These titles bear an uncanny resemblance to the work and anxieties of Islamophobes in the West.

Sex, Women and Racism in Myanmar: How Irrational They are

Htoo December

April 11, 2013

Recently, a friend forwarded me a link to a web blog. The link points to a 400-page document, titled “Islam Virus”, which is a collection of misinformation about Islam – how cruel, inhumane and scary Muslims are. The owner of the blog mentions that everyone must read the document because what is happening in Myanmar today is very dangerous and scary. That is, Islam is threatening the existence of Myanmar. Pointing to distorted information about gross cruelty, the document urges the people of Myanmar to protect Myanmar race and Buddhism by opposing Islam and Muslims.

On the left column of the blog site, there are icons (with links) to two books. One book is about the colonial-time conflict between Muslims and Buddhists, and the other is a well-known anti-Muslim book titled “fearful of the extinction of Burmese and Buddhism”.

On the top of the column was a feature section, labeled National Traitors, under which people accused of supporting ethnic Rohingyas are listed. They include Dr. Maung Zarni, Harn Yawnghwe of Euro-Burma Office, Aung Zaw of The Irrawaddy magazine, Than Win Htut of Democratic Voice of Burma, and Burmese section directors of the Voice of America and BBC. There are anti-Rohingya posts here and there throughout the site.

What I want to say only starts here. Those involved in anti-Muslim campaigns consistently claim that Kalars (derogatory term for Muslims and South Asians) are taking over Buddhist women and converting them to Islam. They also accuse Muslims to be spoiling Burmese woman to destroy or swallow Burmese culture.

Only when I browse through the internet blog, I realize how irrational people are.

First, the blog urging people to protect Burmese culture and women turns out to a very popular Myanmar porn web blog.

Second, and more importantly, it is an abusive and disrespectful blog for women. Why? Because it features nude photos of Burmese women and leaked videos of Burmese couples. The blog also features photos and videos of Burmese women/couples shared by blog visitors.Of course, the attention is on ‘women’, especially their ‘passivity’ and ‘suffering’ during sexual intercourse.

They found the materials somewhere on the internet, or filmed by themselves. Some women, possibly sex workers, allowed the men to film on the basis that the films and photos won’t be published on the internet. Regardless of the promise, these nude photos and videos made their ways to the blog, which is a hard core pornographic blog accessible to everyone for free. I will not enclose the blog address here to avoid further publicizing of it and its contents, especially the women whose privacy the blog has abused.

As soon as I realized the type of the blog, I immediately saw the contradiction: calling for protecting Burmese women from ‘kalar’ on the one hand, and abusing women by i) publicizing pirated photos and videos, and ii) allowing blog visitors to write sexually abusive comments on the other. These comments can be read as verbal rapes. Then, I asked to myself, how possibly can these men, shamelessly writing sexually abusive comments, protect the nation and the women?

They said they want to protect the women in order to protect the nation, but they are verbally raping the women whose photos and videos were pirated. I am amazed how self-proclaimed nationalists claiming to protect Burmese women (by means of controlling their sexuality and sex-related life) can easily abuse these women. They do not seem to think that distributing the women’s nude images for the consumption of the men they do not have any inter-personal relations is a plain abuse.

If they stay true to what they say about protecting the nation, they should have opposed to the blog for the sake of the women’s privacy and dignity. Far from it, they are the ones disgracing the women; they are the one fulfilling their sexual fantasies on a free porn website. How cheap they are!

This is an important indication that nationalists uttering to protect the nation is not a safe refuge for women. These nationalists are in fact the enemies of women. They abuse women by dictating personal decision over relationship and reproduction. They abuse women by exploiting sexuality and body.

To continue with my main point, the blog owner posted the 400-page document on August 23, 2012. I thought he changed his attitude. I thought he realized he needed to start protecting women and stop abusing their private matters. But, the next day, he posted another nude photos of a Burmese lady. What is even more surprising is, he highlighted the logo of a Burmese channel “Sky net” on the TV in the background to confirm that she is truly a Burmese.

There are many other photos and videos with exact names and locations such as cities and countries where the videos were taken. Some materials were taken secretly and make available on the internet.

