“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” Michael Crichton
After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a sermon against what he called “the enemy”—the country’s Muslim minority. “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog. I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers. Myanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.”
Religious violence in Myanmar (Burma) flared up a year ago after a young Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by Muslims. Armed Buddhists retaliated by razing Muslim homes in the western Rakhine state, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 125,000 people to flee. .
While Buddhist waving machetes may seem radical to most, after seeing what has happened to other countries that the Muslims have taken over, these Buddhist are protecting their homeland and their religious liberty.
Unlike the West, Buddhist monks, despite their reputation as devotees of peace, are still able to accept and respond to reality; and are still governed by common sense. Unlike the West, whose sense of reality has been so thoroughly warped by a nonstop media propaganda campaign emanating from ubiquitous TVs and computer screens, conditioning Americans how to think and what to believe, “third world” Buddhist monks are acquainted with reality on the ground. They know that, left unchecked, the Muslim minority living among them will grow more aggressive, a historically demonstrative fact.
As in other countries, the Muslims of Myanmar have engaged in violence, jihadist terror, and rape of Buddhist girls. And that’s while still a minority. Myanmar’s Buddhists are also cognizant that, in neighboring nations like Bangladesh where Muslims are the majority, all non-Muslims are being ruthlessly persecuted into extinction. But even in bordering Thailand, where Buddhists are the majority and Muslims a minority, in the south where Muslims make for large numbers, thousands of Buddhists—men, women, and children—have been slaughtered, beheaded, and raped, as separatist Muslims try to cleanse the region of all “infidel” presence.
An acquaintance with real history, not the whitewashed versions currently peddled in American schools, proves that for 14 centuries, Islam has, in fact, wiped out entire peoples and identities. What we today nonchalantly refer to as the “Arab World” was neither Arab and almost entirely Christian in the 7th century, when Islam came into being and went on the jihad.
Buddhist in Myanmar have more than sufficient reason to be fearful of Muslims. A recent report on the Islamic jihad against Christians shows that 70% of Christians killed in the world in 2012 were killed in Nigeria by Muslims. When the Nigerian government finally decided to go on the offensive to try to contain the jihadist, the Obama administration, in the person of Secretary of State John Kerry, warned the government not to violate the “human rights” of the mass murderers.
And it’s not just Nigeria. The slaughter of Christians by Muslims continues in Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.
Fr Daniel Byantoro explains that: “For thousands of years Indonesia was a Hindu Buddhist kingdom. The last Hindu king was kind enough to give a tax exempt property for the first Muslim missionary to live and to preach his religion. Slowly the followers of the new religion were growing, and after they became so strong the kingdom was attacked, those who refused to become Muslims had to flee for their life to the neighboring island of Bali or to a high mountain of Tengger, where they have been able to keep their religion until now. Slowly from the Hindu Buddhist Kingdom, Indonesia became the largest Islamic country in the world.
If there is any lesson to be learnt by Americans at all, the history of my country is worth pondering upon. We are not hate mongering, bigoted people; rather, we are freedom loving, democracy loving and human loving people. We just don’t want this freedom and democracy to be taken away from us by our ignorance and misguided ‘political correctness’, and the pretension of tolerance.”
Source: Raymond Ibrahim, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
