[Buddha-l] Right Speech?

[Curt Steinmetz]

As far as right speech goes, Danny Fisher's open letter engages in a 
very specific type of bad speech: malicious rumor-mongering. In the 
letter, two media reports are uncritically cited as all the proof we 
need that Southeast Asian Buddhists have an Islamophobia problem. This 
is an example of the kind of lazy-mindedness that political correctness 
leads to. One starts with the assumption that the poor oppressed Muslims 
are the pitiable victims of Islamophobia, then one goes out in search of 
the "evidence", and any and all "reports" that come along verifying the 
Islamophobic assumption (which itself is never questioned) are swallowed 
whole.

The article on Burma was written by a non-Burmese professional political 
activist who belongs to a once prominent organization of 
dissidents-in-exile that is now struggling to keep itself relevant and 
to keep the money coming in (and that recently went through a major 
financial scandal involving resignations at the highest level of the 
organization.)

The article on Thailand, on the other hand, was written by a respected 
independent journalist who is not a political hack. Much of the article 
(especially at the beginning) is very balanced and portrays Thai 
Buddhists as acting in self-defense against terrorists who happen to be 
Muslim. It is in fact quite clear from the article that Thai Buddhists 
are not motivated by hatred or fear of Islam or Muslims, but are 
responding to real violence being directed against them as Buddhists by 
Muslims. On the other hand, the parts of the article that are more 
accusatory (and that are selectively cited by the open letter) are based 
entirely on the claims of one Michael Jerryson, a man who has made a 
(very) minor career out of expressing naive orientalist outrage at the 
fact that Asian Buddhists dare to defend themselves when faced with 
terrorist attacks.

Curt