The Rohingya Muslims of Burma by all accounts are treated
badly.
But in not one particular cited by your guests does the
situation of these oppressed people differ from the situation of the millions
of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
Inability to freely travel limiting opportunities to earn a
living; unfair treatment by officials and police; hate speech - all of these
and more are the everyday experience of Palestinians.
The Rohingya, concentrated on the west coast of Burma in Rakhine
State, sometimes leave their oppression because of the seas, yet the people of
Gaza, stretched along the sea in much the same fashion, are not even free to
use the sea: fishermen who go outside their tiny permitted zone are shot at
regularly by Israeli naval forces; ships of needed supplies from other places
are subject to attack by Israel on the high seas; and even natural gas fields
discovered in the Mediterranean in areas which under international law should belong
to Palestine are seized by Israel.
The comparisons are even closer because if you ask Burmese
officials, they would tell you the Rohingya want their own state, something
Burma will not grant, and are regarded as rebellious, something none of your
guests discussed.
Yet CBC Radio, and The Current in particular, would not
dream of treating the Palestinians’ plight, which after all is in every sense
closer to home. You have not done so once in any meaningful way.
To add insult to injury in the piece you did, you
interviewed a representative of the American Holocaust Museum whose
investigations are said to have established that all the “early signs of
genocide” were now present in Burma. I wasn’t aware that there was an official handbook
of diagnosis for genocide, but these people appear to have one.
It does seem to me in view of the appalling conditions in
Israel/Palestine, people from the Holocaust Museum are simply not qualified to
comment on Burma.
AFTERWORD: In a follow-up interview the next day with Burma's ambassador to Canada, he said something along the lines of "There's no such thing as the Rohingya people."
These were exactly the same words uttered by Golda Meir about the Palestinians decades ago, and her chilling words have been echoed many times since, including a few years ago by Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail after receiving the best part of $20 million in campaign contributions from billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a devoted supporter of Netanyahu's vision of Israel.
