International Journal of Communication 13(2019) Extreme Speech in Myanmar 3205 and political contexts, these examples might not be considered hateful and might thus escape the scrutiny and criticism attracted by more obvious cases of hateful speech by nonstate actors. Consequently, throughout this article I use the term “extreme speech” to describe negative speech used by the state authorities to denigrate groups like the Rohingya. The History and Contemporary Circumstances of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims I lost my two sons and two daughters. At midnight the military came into my house and burnt the house but first they raped my two daughters and they shot my two daughters in front of me. I have no words to express how it was for me to suffer, to look at daughters being raped and killed in front of me. Also, my two sons were killed by government. I was not able to get the dead bodies of my daughters, it is a great sorrow for me . . . It was not sufferable, the persecution was very dangerous, we are falsely come here, not to live long, we want to back again. (Rohingya farmer living in Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh [personal interview, October 22, 2017]) Desperately sad accounts like this, told to me by an ethnic Rohingya farmer recently arrived in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong refugee camp, were disturbingly common when I spoke with new camp arrivals in October 2017. Throughout the two preceding months more than 600,000 Rohingya had fled a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military (known as the Tatmadaw) that targeted the Rohingya community in Rakhine State and swelled the already large refugee camps across the international frontier in Bangladesh (“UN: Rohingya Exodus,” 2017; Inter Sector Coordination Group, 2017). The context of the Rohingya’s most recent forced migration was one in which anti-Rohingya speech was widespread in mainstream and social media and the group was without any meaningful political support within Myanmar. This was not always the case. A Muslim minority in the overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar, the Rohingya are from Rakhine State, adjacent to Bangladesh, and claim a heritage in Myanmar that makes them indigenous. Myanmar’s authorities consider the group to be colonial era arrivals or illegal post–Second World War migrants from Bangladesh (formerly Pakistan) and routinely label them Bengali (Ibrahim, 2018; Ware, 2015). The Rohingya reject the Bengali label, which they consider a slur designed to deliberately misrepresent them as foreigners. Kyaw Min, a Rohingya community leader elected at Burma’s 1990 election to serve in parliament (a post–1990 election parliament was subsequently not convened by the military authorities), spoke to me during 2015 about official Myanmar’s rejection of Rohingya rights, saying, “I don’t know why they reject us. We have been in Rakhine State for many, many centuries. Our language is not like Bengali. Our culture is not like Bengali” (personal interview, November 19, 2015). Myanmar’s authorities and Buddhist nationalists dispute the Rohingya’s claim to indigeneity (Aye Chan, 2005; Hunt 2017a, 2017b; Radio Free Asia, 2012). However, there is evidence of a substantial Muslim population residing in the Rakhine State area in the centuries before the arrival of the colonial British (Ibrahim, 2018; Yegar, 1972). When British administrators undertook their first population study there in 1826, they described a Muslim population accounting for “three-tenths” of the total (Paton, 1828, p. 372). Prominent Rohingya figures and historians, including Htay Lwin Oo (2013), Islam (2011), Siddiqui (2011), and Tahir Ba Tha (1998), confidently claim the community’s residence in precolonial Burma. I heard this