Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Her country brutalised Africans

 A New Myanmar?

Just to confirm: “We condemn a coup if we did not support it. It is not a coup if we did support/sponsor it.” —American imperialism and its allies

Although global media outlets like the  Economist  have made the case that the Rohingya of Burma are the “ most persecuted people in the world ” for several years at this point, their plight has yet to fully register around the world. Does that mean that what's been happening to the millions of Syrians is not persecution? The assertion above does not say "the most persecuted ethnic group." I don't understand the criteria used here and not questioned or at least qualified by the Economist and Jacobin editors. The Catasrophe of the Rohingya

"The global community has done little to intervene in the  ongoing genocide ."  Is there such a thing as a "global community" or "international community"? What we have, in fact, is big powers and regional ones decide who is worth "saving" and who is a collateral in geopolitics. Think, for example, of Bosnia vs. Rwanda and Syria. "For the most part, there has been confusion about who the Rohingya are and why they are being targeted by the Myanmar regime. Azeem Ibrahim, an international research fellow affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and the U.S. Army War College, argues that the persecution of the Rohingya is historically rooted in the situation of postcolonial Myanmar and the normalized “otherness” of the Rohingya people within the country’s culture. Ibrahim’s new book  The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide  t races this troubling history of persecution and explains its origins." Book review The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar

“There is a history there, but I am mystified by such a widespread fear of Muslims among ordinary Burmans, so I throw up my hands. But it’s been fanned and cultivated and whipped up by Buddhist nationalists who have their own particular agenda, and by Rakhine who have their own history and anxieties that are deeply rooted and realistic, and by the military, for whom all this helps to solidify their claims to power and control of the economy and state. These attitudes are there and they are deeply rooted but they have been politically mobilized like no one has ever seen. The Rohingya were quite passive historically but now they have become a point of public mobilization. Yet if one wanted to get upset about an “outside” economic threat in Myanmar then the Yunnan Chinese population, and the Chinese companies that control all of northern Burma, would be the source of a more realistic and palpable concern of economic domination than the Muslims have ever posed." An interview with J C

Politicians and pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British Establishment.” " Burmese nobel prize winner turned an apologist for genocide " (?) Those liberals and leftists who had a brilliant analysis of the regime in Burma and knew very well that the Lady broke up with the regime or that the regime was dismanteled.  Who else is a Nobel Prize winner that comes to my mind? Sadad of Egypt and Obama.  See also Earlier this year, when a team from the  United Nations Human Rights Commission carried out research  into alleged human rights violations in Rakhine state, it refused to use any photographs or video it had not taken itself, because of the problem of authenticating such material. Their report gives meticulous details of their methodology.  Yet its fin