HEAR ALL SIDES: Letters to the Editor
I WAS intrigued by Ralph Musgrave’s claim that he had been temporarily banned from a social media platform
simply for stating that Muslims are responsible for a disproportionately large number of terrorist attacks (HAS, May 3).
So I took a look at his Facebook page, where he says he was also banned for posting: “Buddhists on Islam: You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog.”
Since Mr Musgrave’s original post has been removed, we cannot know how he commented on this, but it is unlikely he would have been banned if he had condemned this remark, and explained that it was made in 2013 by Ashin Wirathu, a fanatical Burmese Buddhist monk, who was trying to justify the ongoing violent persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma.
In 2017, this persecution culminated in a genocidal attack by Burmese forces on the Rohingya, leaving 10,000 dead, 354 villages burned to the ground, thousands of women and girls raped, and 700,000 forced to flee the country.
Mr Musgrave posts a lot of anti-Muslim diatribe on social media - he describes the above quote as “pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I’ve put on Facebook” - but in using Wirathu’s words to support his Islamophobic views, he really has hit a new low.
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