Years ago, I used to regret leaving my home country of Burma for Malaysia. But after seeing the trend in ad populum criminalisation of Muslims as jihadists being replicated in my home country, I was awash with a flurry of contradicting emotions - on one hand I was relieved my family and I weren’t being subjected to ‘the purge’ in Burma.

However, on the other hand, I felt guilty for having these selfish feelings when my fellow brothers and sisters were still struggling in the nightmare I’d been lucky enough to escape. Should I be bewildered and unsettled by the idea that one point six billion of us who have never harboured a violent thought against our non-Muslim brethren, would suddenly and collectively be made guilty for the senseless acts of a band of lunatics?

No, I should not. After all it’s us Muslims who own and operate media giants which routinely churn out manufactured misinformation.

It’s us Muslims who have the military panache; the leader in international arms trade; who take it as a moral responsibility to invade countries on the unproven pretext of nuclear arms possession. Yeah, we’re a pretty powerful and dangerous bunch. Shivers.

In case you missed it, cognitive dissonance is a huge facet of our reality these days. The media reports Muslims as:

a) Radical Islamists intent on destroying western civilisation (the reality is that the majority of us Muslims would sooner see Marvel movies disappear on the face of the earth than let these radicals take over ourselves).

b) Potential Islamists and sympathisers (I can’t imagine myself harbouring a bearded IS member any more than Donald Trump can imagine himself respecting intelligent women).

Swapping truth for comfort

George Orwell had this prescient epiphany: “All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” The bottom line is that, most of us would much rather forego truth for falsehood as long as the comfort of our daily lives isn’t threatened.

The ubiquitous liaison with terrorism

The USA’s scandalous, ill-fated flirting with terrorism began in the 1970s when it commissioned terrorist groups to counter the threat of communism during the Cold War era. Thus, the unholy alliance between the US and its terrorist mistresses took root in key strategic countries in the Cold War such as Egypt and Afghanistan.

Later on, it became easy to use their CIA intelligence and weapons backed terrorist groups against leaders that eschewed the US world view in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda itself is their brainchild that bit the breast that it suckled on as formerly, it was merely a database of Extremist Islamists which the US (and its ally Saudi Arabia) used in their fight against the Russians in Afghanistan.

The lesser of the two evils? I don’t remember Communism or Russia actually being responsible for a sky high death toll of people from all around the world. Let’s see; Good old Uncle Sam was responsible for ten to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars (direct wars); between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan (proxy wars).

In addition, the US military is responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world since WWII.

Reports claim total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s, from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation likely constitute around four million (two million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus two million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as six - eight million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.

Owing to the lack of proper recording apparatus and consensus in Afghanistan, it is suggested that the death toll could be possibly higher than reported. How the US war on terror (of the very groups they groomed) destroyed the following countries:

Iraq

By removing Saddam Hussein as the iron-fisted leader of a region fraught with competing sectarian interests, and replacing it with the (minority) Shiite government, the US succeeded in single-handedly destroying the secular controls Saddam Hussein had put in place and opened the floodgates for Sunni dissent to fester.

The age old enmity between the Sunnis and Shiites were stoked by the disparity in treatment between Iraq’s Shiite minority and the disgruntled Sunni majority that lost their jobs and faced discriminatory treatment in relation to their more privileged counterparts.

Afghanistan

1970s Afghanistan was very different from the terror-ravaged Afghanistan of today. Even though Afghanistan back then was a struggling third world nation somewhat compromised in certain areas, it had a system that was still working. When the US and UK decided to dip their military toes in the area, Afghanistan was already struggling economically due to several factors, one of which were feudal14 wars over lands.

Innocent lives needed to be exploited to enable the success of the broader US aim of containing communism and protecting western liberties. To defeat the Soviets, the CIA gave support to the most extreme of all the mujahideen groups. The mujahideen while in power catastrophically ravaged the shaky democracy past governments, unfettered by US invasion, had achieved.

The hallmarks of their rule included denigrating women to the status of chattel, throwing acid in the faces of women who did not veil themselves and exiling more progressive minded people - particularly those suspected of being Marxist and Socialist sympathisers out of Afghanistan.

A solution perhaps?

The solution and the way forward? America as a nation and a collective consciousness needs to search deep within its troubled soul and understand the concept of karma : “You reap what you sow.” The solution does not lie in a reactionary approach, namely, the building of walls to shut problems and unwanted people out.

The solution lies in getting the administration to acknowledge it’s mistakes and holding it accountable under the constitution and the law. Any heavy vetting that needs to be done should be in the form of a collective self analysis. The way forward lies in taking the real culprits to task : those who tell the American people what their interests should be, whilst pandering to the interests of corporations that do not have the American citizens’ welfare at heart.

Even though it seems like a uphill battle against Goliath, it can be done. America needs to tap into the enlightened, progressive and intelligent society it once was and eradicate the wheat from the chaff.

SU KYAW is a Burmese Muslim whose family moved to Malaysia when she was five and has grown up as a Third Culture Kid since. She is an academic lawyer and is currently pursuing her LLM in Rohingya Refugee Education Rights. She strongly believes that activism starts from the ‘little people’, the ordinary Jane Does and that no one should be silent in the face of oppression irrespective of the parties’ race, religion, nationality or skin colour.