Watching Our Neighbors Suffer – in Silence

What is happening in Myanmar’s Rakhine state to the Rohingya people is nothing short of abject failure by many Burmese who regarded themselves as Buddhists to be compassionate. Buddhism preaches tolerance, not the opposite. Wrongly clinging to one’s ethnicity, nationality, religion or the past can tragically make us regard others as less than human and undeserving of empathy, not to mention equal rights.