incredible journey..not yet finished..amazing she still continues (alive) considering the powers of greed...definitely a read the dumbed down should take up. thanks.
The Muslim Overpopulation Myth That Just Won’t Die
"Aung San Suu Kyi spent her life playing cat and mouse with Myanmar's generals. Did she lose the final round? "Myanmar’s Leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Is Detained Amid Coup "In a first, Burmese military admits that soldiers killed Rohingya found in mass grave "Squalor and disease await Rohingya babies born in Bangladesh camps""""
The claim that Muslims have "too many children" is reliably powerful anywhere there's a sizable Muslim immigrant or minority population.
Krithika Varagur November 14, 2017
After fleeing from Burma, Noor Kayes holds her daughter in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, February 9, 2017.Mohammad Ponir Hossain / Reuters
The sheer number of Rohingya Muslims fleeing genocide in Burma—over 10,000 per day since late August—has become too huge to ignore. It’s the reason why U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will visit Burma on Wednesday. In his briefings on the crisis, Tillerson will likely encounter another question of numbers: the claim, voiced often by Burmese officials and hardline Buddhist monks, that Rohingya Muslim “overpopulation” threatens their country’s Buddhist majority.
“The population growth of Rohingya Muslims is 10 times higher than that of the Rakhine [Buddhists],” said Win Myaing, a spokesperson for Burma’s western Rakhine State, where most of the stateless Rohingya live. That was in 2013, when the state passed a controversial two-child limit law that applied only to Muslims. Just last month, an administrator of a “Muslim-free” village outside Yangon told The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-ethnic-cleansing.html , “[Rohingya] are not welcome here because they are violent and they multiply like crazy, with so many wives and children.” The motto of Burma’s immigration ministry is, “The Earth will not swallow a race to extinction, but another [race] will.”
The specter of an exploding Rohingya population—fueled by incendiary content .. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/sep/05/fake-news-images-add-fuel-to-fire-in-myanmar-after-more-than-400-deaths .. on social media—has been weaponized in Burma’s ethnic cleansing. It haunts everyone from the military and Buddhist nationalists to ordinary Burmese citizens. I myself often come across this reprinted claim. Despite its clear attribution to sources like extremist monks,I started to wonder if it was true. It’s not.
The trope of Muslim overpopulation is reliably powerful anywhere in the world where there is a sizable Muslim immigrant or minority population, from India to Western Europe.
Hindu nationalists often fan anxiety .. https://thewire.in/64570/rss-claims-rapid-growth-muslim-population-simply-false/ .. about Muslim population growth; the proportion of Muslims in India grew about 0.8 percent between 2001 and 2011, to 14.2 percent. “If this remains the situation, one should forget about their existence in one’s own country by 2025,” said the leader of a major Hindu nationalist organization last year. But the fertility gap between Muslims and Hindus in India is narrowing fast, and the greatest birthrate disparities are between states, not religions: Hindu women in the very poor state of Bihar have about two more children .. http://www.indiaspend.com/cover-story/indian-population-growth-less-dependent-on-religion-more-on-development-80125 .. each than Muslim women in more developed Andhra Pradesh.
Similar concerns echo across countries like France, Germany, the U.K., and the Netherlands. Although Muslims make up less than 10 percent of the total population in each of these countries, perceived overpopulation has been at the center of anti-immigration discourse. About 7.5 percent of France is Muslim, yet on average French people believe Muslims constitute about one in three people in the country. Although Muslim women in Western Europe do currently have more children than their non-Muslim counterparts, research shows that European Muslims’ fertility rate is also declining much faster, so their fertility rates will likely converge over time. (However, in this context, fertility isn’t the only issue; a wave of Muslim immigration over the past few years has reinforced some Europeans’ concerns about Muslim population growth.)
Why does the overpopulation myth persist worldwide, even though it’s typically demonstrably false (like in Burma) or nowhere near the epidemic that its proponents assert (like in Europe and India)? It’s true that the global Muslim population is growing .. http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/ , and fast. But it’s not growing at the same speed across regions. And the trope seems to have the most power not where Muslim populations are actually growing the fastest—like sub-Saharan Africa—but in places where they are culturally distinct minorities.
There’s nothing inherent in Islam to link it to higher fertility—in fact, it’s not a particularly natalist, or pro-birth, religion. Eight of the nine classic schools of Islamic law permit contraception. Many Muslim states, including Pakistan, have supported family planning. The growth of the global Muslim population was, according to a 2011 Pew Center report, due to both a “youth bulge”—an unusually high number of young Muslim people, which peaked around 2000— and a higher overall fertility rate for Muslim women as a group.
