Holocaust Museum Revokes Award to Aung San Suu Kyi

Membership Ticker

Support Mother Jones with a year-end donation

Here are the facts: 1) We urgently need to raise $350,000 in online donations this month; 2) Readers told us fundraising is annoying; 3) Both journalism and US democracy are in trouble. So, to make this as un-annoying as possible, we’re hoping less is more right now—and we focus on three simple questions: Why us, why now, and why does your support for our journalism matter? We need a lot of help this month and can’t afford to come up short again. Please make a year-end gift if you can right now.

We need to raise $350,000 in online donations this month to keep Mother Jones charging hard. But readers told us fundraising is annoying, and we don’t want to add to the overwhelming noise. So we’re hoping less is more right now, and that we can “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” in making the case for the year-end gifts we need. Please help if you can right now.

Aung San Suu Kyi: Liu Weibing/Xinhua via ZUMA; Rohingya refugees: Alison Wright/zReportage.com via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

From the New York Times:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has revoked a prestigious human rights award it had given to the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, now Myanmar’s civilian leader, faulting her for failing to halt or even acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of her country’s Rohingya Muslim minority….The award, according to the museum, is given annually “to an internationally prominent individual whose actions have advanced the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote human dignity.”

Jay Nordlinger offers up a punchier version:

Aung San Suu Kyi is the civilian leader of Burma, otherwise known as “Myanmar.” In concert with Buddhist nationalists, the Burmese military has carried out an “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya minority, in the west of the country. What has been done to these people staggers the imagination: mass murder, mass rape, the full range of human savagery. In recent days, Burma has been busily trying to cover up the crime: bulldozing the villages where Rohingyas once lived. All the while, the great Aung San Suu Kyi has been indifferent to this, making excuses, issuing denials, and appalling her many admirers around the world.

This is an object lesson: The fact that you are persecuted doesn’t automatically mean you’re a good person. It just means you’re persecuted.