Time Magazine has a cover story on Buddhism called “The Face of Buddhist Terror”.
Like “jumbo shrimp”, Hannah Beech wants you to believe that the oxymoron of “Buddhist terror” is possible.
Here’s the timeline: a Muslim insurgency group in Thailand has committed acts of terror stretching back to 2004, claiming 5,000 lives—more than the September 11th attacks.
Beech characterizes it as this:
A separatist insurgency has claimed around 5,000 lives since 2004, and while more Muslims have died, it is Buddhists who feel particularly vulnerable as targets of shadowy militants.
Beech neglects to mention exactly who this insurgency consists of:
• Mujahideen Pattani Movement (BNP)
• Pattani United Liberation Organization (former (PULO)
• Pattani Islamic Mujahideen Movement (GMIP)
• Mujahideen Islamic Pattani Group
• National Revolution Front (BRN)
• Liberation National Front (BNPP)
• Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
• Runda Kumpulan Kecil (RKK)
According to Human Rights Watch:
The insurgents have murdered Buddhist monks collecting alms. School teachers, principals, and students have been killed and schools torched presumably because schools represent the Thai Government. Civil servants have been targeted for assassination. Buddhist villagers have been killed going about routine work like rubber tapping. According to the Thai Journalists Association, during the year 2008 alone there were over 500 attacks resulting in more than 300 deaths in the four southern provinces where the insurgents operate.
So it’s clear which side is being attacked.
Beech continues:
Buddhism’s pacifist image is being challenged by a radical strain that marries spirituality with ethnic chauvinism. In Buddhist-majority Burma, where communal clashes have proliferated over the past year, scores of Muslims have been killed by Buddhist mobs, while in Thailand and Sri Lanka the fabric binding temple and state is being stitched ever tighter.
No concern that Islam’s pacifist image is being challenged by a radical strain. Is this a quiet admission that Islam really isn’t a “religion of peace”?
Beech imposes problems in Burma and Sri Lanka on Thailand—despite the fact that they’re all different countries.
The godfather of radical Buddhism is a monk named Wirathu, a slight presence with an outsized message of hate. Adam followed Wirathu, who has taken the title of “Burmese bin Laden,” around Mandalay in central Burma, as he preached his loathing of the country’s Muslim minority to schoolchildren and housewives alike.
Yes, this guy sounds completely like bin Laden, except for the fact where he committed terrorist attacks, killed 3000 people, has a beard, ethnicity—yeah he’s nothing like bin Laden.
I’d loathe a group that came in and killed 5,000 of my fellow family members, friends, and neighbors, wouldn’t you?
In March, tensions detonated in the town of Meikhtila, where communal violence ended dozens of lives, mostly Muslim. Entire Muslim quarters were razed by Buddhists hordes. Even today, anxiety churns. One late afternoon as Adam walked near Wirathu’s monastic compound, a monk hurled a brick at him. Burgundy robes cannot camouflage inborn hostility.
Pretty sure that one group started and stoked the hostilities first. When Buddhists defend their communities, they’re called terrorists. Funny how that happens.
It looks like the most violence here displayed by a monk is a hurling of a brick, making monks at least as dangerous as 5-year-old boys.
The Thai military now stations its troops in Buddhist temple compounds, further cleaving a pair of religions whose followers once shared each other’s feast days.
Better than letting Muslims cleave peaceful Buddhist monks into pieces.
A Muslim nurse with a head covering quietly plucked shrapnel out of Chanchote’s face, cleaning him up for his funeral, while another tended to one of his wounded comrades. A clutch of Buddhist rangers looked on. The nurses’ veils felt like a reproach, a symbol of the divide between faiths in this nervous land. “They are scared of all of us,” whispered one Muslim hospital worker. “We used to have trust but that’s gone.”
A Thai ranger was killed by an IED (sound familiar?) set in a house by one of the Muslim separatists.
It’s funny how only a white Time Magazine reporter seems to feel “reproach” from the veils of the nurses while the Buddhist rangers are there to watch them treat their fallen comrade.
For a relatively-peaceful country like Thailand, Muslims have torn the place in two. Buddhists have had to defend their homes and lives. Calling them terrorists while they get attacked by terrorists is intellectually dishonest to the highest degree, and Time should be ashamed for making this a cover story.