On the latter point, a major takeaway of the Pew report (and its companion from this year) is that fertility has much less to do with religion and much more to do with economics, social services, women’s empowerment, and conflict. The fertility rate across all 49 Muslim-majority countries fell from 4.3 children per woman in 1990-95 to about 2.9 in 2010-15. This was still higher than the global fertility rate in 2015, but it’s a strikingly fast drop given the fact that it took some Western European countries nearly a century .. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility/%23fertility-was-high-in-the-time-before-population-growth .. to transition from six children per woman to three.
The claim about Muslim overpopulation falls apart in fascinating ways when examined more closely. The fastest fertility drop in modern history happened in the Islamic theocracy of Iran. In 1950, Iranian women had about seven children each; today they have about 1.68, fewer than Americans. What changed? In 1989, the country’s leaders realized that the the high birth rate was straining the young republic. In response, the Supreme Leader issued fatwas encouraging birth control and contraception, and the Health Ministry propagated family planning counseling, rural health centers, and contraceptive distribution across the country. Iran also made girls’ education a development priority .. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/378248 .. as it sought to rebuild civil society after the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988, so more girls than ever started to attend (strictly gender-segregated) schools. Everywhere, there is an inverse relationship between years of schooling and fertility rates.
In the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, fertility rates dropped between the 1960s and the 1990s, from about 5.6 children per woman to 2.3, as the Suharto dictatorship instituted a vigorous, centralized family planning program and made improvements to girls’ education. Those government services were decentralized after democracy came to the archipelago in 1998 and, predictably, fertility rates have been creeping up again. Today, Indonesia’s majority-Christian but less developed eastern provinces have a higher birthrate than the more developed, Muslim-majority western ones—a testament to the correlation between economic development and fertility.
But it’s unlikely that these, or any, facts about Muslim demographics will change minds anywhere. In a demographics report, Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah, researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, write: “There remains a widely perceived notion—still commonly held within intellectual, academic, and policy circles in the West and elsewhere—that ‘Muslim’ societies are especially resistant to embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that has transformed population profiles in Europe, North America, and other ‘more developed’ areas.”
In places like Burma, where the Muslim overpopulation trope is now deeply rooted, facts may have even less sway. “Repeated exposure is a big factor in determining the ‘stickiness’ of misinformation,” said Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge. He pointed to the mere-exposure effect, a tendency to develop a preference for things simply because we’re familiar with them, and the illusory-truth effect, a tendency to believe information after repeated exposure. “Both point to the fact that the more a falsehood is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it,” he said, adding that political leaders have long understood this concept on an intuitive level. “Consider the ‘big lie’ law of propaganda: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’ … We’ve seen many ‘big lies’ fly by in current debates, and some people continue to believe them.” (After reading a few hundred stories on the Rohingya crisis, I was almost one of them.)
What’s more, in Burma, where open internet access is less than a decade old, news content does not necessarily get evaluated critically. As one observer put it recently, for the Burmese, “The entire internet is Facebook and Facebook is the internet,” so there is plenty of opportunity for repeated exposure to incendiary fake news about the Rohingya.
The consequences of the Muslim overpopulation myth are chilling. They’re also sadly ironic, because the myth has likely been counterproductive for its propagators. Given the socioeconomic underpinnings of fertility, the targeted persecution in Burma may have made high Rohingya birth rates a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are only a few factors that reliably decrease the fertility rate in any developing country: more schooling for girls, the expectation that one’s existing children will survive (due to healthcare and freedom from conflict), access to contraception, and job opportunities for women. By denying Rohingya women all of the above, the Burmese military may be creating the exact result that its supporters feared in the first place.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Krithika Varagur is a writer and journalist based in Jakarta.
"Aung San Suu Kyi spent her life playing cat and mouse with Myanmar's generals. Did she lose the final round?"
By foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic Posted Yesterday at 5:14pm, updated Yesterday at 6:47pm
Woodside says it aims to be a "constructive foreign investor" and is pushing ahead with its A–6 project. (Supplied)
Human rights groups have slammed Australian energy giant Woodside after its chief executive said the company would press ahead with a major gas development in Myanmar and suggested the nation's former civilian leaders ignored the army's grievances in the lead-up to the military coup.
