An activist friend of mine Htin Kyaw with a large following in the social media re-posted my appeal to the Buddhists of Burma on 15 Nov. We have been monitoring Burmese language responses to it since. It generated over 3,000 comments, shared over 8,000 - and attracted over 94,000 hits - without a single dime spent to "promote it". Ko Htin Kyaw deleted about 1,000 comments which he thought extremely 'hurtful to me'. I have told him to stop deleting hate comments, because they are extremely rich data for discourse analysis on hate-speech. 99% of the comments fall under 3 categories: 1) kill all Muslims. Myanmar is a Buddhist nation. Muslims have no business living here. 2) kill this 'mother-fucker' who made the bullshit appeal. 3) let the Muslims rape his mother, sisters and daughters. 4) the appeal is paid for by the Muslims. Having spent the last 4-years trying to sensitize the mainstream Burmese, I have come to conclude that UNDENIABLE FACTS and ANALYSES do not change self-un-aware RACISTS - deeds or thoughts. I went ahead and made this appeal, anyway in hopes of picking up a handful of fellow Burmese as allies in the fight against the rising Genocidal Racism in my own country.
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