[nkoren]

First: yes I am absolutely saying that Muslims in Myanmar are not engaged in a vast conscious conspiracy to change the demographics of the country. Yes, different cultural groups can have different fertility rates, but to say that this is an attempt "to take over the country by means of rapid reproduction" is when one crosses the line from making factual demographic observations to genocide-inciting hate speech.

I regret that I couldn't capture the full quote in which the monk analogises Muslims to African Carp (there was no way to pause or rewind the video, and that's the most I could remember with accuracy). He goes on at length about how they are violent, selfish, attack other species as well as their own kind, pollute the ecosystem, are a foreign invasive species, etc. These kind of analogies are designed to dehumanise their subjects, and to lead to an inevitable conclusion: for the health of the ecosystem, invasive foreign species must be eradicated. Of course culling always feels a bit distasteful, but in the long run it's the best thing to do.

This kind of rhetoric puts my hackles up because I've seen it before. In 2001-2002 I lived in Ahmedabad, India, and I saw at point-blank range how these kind of Islamophobic sentiments culminated in the massacre of thousands of innocent Muslims. So it's something that I take very seriously.

(By the way: this isn't a matter of tribal allegiance. I'm ethnically Jewish and my spiritual practice owes more to Buddhism than anything else -- but somehow it's still not difficult to recognise that the Rohingya are human beings, not African Carp. Anybody who says otherwise can fuck the hell off.)