They’re throwing babies onto fires in Myanmar. We need to recognize genocide is occurring

December 19, 2017 — The National Post reports: “‘Ethnic cleansing’ and even ‘genocide’ are antiseptic and abstract terms. What they mean in the flesh is a soldier grabbing a crying baby girl named Suhaifa by the leg and flinging her into a bonfire. Or troops locking a 15-year-old girl in a hut and setting it on fire.

The children who survive are left haunted: Noor Kalima, age 10, struggles in class in a makeshift refugee camp. Her mind drifts to her memory of seeing her father and little brother shot dead, her baby sister’s and infant brother’s throats cut, the machete coming down on her own head, her hut burning around her … and it’s difficult to focus on multiplication tables.

‘Sometimes I can’t concentrate on my class,’ Noor explained. ‘I want to throw up.’

In the past I’ve referred to Myanmar’s atrocities against its Rohingya Muslim minority as ‘ethnic cleansing,’ but increasingly there are indications that the carnage may amount to genocide. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, backed by a Myanmar-focused human rights organization called Fortify Rights, argues that there is ‘growing evidence of genocide,’ and Yale scholars made a similar argument even before the latest spasms of violence…”  (“These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:  A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,  An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,  A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren“– Proverbs 6:16-19 [emphasis mine].  “Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,  Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:  Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” – Romans 1:29-32.  These barbarians will soon “…be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:  Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” – Mark 9:43, 44.)