Myanmar Muslim-haters love Trump

As reports of harassment and violence against Muslims in America flow down Facebook feeds around the world in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, Myanmar’s most prominent Muslim-haters are celebrating.

Hate-spewing monk Wirathu, the “face of Buddhist terror“, posted a four-line poem on Facebook praising the billionaire, who has pledged to ban Muslims from entering the US and to keep a database of all Muslims living in the country.

“Public security is the most important consideration/Donald Trump is the real leader/People love him so much/Nationalism is the priority,” he wrote.

“May US citizens be free from jihad. May the world be free of bloodshed,” he added below the poem. 

Wirathu’s anti-Muslim, hyper-nationalist sermons have helped turn large portions of Myanmar’s population against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, whose members have suffered intermittent violence and constant discrimination at the hands of their Buddhist neighbors and the military for years.

The Myanmar government is blocking independent investigations of rape and other human rights abuses in northern Rakhine State following a series of attacks on border guard outposts in the area that killed nine police officers, which are purported to have been perpetrated by Rohingya militants.

This has stoked beliefs among Buddhist nationalists that the Rohingya minority is launching a terrorist offensive against Myanmar’s Buddhist majority.

Members of the Arakan National Party, which won 44 seats in Myanmar’s national and regional parliaments in the 2015 election, are among such theorists.

“Being engulfed in Islamisation and illegal immigration problems, we the Arakanese (Rakhine) people look up to you as a new world leader who will change the rigged system being infested with jihadi infiltrators,” said ANP president Aye Maung in an open letter to Trump.

“We… hope your leadership will steer the US and the world into a safer place without radical Islamic terrorism.”

In the past, ANP publications have issued such statements as: “In order for a country’s survival…crimes against humanity or inhuman acts may be justifiably committed” and “We will go down in history as cowards if we pass on these [Rohingya] issues to the next generation without getting it over and done with”.

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