{"id":6299,"date":"2013-08-01T10:59:50","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T17:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6299"},"modified":"2013-08-01T10:59:50","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T17:59:50","slug":"understanding-islam-buddhist-common-sense-vs-western-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/understanding-islam-buddhist-common-sense-vs-western-nonsense\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Islam: Buddhist Common Sense vs. Western Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0CBN News (Ibrahim: Islam Unveiled)<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

A recent\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0titled \u201cExtremism Rises Among Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists\u201d offers important lessons on common sense and nonsense. \u00a0Witten by one Thomas Fuller, it begins by telling of how<\/p>\n

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 rant against what he called \u201cthe enemy\u201d\u2014the country\u2019s Muslim minority.\u00a0 \u201cYou can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,\u201d Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims. \u201cI call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While the article is meant to highlight the supposed \u201cintolerance\u201d of Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists, for those who can read between the lines\u2014or who are familiar with Islamic teachings, history, and current events\u2014it is clear that Buddhists are responding to existential threats posed by the Muslims living among and around them.<\/p>\n

Here is the first lesson: unlike the West, Buddhist monks, despite their reputation as devotees of peace, are still able to accept and respond to reality; are still governed by\u00a0common sense<\/em>.\u00a0 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, \u201cthird world\u201d Buddhist monks are acquainted with reality on the ground.\u00a0 They know that, left unchecked, the Muslim minority living among them\u2014which began hostilities\u2014will grow more aggressive, a historically demonstrative fact.<\/p>\n

As in other countries, the Muslims of Myanmar have engaged in violence, jihadi terror, and rape of Buddhist girls.\u00a0 And that\u2019s as a minority.\u00a0 Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists are also cognizant that, in neighboring nations like Bangladesh where Muslims are the majority, all non-Muslims are being ruthlessly persecuted into extinction.\u00a0 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\u2014men, women, and children\u2014have been slaughtered, beheaded, and raped, as separatist Muslims try to cleanse the region of all \u201cinfidel\u201d presence.\u00a0Click here<\/a>\u00a0for graphic reports and images of Muslim atrocities committed against Buddhists that may shed light on why Myanmar Buddhists are wary of Muslims.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, Wirathu, the \u201cradical\u201d Buddhist monk is quoted in the NYT article as saying: \u201cIf we are weak, our land will become Muslim.\u201d\u00a0 The theme song of his nationalist organization speaks of people who \u201clive in our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us\u201d\u2014a reference to Muslims\u2014and how \u201cWe [Buddhists] will build a fence with our bones if necessary\u201d to keep supremacist Muslims out.\u00a0 His pamphlets say \u201cMyanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.\u201d\u00a0 Another senior and apparently \u201cradical\u201d monk concurs: \u201cThe main thing is that our religion and our nationality don\u2019t disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

From here we come to lesson two: if Buddhists understand what is at stake\u2014their entire civilization\u2014the NYT report is a testimony to why the West still cannot face reality.\u00a0 Fuller\u2019s article carries all the trademarks\u2014moral relativism and pro-Islam bias, and that dangerous mixture of confidence and ignorance\u2014that characterize the mainstream West\u2019s inability to acknowledge and respond to Islam, but rather to sprout sentimental, nonsensical platitudes.<\/p>\n

For starters,\u00a0 Fuller doesn\u2019t seem to comprehend why Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists are worried about disappearing , saying that \u201cBuddhism would seem to have a secure place in Myanmar. Nine in 10 people are Buddhist\u2026\u00a0 Estimates of the Muslim minority range from 4 percent to 8 percent of Myanmar\u2019s roughly 55 million people while the rest are mostly Christian or Hindu.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, in neighboring Thailand Muslims also make for about 4% but have, as mentioned, been engaging in genocide against Buddhists in the south where Muslims are concentrated.\u00a0 Moreover, an acquaintance with history\u2014real history<\/a>, not the whitewashed versions currently peddled in American schools\u2014proves that for 14 centuries, Islam has, in fact, wiped out entire peoples and identities: what we today nonchalantly refer to as the \u201cArab World\u201d was neither Arab and almost entirely Christian in the 7th<\/sup>\u00a0century, when Islam came into being and went on the jihad. Fuller also seems to miss the significance of the fact that there are more Christians and Hindus in Myanmar than Muslims\u2014yet Buddhist hostility only extends to Muslims.\u00a0 If indigenous Buddhists are simply becoming nationalistic radicals, as Fuller suggests, how come they are only attacking Muslims, not Christians and Hindus?<\/p>\n

