JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 17 Another example: after the prominent lawyer and political activist U Ko Ni, who was also Muslim, was assassinated outside the Yangon airport in early 2017, posts on Face­ book celebrating the men involved in his murder became common. One year after the assassination, meanwhile, a prominent monk, dubbing himself personal abbot to the shooter, circulated a video on YouTube and Facebook warning those who disrupted the activities of nationalist monks to “eat their fill” as well.77 The statement invoked a well-known idiom for death threats, akin to “eat your last meal” in English. It was primarily directed at the then recently elected civilian government, which had temporarily banned him from giving sermons after an earlier celebration of the assassination. But it also clearly extended a pattern of threats against anyone attempting to disrupt the activities of nationalist organizations. Figure 6, for example, features the photograph and personal phone number of a local elder that circulated on Facebook in early 2015, after he had rejected a request to organize a public sermon featuring nationalist monks. “Here is his phone number,” reads the last line of the post. “You can call and ask him [about this].” In-group policing also took distinctive forms when it targeted women, with conse­ quences that were also clearly gendered. In May 2014, for example, a coalition of more than 100 civil society organizations, led by prominent women’s groups, released a state­ ment opposing a suite of four draft “laws to protect race and religion.”78 In response, a leading nationalist organization and proponent of the laws released an official statement denouncing them as “traitors,” which circulated widely on Facebook.79 Some of the women involved had their photographs edited into pornographic images and videos or received threatening phone calls and text messages. “Race traitor whore,” read part of one message, to an activist whose name and phone number were included on the statement as a contact person. “Sluts like you deserve … female genital mutilation,” read part of another message, to the leader of a signatory organization whose phone number had not been listed on the statement.80 The activists who came together to prepare Ignited also discussed these and other incidents. “[T]hreats and attacks on Face­ book against women HRDs [human rights defenders] are more severe, degrading, graphic, and almost always sexual in nature,” notes the report.81 In-group policing that targeted women drew on the gendering of anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim discourses. The claim that Islam would conquer Myanmar through overpopu­ lation, for example, also included the claim that Muslim men were being instructed to seek out Buddhist women to impregnate, in a Myanmar-specific version of what has been called “love jihad” in other contexts82 that also drew on colonial-era narratives about the importance of women for reproducing the nation.83 One corollary to this 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 The video is still available on YouTube, while clips of various length have become a meme that can be found on Facebook and, with the rise of TikTok, that platform as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i14ghT7QTcI (accessed 27 September 2023) https://www.facebook.com/100079350165372/videos/1893723560827873/ (accessed 27 September 2023) “Statement of Women’s Groups and CSOs on Preparation of Draft Interfaith Marriage Law in Myanmar,” 8 May 2014. Disclosure: the author worked for one of the signatory organizations at the time. Nyein Nyein, “Nationalist Burma Monks Call NGOs ‘Traitors’ for Opposing Interfaith Marriage,” The Irrawaddy, 12 May 2014. Justice Trust, Hidden Hands Behind Communal Violence in Myanmar: Case Study of the Mandalay Riots (March 2015), 18. Progressive Voice et al., Hate Speech Ignited, 46. Iselin Frydenlund, “Protecting Buddhist Women from Muslim Men: ‘Love Jihad’ and the Rise of Islamophobia in Myanmar,” Religions 12, no. 12 (December 2021): 1082. Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women: Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).