M.MAS 7/22/15 identified the analogy between discourses in Myanmar and the US after 2001. In the US, similar sentiments and security rhetoric became an integral part of the 2004 elections, supporting political agendas while also demonizing Muslim communities in the US and worldwide. We should expect similar dynamics in Myanmar, while hoping for less violent outcomes. Secondly, recognizing these parallels helps to explain how an apparent contradiction between violence against Muslims and commitments to human rights, religious freedom, or inter-faith harmony may be managed. That is to say, they are managed in ways similar to ways that countries such as the United States justify indefinite detention or torture: both are couched in terms of national security, and as legitimated exceptions to otherwise universal principles. Narrators regularly made clear the ways in which such discourses can co-exist; their expressions of fear or their misperceptions about Islam were in many cases complemented by stated commitments to inter-communal harmony and non-discrimination. ‘We are all the same human beings in my heart… There is no discrimination in my mind,’ the woman at the Ma Ba Tha office told us, before launching into an extended exposition about how the dangers of Islam now required that she devote her life to warning people of this threat. Finally, recognizing these parallels also highlights the hypocrisy embedded in criticisms of Myanmar that are applied to discourses or uses of violence that are also visible in the home countries or cultures of the critic. The ferocity of responses to international attempts to promote recognition of Rohingya citizenship claims, for example, is primarily a function of the way it is understood to be a defence of national security. But insofar as people frame the ‘Rohingya problem’ as an issue of religion rather than (or in addition to) immigration, they would also feel in their perception of threat an alignment with the Global War on Terror. The corollary to this is that to feel criticised for defending against such a threat is to feel that Myanmar is being held to a standard other states are not. Illustrating this for example, presidential spokesman U Ye Htut rejected calls for an international investigation into violence in northern Rakhine State during January 2014 by pointing to the United States government’s refusal to allow a probe into its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.69 This is not to say that, for example, the Myanmar government should not be criticized for the continuation of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar. Rather it is to say that such criticisms should take into account that in Myanmar they are received and contextualized globally, just as are conceptions of Muslim threat. How is the historical lineage of contemporary conflict being constructed? We have noted the sense of contradiction that narrators had to manage, between memories of past coexistence and present tension. In discussing concerns about religious conflict, we consistently heard the assertion that such concerns are recent, dated to ‘the Rakhine case’ (June 2012) or local examples of riotous violence. This was more noticeable outside Rakhine State, but even in Sittwe we heard comparisons between current conflict and an image of a peaceful past. The following excerpt is from a University-educated teacher in Sittwe, who came and sat down with us at a teashop, almost without our request – she had heard we were speaking to another man in the area and volunteered. In the past, we had students from different ethnicities and religions. Now, we do not have them anymore… We taught them and there was no conflict. We didn’t hope that these kinds of things would happen… There was a Bengali issue here in 2012. It is important. One people will swallow another people. So, we have to stop them. As a citizen of Myanmar, I am worried… In the past, I was not so worried as we just lived together. They [“Bengalis”70] were also in this section [of the 69 Gemima Harvey, “Myanmar: The Worsening Plight of the Rohingya,” The Diplomat, March 19, 2014, http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/myanmar-the-worsening-plight-of-the-rohingya/. 70 In this case, the ‘they’ she refers to throughout the interview she defines as ‘Bengalis,’ which is the way many in Rakhine – and across Myanmar – refer to people who are seeking to be recognised as Rohingya. 20