Then there is the clear bias.\u00a0 While regularly decrying the Buddhist treatment of Muslims, including by giving several anecdotes, Fuller does not mention the jihadi terror and murder that Muslims have visited upon Buddhists.\u00a0 He condemns Buddhists for reportedly displacing some 150,000 nonindigenous Muslims, without seeming to be aware that, all around the Islamic world, Muslims are displacing\u00a0hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims, leading to a mass exodus of Christians<\/a>.\u00a0 If Fuller is unaware of the significance of this fact, Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists are not\u2014hence their very real concerns of being swallowed up by Islam if they don\u2019t act now when they\u2019re in the majority in their own homeland.<\/p>\n

But these objective facts are apparently not relevant to the NYT\u2019s readership, which has been more conditioned to subjective talk of \u201cfeelings\u201d and other therapeutic nonsense.\u00a0 And here Fuller certainly delivers: the entire tone of the article is one of disappointment at the Buddhists and how \u201cmany Muslims are worried.\u201d\u00a0 His closing paragraph is of \u201ca Muslim vendor in the city\u2019s central market\u201d who spoke \u201cin a whisper\u201d saying \u201cI\u2019m really frightened. We tell the children not to go outside unless absolutely necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus while Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists fight for their right to survive against an ever encroaching Islam, the NYT does what it does best\u2014distort reality to make it fit the mainstream media\u2019s world of make believe, in this case, that Muslims are always innocent and misunderstood victims.<\/p>\n

Postscript<\/strong>:\u00a0Ralph Sidway<\/a>\u00a0reminds me that Indonesian priest,\u00a0Fr Daniel Byantoro, has written the following applicable words:<\/p>\n

For thousands of years my country (Indonesia) was a Hindu Buddhist kingdom. \u00a0The 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\u2019t want this freedom and democracy to be taken away from us by our ignorance and misguided \u2018political correctness\u2019, and the pretension of tolerance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0CBN News (Ibrahim: Islam Unveiled) A recent\u00a0New York Times\u00a0article\u00a0titled \u201cExtremism Rises Among Myanmar\u2019s Buddhists\u201d offers important lessons on common sense and nonsense. \u00a0Witten by one Thomas Fuller, it begins by telling of how<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,227],"tags":[366,1017,1044,30,1060,58],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1DB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6219,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/crucified-again-venn-institute-interviews-raymond-ibrahim\/","url_meta":{"origin":6299,"position":0},"title":"Crucified Again — Venn Institute Interviews Raymond Ibrahim","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Raymond Ibrahim [Note: The following interview was conducted by the\u00a0Venn Institute\u00a0with Raymond Ibrahim] Raymond Ibrahim is a widely published author, public speaker, and Middle East and Islam expert, and author most recently of\u00a0Crucified Again: Exposing Islam\u2019s New War on Christians. 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Pp. 297","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 26, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please\u00a0read\u00a0this\u00a0book\u00a0review\u00a0from\u00a0my\u00a0colleague Terry Scambray \/\/ New Oxford Review Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West\u00a0by Raymond Ibrahim.\u00a0 Da Capo Press, 2018.\u00a0\u00a0 Pp. 297 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We judge individuals by what they say and what they do.\u00a0 We judge cults, religions and ideologies the same way; that\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1864,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-taqiyya-alters-islams-rules-of-war-defeating-jihadist-terrorism\/","url_meta":{"origin":6299,"position":3},"title":"How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War: Defeating Jihadist Terrorism","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Middle East Quarterly\u00a0(Winter 2010) Islam must seem a paradoxical religion to non-Muslims. 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