The blog also links to another porn website. I am not too sure if that belongs to the same person. On the second website, the most popular post, as I visited in August 2012, was a nude photo of a Burmese medical doctor in Thailand.

I expected that the woman’s privacy be protected – or at least respected – by Burmese nationalists who have been upset and/or worried about Kalars taking advantage of Burmese women’s sexuality. To my amazement, supposedly the nation-loving and culture-loving blog owner only publicized the photos of the doctor. The visitors left more than a hundred comments that said they wanted to have intimate relations with her (note: of course, their languages were sexually explicit, not even some decent comments about woman’s body or the sort, but abusive hard core comments). There is no single comment that said the woman’s privacy should be respected. The point I want to make is, there is no such thing as respect for the woman. It was a plain abuse and disrespect.

Read the rest…

Spain was largely free of the high-profile child sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in many European countries and the United States… until now. Even more men of the cloth are found to be involved in sexual child abuse. A Spanish Catholic priest was arrested with 21,000 images of child porn on computersin his church.

To be fair, it should be obvious that hoarding pornography of any sorts, especially children, is against the formal teachings of the Catholic Church. “If the accusation is true, this is something that hurts us deeply, that we sincerely regret and that we reject unreservedly,” the diocese said. Just because some criminals belong to a faith does not mean that faith endorses criminal behavior. Reasonably open-minded people can understand that.

But what if he were Muslim?

Expect no fairness from the anti-Muslim conflict-o-sphere. Child porn is a tenet of Islam, we’d be told. We’d see another repeat of the whole child bride fiasco, echoing again and again the tired “Muhammad is a pedophile” smear.

But was Muhammad’s marriage to the young but post-pubescent Aisha unusual for 7^th century Arabia? Nope. As Colin Turner of the University of Durham Middle East Studies department points out:

A marriage between an older man and a young girl was customary among the Bedouins, as it still is in many societies across the world today. It was not unheard of in Muhammad’s time for boys and girls to be promised to each other in marriage almost as soon as they were born, particularly if the union was of direct political significance to the families concerned. However, such marriages were almost certainly not consummated until both parties had entered adulthood, which Arabs in the 7^th century tended to reach at an earlier age than Westerners today. It is highly unlikely that Muhammad would not have taken Aisha into his bed until she was at least in her early  teens, which was wholly in keeping with the customs of the day, and in context not in the least improper.

[Turner, C. (2006). The messenger. Islam: the basics(pp. 34-35). London: Routledge.]

But wasn’t Muhammad some sexual pervert that couldn’t control his libido? False. As Aisha herself testified:

Narrated Aisha: “The Prophet used to kiss and embrace his wives while he was fasting, and he had more power to control his desires than any of you.”

[Sahih Bukhari, Volume 3 Book 31 Number 149]

But wasn’t Muhammad a violent misogynist who beat women and children all day? Wrong again. As Aisha again testifies:

Narrated Aisha: “The Messenger of Allah never struck a servant or a woman.”

[Sunan Abu Dawud, Book 41 Number 4786]

عَنْ عَائِشَةَ، عَلَيْهَا السَّلاَمُ قَالَتْ مَا ضَرَبَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم خَادِمًا وَلاَ امْرَأَةً قَطُّ

Now, do these same anti-Muslim bloggers know (or care) that Christian sources record that Joseph married the Virgin Mary when he was 90 and she was 12? Probably not.

A year after his wife’s death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age. Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates…

[Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Joseph]

Will these same anti-Muslim keyboard warriors accuse Joseph of being a pedophile and Christianity of being a religion of pedophilia? Not likely. So what is at play here? As George Readings observed, “This attempt to aggressively apply a modern British definition of pedophilia to seventh century Arabia strikes me as a sign of severe anthropological illiteracy…”

Anthropological illiteracy indeed! But who has time for troublesome scientific principles and scholarly analysis if you rely on “closed information systems based on pretend information” and your anti-Muslim canards fit so neatly into your supremacist ideological view of the world?

Note: This article is part of our “What if they were Muslim?” series. In this series, we examine the double standards used by anti-Muslim activists when discussing religious extremism in Islam as compared to other religions. We reject using extremists of any religion to justify prejudice, stereotypes, and hostility towards all members of that religion. Period.