There appear to be a significant number of Rohingya Muslims who are not prepared to live in peace with their Burmese neighbours. The response to the violence of the jihadists among the Rohingya by the Burmese military, has swept up both innocent and guilty Muslims alike.

There seems to be no fair or just way of solving the Burmese Rohingya problems without separation of some form. The Rohingya need to be settled and live in peace and have access to a national identity, which is something they do not have in Burma, but which they would have in Bangladesh. On the other hand the Burmese Buddhists also deserve to live in peace and enjoy their own national identity, free from Muslim violence which afflicts their country just like it affects other nations.

The Burmese don’t seen to want their Rohingya Muslims and if what the Rohingya have brought to Burma is anything like what other Muslims have brought elsewhere, things like rape, jihad, arrogance, violence and crime, then maybe this animus is to some extent understandable. No reasonable person wants to see the violence continue but maybe the best way of stopping the violence is to remove the Rohingya to a nearby nation of safety. It will be disruptive to the Rohingya and fiscally costly for the nations that help Bangladesh with the costs of a population transfer, but it may be better and may save more lives than letting the current violence get worse or forcing the Rohingya to remain in a place where they are plainly not wanted. If we want to save the lives of the Rohingya then it may be better all round just to move them, instead of leaving them where they are, to be killed next time communal violence flares up. This other narrative regarding Burma, where the Muslims are not unadulterated victims, may lead to a less violent solution to the current problems and that may be by removing the Rohingya.