Myanmar Spring Chronicle – View from September 12

(MoeMaKa), September 13, 2025

Hate speech and assassinations are things that must be stopped

All over the world—and in Myanmar too—assassinations and killings happen almost everywhere and at all times. In Myanmar, even if not daily, civilians are dying week after week from airstrikes. Children and elderly people who cannot easily flee are among those whose homes in villages and towns are burned, and some perish in the fires.

Because there are two or more armed groups fighting in Myanmar, combatants—including members of the People’s Defense Forces—have also been killed in battle over the past four-plus years in numbers so large they are likely in the tens of thousands, though no exact record exists.

In war, armed forces claiming to be a “government” kill civilians on suspicion and with accusations; on the other side, resistance forces also mete out death to people accused—often on mere suspicion—of informing for, supporting, or assisting the enemy.

Operating under the banner of “military operations,” armies acting as governments drop bombs, kill civilians indiscriminately, and—worse—fire heavy weapons to make ordinary people in a given area unable to live there, turning places into battlefields. They then drive tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions to move elsewhere, using propaganda to mislead the public into accepting it.

A typical example is Gaza, where the Israeli government’s army, the IDF, is attacking and killing more than two million Palestinians under the heading of “eliminating Hamas terrorists,” imposing starvation, and, even as deaths mount, maintaining a blockade while trying to push residents to seek refuge in neighboring countries—with participation and support from “liberal” countries that claim to be advanced and fair-minded, such as the United States and some Western European states, through weapons, funding, and intelligence.

What is happening is similar in form to Myanmar’s 2017 “clearance operation” against the ARSA militant group in Rakhine State, during which many Rohingya—children, women, and the elderly—were killed and driven to flee to a neighboring country. Although the catastrophe in Gaza is on a scale far worse than the Rohingya crisis in northern Rakhine, both share the similarity of killing, “clearing,” and expelling an entire ethnic/religious community.

In the United States, a young man named “Charlie Kirk”  who spoke and spread the view that daily deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza were justified in retaliation for Hamas’s acts, and who excused the Israeli army and those who command it, was recently targeted and shot with a sniper rifle by a 22-year-old named Tyson Robinson. Because of this incident, fears are growing in America about an escalation of politically motivated assassinations. Some are portraying the victim as a hero; others—politicians and media alike—are framing it as a grave threat to freedom of expression (whether “hate speech” or “speech opposing hate”). They even invoke a famous line attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

But in Voltaire’s notion of free expression, there is no room for spreading hate speech that declares killings and genocide to be right. To propagate the idea that innocent Palestinian civilians deserve to be killed because of Hamas’s crimes, or to justify such killings, is hate speech—and should not be protected.

Assassination is never acceptable under any circumstances. Likewise, disseminating hate speech—cheering on powerful, wealthy countries and military forces as they kill civilians, children, women, and the elderly without distinction—and lending support to genocidal acts is akin to endorsing murder.

If the world cannot stop the daily deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, then talk of justice, protection for free expression, and equal human rights becomes a mockery.

The attacks, killings, starvation, and efforts to force the more than a million civilians in Gaza to relocate to another area deserve criticism and denunciation. To suppress such criticism, or to be unable to stop defenses mounted on behalf of these abuses, is also a failure of ethics.

When the Israeli government carries out military operations and genocidal acts with the aim of controlling a country or a portion of territory, doing so under the pretext of “eliminating a terrorist organization” must be questioned. When such questions are raised, responding by branding them as anti-Jewish hate speech in order to deflect and evade scrutiny is also unacceptable.

Today’s world is witnessing the erosion of international law, respect for sovereignty, recognition of equal status among nations, and the values of honoring and observing such norms. Eighty years after the end of World War II, while it may be too much to say a third world war is imminent, we are indeed in a period when states are forming blocs, practicing might-makes-right, racing to build up arsenals, and when powerful countries—militarily and economically—justify using and dominating smaller nations through propaganda.

In Myanmar, killings by superior force, targeted killings of ethnic groups, and mass slaughters and expulsions designed to force people to move from their homes and livelihoods are occurring; similar events are happening elsewhere in the world, some even worse than in Myanmar, and others are as bad.

We must condemn and work to prevent the physical killings carried out by those who bear arms. Likewise, we must condemn and curb those who glorify such killings and spread hate speech that turns killers into “fighters against extremism,” thereby paving the way for fresh murders.