M.MAS 7/22/15 at odds with this narrative; recognizing the operation of this narrative exposes readings that may be common for Myanmar audiences but not obvious for outsiders. President U Thein Sein, for example, has made public commitments to human rights and warned of those who are ‘domestically and internationally spreading extremism.’76 But while such comments can be read as references to monks such as U Wirathu, it is also possible to read such a statement as directed against Muslim extremists. There is, in other words, nothing about such statements that requires contradicting the narrative of Muslim threat and virtuous defence. Reading the president’s statement in the opposite direction, to be consonant with or even supportive of the narrative of threat would require minimal interpretive work. Indeed, such a reading would actually be more congruous with his prior statements: after the TIME magazine cover story branded U Wirathu ‘the face of Buddhist terror,’ for example, the President referred to the monk as a ‘son of Buddha’ and banned the sale of the magazine issue.77 Our research suggests two questions that should help clarify how influential actors in Myanmar society are contributing to conflict. First, how are instances of riotous violence explained and who is identified as victim and aggressor? If people are marking their concerns with Buddhist-Muslim conflict to 2012 or other recent instances of violence, and there is a common sense that Buddhists were victims during this time, this indicates that the explanations presented for these incidents need to be considered. This applies to the explanations offered by media, religious, and political leaders. It also applies to the state, insofar as the policing after a given incident – in which more people from one side are arrested than the other – is a powerful statement about who was attacked and who did the attacking. This operates as a statement about the ‘truth’ of who did what to whom, as defined by the state’s legal proceeding. But, perhaps more importantly, it is a statement about whose use of violence is legitimate, as evidenced by whose uses of violence are punished and whose are not. These considerations apply to large-scale instances of riotous violence, but also to other cases that, though they do not have a national profile, are nonetheless locally significant. Legislative and administrative moves understood to protect one religion from another or privilege public speech and action by representatives of one religious group, along with implicit or explicit condoning of the rationale and rhetoric of 969 and Ma Ba Tha, are other moves that help to reinforce the sense of threat. Most dangerous of all are statements by authorities that imply or assert risks of ‘Islamic terrorism’ in Myanmar.78 Second, how is Islam being represented, and is it as a unitary and fearsome Other? This is the question that helps us see the wider array of contributions that the state and social, religious, and political leaders are making which help to justify a sense of Muslim threat. Clearly, 969 and Ma Ba Tha present such an image of Islam. But so too do government authorities when they limit their concern for extreme speech to choice of words, while implicitly or explicitly accepting that the motivation (protection of Buddhism from Islam) is legitimate. Individual news stories that, directly or indirectly, explain violence in Myanmar and abroad as the function of unitary and violent Islam also reinforce the larger narrative. But the editorial decisions of private sector and state-owned media matter too; a similarly unitary and violent image is visible in the aggregate of stories published, and not published, in the international affairs sections of their papers. It would be valuable, for example, to compare the quantity and quality of coverage of international news related to Islam in Myanmar language media to, for example, the international affairs coverage in other regional papers. 76 Nirmal Ghosh, “Myanmar Alert to Extremism Threat,” The Straits Time, January 18, 2015, http://www.asianewsnet.net/news-70566.html. 77 Hanna Hindstrom, “Burma President Backs anti-Muslim ‘hate Preacher’ Wirathu,” Democratic Voice of Burma, June 24, 2013, http://www.dvb.no/news/politics-news/burma-president-backs-anti-muslim-%E2%80%98hatepreacher%E2%80%99-wirathu/28955. 78 Galache and Pedrosa, “In Myanmar, Muslims Arrested for Joining Terror Group That Doesn’t Exist.” 23