Key points:
* The Woodside chief executive says the company cannot judge if the military had legitimate grievances with Myanmar's election
* Human Rights Watch said Woodside's comments were cynical and they should be calling for the release of detained civilian leaders
* Woodside's position is at odds with several Western governments
Dozens of governments have condemned Myanmar's army after it seized power and arrested dozens of elected leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi, on February 1.
The military said it had seized control because last year's election, which delivered a convincing victory to Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, was riddled with fraud.
Those claims have been dismissed by independent election observers who say the poll was fair and credible.
But Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman said the company could not judge if the army had legitimate grievances.
"It's not up to us to judge the veracity of grievances they have around the previous election process," Mr Coleman said, in comments first reported by specialist publication Energy News Bulletin.
"I understand [the Army] put together quite an extensive folder of grievances around the election that they wanted to be heard, and they weren't being heard.
"They were pushed up against a difficult decision point, the day of the coup was the day the new parliament was due to proceed." 'The antithesis of corporate social responsibility'
VIDEO - 58 seconds Armoured vehicles in the streets of Yangon as protest continue across Myanmar.
His comments drew a furious response from human rights groups in both Australia and Myanmar.
Elaine Pearson from Human Rights Watch said Mr Coleman's comments were "cynical".
"I think this is really Woodside sitting back and quietly hedging its bets in its own self-interest," she said.
"This is the antithesis of corporate social responsibility. This is a country which just had a coup. This is not the time to wait back and see what will happen.
"They should be picking up the phone and telling Myanmar's army they should release civilian leaders and call for an end to abuses by the military."
Mr Coleman is also directly at odds with several Western governments that have condemned the coup and accused the military of illegally seizing power.
Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman says Western government will be wary of pushing Myanmar further into China's orbit with harsh sanctions. (Supplied: Woodside)
Australia has been reviewing military cooperation with Myanmar, while Foreign Minister Marise Payne has repeatedly urged the junta to free civilian leaders and restore democracy.
Woodside doesn't expect harsh sanctions against junta
Protesters including doctors, civil servants, students and monks have been demanding change since the coup. (AP)
Woodside is also pressing ahead with a major deepwater gas development off Myanmar's west coast, known as A-6, in a joint venture with French company Total SA and the Myanmar-based MPRL.
Activists in Myanmar say the government earns almost $US1 billion ($1.28 billion) annually from natural gas.
They have warned industry profits would help support the military regime, as well as fuelling corruption by the ruling generals.
Earlier this week the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Myanmar Tom Andrews also called on international businesses investing in Myanmar to take "immediate action" and "implore" the military to "return power to the people of Myanmar".
"Businesses and investors should suspend or terminate activities with the Myanmar junta when the risk of involvement in serious human rights abuses can no longer be reasonably managed," he said.
"I, and many others, would argue we have long passed that threshold."
But Mr Coleman indicated Woodside would push ahead with the A–6 project.
He also predicted that other Western countries would be unlikely to hit the military regime with "harsh" sanctions for fear of driving Myanmar further into China's strategic orbit.
"It's very early days in the coup, the military has committed to free and fair elections in 12 months," he said.
"I think you'll find, in my view, other Western governments will be reluctant to put up very harsh sanctions in place.
"Myanmar has made good progress in moving to democracy, the last thing they'd want is to push them away from that, potentially towards China."
A Woodside spokesperson told the ABC the company would "continue to monitor the evolving situation regarding the Myanmar government, including any guidance from the United Nations and the Australian government on economic engagement in Myanmar".
"While operating in Myanmar, Woodside has aimed to be a constructive foreign investor," the spokesperson said.
"This includes investing in education, training and capability building as well as local content, using Myanmar goods and services where we can.
"In the ongoing development of Myanmar, economic stability and energy supply can play an important role."
Ok, after reading that one this earlier one was a surprise
Woodside CEO Coleman to retire after torrid year for oil and gas
By Nick Toscano December 8, 2020 — 11.22am
The chairman of Woodside, the nation's top oil and gas producer, says the board is on the hunt for a new chief executive officer who can maintain the company's momentum back to growth following this year's torrid downturn.
(Washington, DC) – The Bangladesh .. https://www.hrw.org/asia/bangladesh .. government has repeatedly denied involvement in hundreds of enforced disappearances of activists, critics, and opposition members, and has taken no steps to investigate them, Human Rights Watch, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights .. https://rfkhumanrights.org/ , and the Asian Human Rights Commission .. http://www.humanrights.asia/ .. said on August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Concerned foreign governments should impose targeted sanctions against top security force commanders implicated in enforced disappearances and other grave abuses.
