Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Hugh and the Hui

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In his article on the Muslims of Burma published at Jihad Watch last week, Hugh Fitzgerald wrote:

...the Hui Panthays — a Muslim Chinese people — live in perfect security, free to practice Islam, in Myanmar, perhaps because that doesn’t fit the narrative of anti-Muslim mad monks that has been so successfully peddled in the West. Unlike the Rohingya, the Hui Panthay have not attacked and displaced Buddhists, as the Rohingya, Bengali Muslims, attacked and displaced the Buddhist Rakhine people in parts of Rakhine state.

However, by a casual Googling of "hui panthays", I found that there was in fact a "Panthay rebellion", about which Wikipedia tells us:

The Panthay rebellion (1856–1873)... was a rebellion of the Muslim Hui people and other (Muslim) ethnic minorities against the Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty in southwestern Yunnan Province, as part of a wave of Hui-led multi-ethnic unrest. 

This is pretty much what Hugh describes about the Rohingya Muslims (and we reasonably assume this "rebellion" was a jihad attendant with the usual Mohammedan atrocities).  And it's ironic, given that elsewhere in his article, Hugh chides the Western mainstream for failing to learn the historical context:

Should the history of Muslim-Buddhist relations in Myanmar be better known, with journalists taking it upon themselves to learn about, and then to transmit, this history, it is possible that the “international community” would address the current violence differently.

Not only that, but the Wikipedia entry also notes that:

The name "Panthay" is a Burmese word, which is said to be identical with the Shan word Pang hse. It was the name by which the Burmese called the Chinese Muslims who came with caravans to Burma from the Chinese province of Yunnan. 

Thus these Chinese Muslims whom Hugh naively thinks were really peaceable also manifested what I call the "Jihad of the Feet" (migration) which Hugh himself notes about the Rohingya Muslims causing trouble now in Burma -- a subtype of Jihad which has been a pattern of Islam's "bloody borders" throughout the world and across history right into our own present -- indeed our very West -- as one crucial component of the perennially aggrandizing jihad of Muslims to conquer the Earth (only periodically waning -- or, more pertinently, regrouping -- for reasons beyond the control or desire of Muslims following their Islam script).

Summary:

Hugh here is not merely lapsing into his tendency I've seen before (usually, if I recall, with assorted obscure central Asiatic Muslim peoples) -- of according undeserved praise to Muslims who ostensibly happen to be refraining from jihad; he's also not even doing minimal diligence to check and see if his assumption about their pacific nature is warranted.  At any rate, Hugh's flaw here is his failure to follow the rule of thumb of rational prejudice when it comes to appraising any and all Muslims.

As an adjunct to that rule, I might add, there is the meditation on the question: Why is this Muslim group (or individually, this Muslim) refraining from jihad as far as we can tell?  The question acquires pedagogical usefulness when we bracket out -- i.e., refuse to assume -- any benign reasons that would explain this apparent deficiency of jihad.  For, such a meditation (informed by the mountains of data and oceans of dots to be connected that abound concerning the dangerous pathology of Islam) helps us to adumbrate & augment our knowledge of the "stealth jihad" -- that is, of the jihad that seems to be an absence of jihad.

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