[News] Friends in Ethnic Cleansing: Myanmar and Israel Sign Education Deal to Rewrite History

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Friends-in-Ethnic-Cleansing-Myanmar-and-Israel-Rewrite-History-20180530-0021.html 



  Friends in Ethnic Cleansing: Myanmar and Israel Sign Education Deal to
  Rewrite History

May 30, 2018
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Controlling how history is taught also gives you control over how people 
think about their past and present, and the Israeli and Myanmar 
governments are well aware of that.

    *RELATED:*

    *Israel Continues Arms Sales to Myanmar Amid Rohingya Crisis
    <https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Israel-Continues-Arms-Sales-to-Myanmar-Amid-Rohingya-Crisis-20170906-0024.html>*

The governments of both governments signed an education cooperation 
agreement Monday allowing them to rewrite their own history in each 
other's textbooks, contributing to a more benevolent image of them and 
their responsibility in ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians by 
Israel and against the Rohingya muslims in Myanmar.

According to the agreement, of which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz got a 
copy, the countries will “cooperate to develop programs for the teaching 
of the Holocaust and its lessons of the negative consequences of 
intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia as a part of the 
school curriculum in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.”

*“An education agreement with Myanmar. Cooperation continues with our 
friends all over the world.”*

However, both countries fail to remember and acknowledge their own 
violent, intolerant, racist, and xenophobic acts against native 
populations in their countries or in territories they control.

The agreement will also promote academic cooperation, including 
conferences, training courses and even the development of Israeli and 
Jewish studies programs in Myanmar and Myanmar studies in Israel, 
including language programs.

The countries will be able to “mutually verify school textbooks, 
particularly concerning the passages referring to the history of the 
other state and, where needed, introduce corrections to these 
textbooks,” a move that will basically allow them to write their own 
nationalist narratives in each others' textbooks and ignore that fact 
that Israel and Myanmar have been respectively ethnic cleansing their 
territories from the Palestinian and Rohingya peoples.

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, 
have been victims of a systematic ethnic cleansing program by the 
government for years, but the process intensified in 2017 when the 
military carried out mass executions and rape, forcing about 700,000 of 
them to flee to Bangladesh and other neighboring countries.

The United Nations has said Myanmar's campaign against the Rohingya 
Muslim population “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

"Of course Israel sees Myanmar as a friend. Both states share  the same 
exclusionist world view. Both states have engaged in mass state crime 
criminality against those they have defined as non-citizens. Both states 
operate systems of apartheid, structural discrimination and unfettered 
state brutality. It is entirely predictable that they now engage in a 
shared educational programme of state crime denial," Penny Green, 
professor of law and globalization at Queen Mary University of London, 
told Middle East Eye.

But cooperation between Israel and Myanmar is not only ideological. More 
than 100 tanks, as well as boats and light weapons have been sold to the 
Myanmar government by Israeli arms companies, according to 
investigations by several human rights groups, despite the United States 
and the European Union imposing an arms embargo against Myanmar.

One company, TAR Ideal Concepts, has also trained Myanmar special forces 
in northern Rakhine state, where much of the violence is taking place.

Israel has a long history of contributing to other countries' own ethnic 
cleansing.

In 1982, the General Efrain Rios Montt came to power after a military 
coup, becoming president of Guatemala between 1982 and 1983. During an 
interview with ABC News, Rios Montt said the coup had easily succeeded 
because many of this soldiers “were trained by Israelis.”

The Israeli military then helped Guatemalan regimes that carried out a 
genocide against the Mayan population. Between 1954 and 1996, the 
Guatemalan juntas killed more than 200,000 people, 83 percent of which 
were Indigenous Mayans. The period known as the “Mayan Genocide,” which 
lasted from 1981 to 1983, coincides with the peak of Israel-Guatemala 
military cooperation.

It comes as no surprise that many voices in Guatemalan politics, 
especially from the right-wing, deny there had been any ethnic cleansing 
in the country.

-- 
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