“The Bangladesh government has demonstrated absolutely no interest in investigating the role of its security forces in hundreds of enforced disappearances,” said Brad Adams .. https://www.hrw.org/about/people/brad-adams , Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Governments should act to ensure that the Bangladesh security force officials responsible face sanctions on their international travel, overseas assets, and use of international financial services.”
Enforced disappearances are defined under international law as the arrest or detention of a person by state officials or their agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty, or to reveal the person’s fate or whereabouts. Enforced disappearances violate a range of fundamental human rights, including prohibitions against arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial execution.
The government leadership’s denials havetrickled down through the ranks, the groups said. Many families whose loved ones were forcibly disappeared said that when they tried to register a police report, the police refused to accept any complaint that included allegations against law enforcement, and that some families faced threats and harassment.
The family of Mohammad Rezoun Hossain, an activist with Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami Islamist political party, said that after police detained Hossain on August 4, 2016, and then denied holding him, they tried to file a complaint at the local police station. However, the officer in charge told them, “Do not search for Rezoun or we will slaughter you all.” Hossain remains forcibly disappeared. “If my son is guilty, then the police can produce him in court,” said his mother, Selina Begum. “Why did the police pick him up and disappear him?”
The United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Australia, and other countries have laws authorizing governments to impose sanctions on human rights abusers and prohibit visas or entry, seize assets, and block access to banking and other financial services.
In October 2020, US senators published a bipartisan letter calling for individual sanctions against top RAB officials for extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, and torture under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and section 7031(c) of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020.
Imposing sanctions on high-level officials implicated in enforced disappearances could prompt the resolution of cases, spur accountability, and deter future abuses, the groups said.
Bangladesh is the top contributor of peacekeeping troops in the world. UN Secretary-General António Guterres should ban Rapid Action Battalion officers from participating in UN peacekeeping missions, the groups said. The US Department of State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs should ensure that any support under the Global Peace Operations Initiative is not used to train members of RAB for deployment in UN peacekeeping operations.
“Bangladesh security forces implicated in grave violations should not be deployed to United Nations peacekeeping missions abroad,” said Angelita Baeyens, vice president of international advocacy and litigation at RFK Human Rights. “Secretary-General Guterres should ramp up screening of those deployed by the UN to ensure its human rights screening policy is being effectively applied for those put forward by Bangladesh.”
“Many families of victims of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh feel helpless in the face Bangladesh authorities’ repeated denials, and the world should act and use the tools at their disposal to spur accountability and stop these abuses from continuing,” said Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, liaison officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission. “The UN should apply increased scrutiny to its relationship with Bangladesh security forces, and should not allow leaders implicated in grave violations the honor of serving under the UN flag.”
There are a wide range of grave human rights issues in Bangladesh.
The Government of Bangladesh is responsible for multiple human rights violations, including unlawful killings and disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture. Some of these have been in response to attacks by armed groups claiming to act in the name of Islam. Disappearances occur at an alarming rate, often of supporters of opposition parties such as Bangladesh National Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. Unlawful arrests occur frequently, as does torture in security force custody. Rights to freedom of speech and assembly are under assault, as the Government applies repressive laws and presses arbitrary criminal charges against journalists who publish criticism of the government. Other media and civil society activists also report threats and intimidation.
Armed groups have attacked and killed dozens of secular activists, LGBTI people, and foreign nationals. Among these groups are Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Ansar el Islam, which respectively claimed allegiance to Islamic State and al-Qaeda. A number of secular activists and bloggers have been hacked to death in targeted killings.
Government restrictions remain in place on access to the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The right to freedom of expression of journalists and human rights organizations are curtailed. Women and girls in the area face multiple forms of discrimination and violence.
The death penalty remains in effect. The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), a Bangladeshi court established to investigate the genocide and war crimes that occurred in the 1971 independence war, has convicted a number of people of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and several have been executed. Although horrendous abuses were committed during the 1971 war, UN human rights experts have expressed concern about irregularities and the fairness of the ICT trials.
Violence against women and girls is a serious problem, including rape, dowry-related violence, acid attacks, and domestic violence. In addition, Bangladesh has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. Poor implementation of laws and ineffective investigations help lead to a culture of impunity and a continued high rate of violence and discrimination.
An acute humanitarian crisis began in August 2017 when more than 655,000 of Myanmar’s mainly Muslim Rohingya fled to Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district to escape violence inflicted by the Myanmar military in northern Rakhine State. Newly arrived Rohingya live in difficult conditions and are not permitted to leave the camps.
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