Holocaust Museum Revokes Award to Aung San Suu Kyi

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

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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.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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