Genocide is Taking Place Right Now in Burma
Saladin, Where Are You?

New song brings to light the slaughter of Rohingya people.

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Saladin) Image courtesy: badassoftheweek.com

(TUCSON / BOSTON / SACRAMENTO) - The dissolution of the British Empire after the Second World War left a number of problems that still fester, several in the Muslim World.

Siraj Davis

The most notorious, of course, is Palestine, a problem that now preoccupies its successor, the American Empire.

There is the unresolved question of Kashmir that endangers the peace of the Indo-Pak subcontinent.

There is also the British legacy of the Northwest Frontier in which the 19th-century British colonialists created an ad hoc border that divides the Pashto-speaking people in Afghanistan and Pakistan on both sides of it, a guaranteed recipe for instability and conflict, as we Americans should know by now.

And then there is another legacy, especially in Southeast Asia, not the result so much of imperial conquest and as of colonial enterprise.

Agron Belica & Tim King

During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of workers were imported from India to work the plantations and fields of Malaysia and parts of Burma.

Many were encouraged to settle there to make colonial Burma, for example, a fruitful model of the economic benefits of British imperialism.

Hence the presence of the Rohingyas in modern Burma, the descendants of the Bengali Muslims who were attracted to the empty spaces of Arakan and adjacent regions in colonial times.

Rakhine Buddhists... machete

During WW II, when Burma was occupied by the Japanese, the Rohingya fought on the Allied side against the occupiers.

A few years after the war ended, like India and Pakistan, Burma became an independent nation.

The debt to the Rohingyas was quickly forgotten. Burma soon slid into totalitarian and military rule, a rule which is just ending now.

With the coming of "democracy," old scores are being settled and the Rohingyas are beginning to suffer horribly.

What will the world do? With the United Nations reduced to the status of an expensive debating society, while the "super powers" decide on priorities with their vetoes, one may expect the usual temporizing from that quarter. Look at Palestine!

Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on Earth, is not interested in adding its distressed cousins to their own burden. Other Muslim countries? There is a lot of talk about the Muslim Commonwealth, but not much action when national interests are involved.

The outlook is bleak. Saladin, where are you?

—Jay R. Crook, Ph.D.

(Editor's note: The song and video presentation below is possibly the first example of modern western music that celebrates and recognizes both the Rohingya people, and their struggle against the militant government of Burma which is decidedly pro-Rakhine Buddhist and anti-Rohingya Muslim. Even their citizenship is denied. Tim King asked Agron Belica if he could please put his musical talents to work by writing and producing a song about the Rohingyas, it took almost no time and the final version is now here)

Published on Oct 30, 2012 by ACE Kinolar

BURMA: Ethnic Cleansing & Genocide/CCTJP Movement
Journalists: Tim King, Siraj Davis, and Agron Belica
Aldin Entertainment Music Group
Music Produced by Sinma Co-Produced by Jamal Belica
Video Production by CCTJP Movement
Commissioned by Salem-News.com

(Saladin: Muslim sultan of Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine, founder of the Ayyūbid dynasty, and the most famous of Muslim heroes. In wars against the Christian.

Dr. Jay R. Crook spent his formative years in the New York metropolitan area, where a chance acquaintance awakened his interest in Islamic culture and civilization, and he soon embraced Islam. After military service and saving some money, he ventured to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to study and ultimately, spent most of his working life in the Middle East, especially in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

He received his Ph.D. in 1978 in the Doctoral Program of Persian Literature for Foreigners at Tehran University. His doctoral thesis was A Comparison of the Quranic Stories of Surabadi With the Bible. Subsequent to leaving Iran in 1980, he worked as an English teacher in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia before retiring in 1997. He now resides in Arizona and has translated several books from Persian into English, including Kashifi’s The Royal Book of Spiritual Chivalry and Ghazzali’s The Alchemy of Happiness.

Salem-News.com Writer/Author/Musician Agron Belica, faced many challenges growing up as a rootless street youth, situations so intense that they threatened to destroy him- that is until he rediscovered his Muslim roots a few years ago and turned his life around. In 2008, Agron Belica published his research article The Revival of the Prophet Yahya, and has caused quite a stir in scholarly circles. In 2009, a new theory was born, The Crucifixion: Mistaken Identity?> John the Baptist and Jesus the Christ. With no formal advanced education, he offers new interpretations of certain key words in the Quran along with his challenging theories about the role of John the Baptist in the Crucifixion and has attracted the attention of well-known scholars in the field of comparative religion, such as Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar, the first American woman to translate the Quran into English, the noted university professor, Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, and the author and translator, Dr. Jay R. Crook.

You can write to Agron at this address: agronbelica@gmail.com

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Tim has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon.