The perils of embracing Islamophobia

This past week, a group of about 60 Buddhist laymen petitioned the governor of Khon Kaen, demanding that he intervene to stop the proposed construction of a community mosque.
The protesters believe allowing a mosque will turn their community into a violence-plagued region like the Malay-speaking southernmost provinces.
Pramual Pimsen, president of the self-proclaimed Buddhist Assembly for National Security, was quoted by Benar News as saying, “Local Buddhists and those in the nearby village agreed that terrorism has spread widely and imprinted a bad perception in people’s mind. The people have serious reservations about allowing a mosque because it may spawn violence as in the deep South.”
Khon Kaen province has a population of 1.8 million, of whom, 3,000 are Muslim. The Muslim-majority far South has been plagued by a 13-year-old separatist insurgency that has so far claimed nearly 7,000 lives.
It is not clear if Pramual and his supporters are feigning innocence and trying to push some hidden agenda with this protest. Or, perhaps they actually believe that Thai Muslims in this region will take up arms against the state.
Does he actually think that every Thai Muslim has a violent tendency and is prone to taking up arms against the state? If that is his belief, then why stop only at Khon Kaen? He should demand that no mosque should be allowed in any part of the country.
If his stance is because of his ignorance, then he is not the only one. Many people in the country, and even around the world, have fallen into the same trap of generalisation. Some would argue that since Thailand is a Buddhist country, opposition to the construction of a mosque would be justified.
In recent years, many communities throughout the country – often led by nationalist Buddhist monks – have voiced objections to community mosques. They cited fear of violence and the threat to the Buddhist character of the country.
Such a mindset and attitude did not come out of a vacuum. Biased media reports, indifferent government bureaucrats and community/national leaders, commentators and half-baked intellectuals and a state-constructed narrative has consistently informed us how we are superior to other people without being able to substantiate the claim. It is not a surprise why we Thais look down on people from neighbouring countries.
These Buddhist nationalists in Khon Kaen claim to be Thai and to be defending Thai values. They wrap the nation’s flag around themselves but tend to ignore that the identity they have embraced has been constructed by the state so that they and their grandparents and great grandparents would not feel out of place, or “un-Thai”.
And while all of us cherish this constructed identity that we call “Thai”, or Thai-ness (kwam pen Thai), we also know well that more than 90 per cent of people in this nation embraced Theravada Buddhism.
For some people, having Buddhist ceremonies carried out at just about every function in public and political institutions is not enough. They want the Constitution to designate Buddhism as a state religion too. Experience all over the world shows that the legislating of religion and morality by the state has never had good results.
The conflict in the Malay-speaking South has always been a convenient point of reference for Buddhist nationalists and Islamophobes. The region, known as Patani, was the 
historic homeland of ethnic Malays. 
It came under direct control of the Thai government at the turn of the last century, ending the region’s 
two-century-long tributary status of Siam.
A comfort level was established during the first half of the century between the two sides as the state left the local Malays’ religious and cultural space alone. But then came the push for greater Thai nationalism and its policies that the local Malays felt came at the expense of their identity and narrative.
By mid-1960s, this rejection of the Thai policy of assimilation turned bloody and local ethnic Malays embarked on an armed insurgency to regain their historical homeland.
The current wave of insurgency erupted again in 2004 but Thai society and the government have yet to review their failed policy of assimilation.
Our officials and national leaders pay lip service to the idea of a harmonious Kingdom. But when a moment of truth, such as the incident in Khon Kaen surfaced, they remained silent – it seems like a case of bigotry and hypocrisy going hand in hand.