All religions can be perverted, but there are certain oxymorons that are hard to contemplate, such as a war-mongering Quaker, a religiously zealot Unitarian or a violent Buddhist.
It is Buddhism, a religion that teaches avoidance of harm to any living creature, that I want to focus on today. Buddhism is best known in this country through the teachings of the Dalai Lama, a universally respected religious leader who promotes love and compassion and supports inter-religious harmony. Although Buddhism, like all religions, is not monolithic, it is fair to say that the Dalai Lama reflects the Buddhist ethos.
And then there is Myanmar (formally called Burma), a country of 55 million people comprised of 90 percent Buddhists. Since June of 2012 violence against its Muslim minority has increased, spurred by a radical monk leading a movement called 969. It began in the western state of Rakhine where Buddhists and Muslims had a kind of caste system in which Muslims performed menial work overseen by Buddhist bosses. It soon spread throughout the country.
To date over 240 people have been killed and 140,000 Muslims have fled their homes. Buddhists are advocating that Muslims who cannot prove three generations of legal residence, a large part of the nearly one million Muslims in Rakhine state, should be put into camps and deported from the country.
What is most disturbing is that the impetus for this anti-Muslim campaign comes primarily from Buddhist clergy, not from political leaders. This past April the Myanmar Buddhist journalist Swe Win published a column in the New York Times titled, "Monks Gone Mad." He reports that the much venerated Buddhist order, the Sangha, has become largely corrupt.
Win was reared in a conservative Buddhist family and spent every summer after the fifth grade studying at monasteries. He wrote that rather than focusing on meditation the monks practiced astrology to attract donations and many monks own luxury cars and LCD television sets. "Only when you grow old do you seek the path of spirituality," one abbot told him.
The anti-Muslim animus is not new. In 2001 when Win was in prison serving time as a student dissident, a fellow incarcerated monk proudly told him that he had defended Buddhism by torching Muslim properties.
This past November the Times reported, in a nearly full page story befitting its importance, a shocking incident where a Buddhist mob stormed through a farming village and hacked to death a 94-year old Muslim woman with machetes, ignoring her pleas for mercy. Richard Horsey, a former United Nations official in the country, commented: "For a culture that has such great respect for the elderly, the killing of this old lady should have been a turning point, a moment of national soul searching. The fact that this has not happened is almost as disturbing as the killing itself."
Contrast this to the reaction to the newspaper photo of the Police Chief, Bull Conner, using attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators, including children, in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Racism marched one bridge too far. The truism that a picture is worth a thousand words spurred a national revulsion that helped assure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
To the contrary, subsequent to the horrific death of this woman there has been either increased political anti-Muslim rhetoric or indifference. Myanmar President Thein Sein actually endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Muslims who have not been in Myanmar for at least three generations, labeling them a "threat to the peace of the nation." (Under international diplomatic pressure he finally retreated from that position.) Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leading civil rights activist and Member of Parliament, has not condemned this anti-Muslim hysteria. She spent 15 years under house arrest and received a Nobel Peace Prize for her commitment to civil rights, yet she has remained silent.
How could this happen in a Buddhist country? I can't tell you why it happened, but I can isolate how it happened. It involves what I call the three tools of hatred. First, it builds upon segregation. Referring to Muslims, a Buddhist woman told a Times reporter, "We lived side by side but we never talked to each other." When asked if their children played together, a group of Buddhist women burst out laughing, "Even a small boy knows that he should not play with (a pejorative term for Muslims)." It's easier to hate someone you don't know.
Segregation leads to the second and third tools of hatred, dehumanization and scapegoating.
A Buddhist monk in saffron robes proclaims that Muslims are "vipers in our laps" and do not "practice human morals." Ergo, they must be inhuman. This brings to mind the famous incident when the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane welcomed Jewish and Arab Hebrew University students with the greeting, "Welcome Jews and dogs." Never forget that it is permissible to kill animals. Given segregation and dehumanization, scapegoating is inevitable, witness our Jewish experience in Europe. Recently, in one village in Myanmar violence broke out after the rape and murder of a Buddhist girl for which Muslims were immediately blamed without any apparent evidence.
Why am I so interested in Myanmar? The answer is that I want to learn from this. First, if this hatred can flourish in a Buddhist country, it could happen anywhere. Human frailty is universal. No religion, no nationality, is exempt. The Talmudic rabbis taught that each of us has within us the yetzer tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer ra, the evil inclination. It is a constant personal struggle to have good overcome evil. So it is with civilizations and religions.
This realization reminds us that all religions, even Buddhism, can, and have been corrupted. I need not recite the medieval experience of Christianity with the wanton killing of non-Christians, or the current experience of al Qaeda or Taliban distortions of Islam, or the fanatical rabbis on the West Bank who proclaim that it is moral to kill Palestinian children because they will someday be grown, and thus your enemy.
The most important lesson for me to remember is that the Myanmar experience does not represent normative Buddhism, any more than Middle East terrorists reflect on the 1.3 billion Muslims world-wide and the sophistication of Islam. And certainly, the Jewish fanatics do not speak for normative Judaism.
The lesson is not to generalize; otherwise we fall into the trap of dehumanization and hatred of fellow human beings.
Rabbi Bruce Warshal is the publisher emeritus of the Jewish Journal and author of "Provocative Columns: A Liberal Rabbi Reflects on Beliefs, Israel American Politics." He can be reached at brucewarshal@comcast.net.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/lesson-to-be-learned-from-myanmar-sun/
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