present-day Myanmar who are leading the anti-Royingya campaign, to the same people who attacked Buddhists in Rakhine State in 1942, killing 50,000. They are descendants of the same people who, as self-described Jihadist warriors (“mujahideen”), conducted a violent Jihad against Burmese authorities that began in 1948 and lasted more than a decade, in order first to make Rakhine an autonomous state under Muslim control, and then to have it annexed by Pakistan. For these Buddhist monks, the Rohingya are simply Bengali Muslims who migrated south to northern Burma, and are merely the local branch of the world-wide Muslim umma that has been in continuous warfare against Buddhists and Buddhism for centuries, and is again becoming more aggressive and violent all over the world.

When those Burmese monks look nextdoor to India, they remember that in the 12th century, Muslim invaders pillaged Buddhist monuments and monasteries, leading to Buddhism’s final decline in that country. The monks know too that the last large group of Buddhists still remaining in the subcontinent, in the Chittagong Hills tract in Bangladesh, are in danger of completely disappearing because of repeated attacks by Muslims.

They remember the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and that gigantic act of cultural vandalism reminds them of the thousands of Buddhist temples and statues and stupas and monasteries that were destroyed over the centuries by the Muslim invaders of India and its neighbors.

And then they think, too, of what Muslims have done to Hindus, in Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and especially in Kashmir, where