Arjun Appadurai: The killings of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli snipers this past fortnight marks a new chapter in the degradation of human life in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. It also makes one think about the continuing scandal of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, followed by their shameful treatment in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Thailand, among other Asian countries. Then there is Kashmir, which the Indian military continues to occupy with complete indifference to the lives of the men, women and children who live there. In each case, the targeted communities are Muslim though they are products of very different contextual histories. The global dynamics of genocide are not, in spite of appearances, primarily about Muslimness. The obsession with projecting Muslims as a coordinated global category is a collaborative project of highly specific Western and Muslim political theologies. It should not be viewed as a self-evident, universal fact.
[…] So, what do the Palestinian and Rohingya cases (extreme ideal types, as it were) teach us? That solutions to the “problem” of biominorities depend on whether you want to keep the despised minority in order to avoid actually producing some semblance of democracy, or whether you want to delink the group from their lands or resources, with no pressing need to use their presence as a pretext for an ever-militant militarised state. You either need the minority to keep paranoid sovereignty alive, or you need their resources more than you need their biominor threat.
[…] The loose post 9/11 discourse of the Muslim threat allows the two states (and others) to legitimise their violence, but the global dynamics of genocide are not primarily about Muslimness. The fact is that all nation states rely on some idea, however covert, of ethnic purity and singularity. Biominor plurality is thus always a threat to modern nation states. The question is what combination of extrusion and incarceration a particular nation state finds useful. As they consider the possibilities, Israel and Myanmar offer them two radical options, which just happen to have Muslim communities as their targets. But today’s varieties of genocide are not as much about religion as they are about paranoid and/or predatory nation-states. More here.