The First Amendment again drew national attention this week as two high-profile right-wing personalities appeared at prestigious universities on separate coasts to denounce what they say is an attack on free speech at college campuses across the country.

On Sunday, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos addressed a crowd at the University of California, Berkeley’s historic Sproul Plaza. The 20-minute speech was a decidedly truncated version of the four-day “Free Speech Week” Mr. Yiannopoulos had been touting since his last scheduled appearance here was canceled in April. (According to reports, the necessary permits and fees were not filed this time.) Still, his presence drew dozens of counter-protesters who decried racism and white supremacy and whose shouts, Yiannopoulos later wrote on Facebook, “made it impossible for any of our speakers to be heard.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at a talk on Tuesday at Georgetown University in Washington, told his audience, “Protesters are now routinely shutting down speeches and debates across the country in an effort to silence voices that insufficiently conform with their views.” As he spoke, about 100 students and faculty reportedly gathered outside the closed venue with signs reading, “Deport hate” and “Free speech is not hate speech.”

In choosing to speak about what they see as the growing limits on free expression, Mr. Sessions and Yiannopoulos continue to fortify a familiar right-wing refrain: that elite liberals and their insistence on political correctness are drowning out conservative voices, especially in the university setting.

The narrative, political analysts note, reflects a significant if gradual shift in the conservative position on the First Amendment. For most of the past century, conservatives aligned themselves with restrictions around speech; it was liberals who traditionally championed expansions to protected expression. (Student activists from the New Left, for instance, led the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.)

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks about free speech at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington on Sept. 26.

Today the general sense among conservatives is that they’re the minority on college campuses – and that their right to speak is being shut down by a left-leaning majority.

“The university is more monolithically liberal and leftist today than it ever has been,” says Charles Kesler, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank in California, and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Both are associated with the political right. “Even though there are students who are conservative or even moderately liberal and want to hear some conservative arguments, it’s very difficult to find the resources and space to invite them.”

That the idea of conservative silencing persists despite the fact that Republicans now control the White House, both houses of Congress, and more than two-thirds of statehouses only shows how the narrative continues to resonate with conservatives today – and how deep the shift now runs, says University of Delaware Prof. Wayne Batchis.

“I think it turned out to be a winning argument for the right. And it remains so,” he says.

'Card-carrying member of the ACLU'

Traditional conservatism, with its concern for morality and family values, would seem to align with a speech-restrictive attitude. And since about the end of World War I, that view was in general reflected in conservative actions and thought. Robert Bork, who served as solicitor general under President Nixon and later a circuit court judge, wrote famously in 1971 that the First Amendment should be applied only to “explicitly political” speech. Between 1955 and 1964, 73 percent of free-speech articles in The National Review – a bedrock of conservative commentary – focused on limiting expression. 

Association with aggressive free-speech advocacy – such as that embodied by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – was, to conservatives, “a political attack of the first order,” Professor Batchis writes in his 2016 book, “The Right’s First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech & the Return of Conservative Libertarianism.” In his 1988 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush would regularly use the phrase “card-carrying member of the ACLU” to denounce Democrat Michael Dukakis.

Universities played a major role in the shift. Through the late 1960s onward liberals, especially in academia, sought to challenge what they saw as structural injustice by giving historically marginalized groups a voice long denied them. As it grew in momentum – and some say militancy – the leftist movement led to the evolution on the right of the term “politically correct,” which “reflected a perception that conservatives … were being muzzled,” Batchis writes.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Counter protesters are held back by a line of Boston Police as attendees at the Free Speech rally on The Common leave the area Aug. 19 in Boston. The Boston Police kept rally attendees and counter protesters separated by barricades and police personnel.

Today that sense of being silenced has led to conflicts – sometimes bloody ones – from Berkeley to Boston, as counter-protesting liberals rush to shut down right-wing speakers. To liberals and those who side with them, such actions are necessary to defend marginalized communities whose hard-won rights are being trampled by the Trump administration. But to conservatives and their camp, the savagery with which some far-left groups have attacked their speakers is an affront to their right to make their voices heard. 

“Say you disagree with Milo’s views on immigration. Terrific,” says Peter Berkowitz, a political scientist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in California and champion of a moderate version of constitutional conservatism. “You can ask a question, write an op-ed, or march with placards peacefully. That all seems entirely appropriate. The violence, the shutting down, to me reflects serious unhealth in American universities."

Role of courts and universities

Many political analysts say there’s nothing inherently wrong with the two parties reversing their positions on the matter of free expression. “Particular constitutional rights can be favored or disfavored by the right or left respectively at different periods in political history – and the First Amendment is no exception,” Batchis writes.

The problem, they say, occurs when elements on both sides take their arguments too far.

On the left, that has manifested as the idea that offensive, hateful, and racist speech should not be spoken at all. “It’s not a bad impulse to think that because we have a diverse student body we need to be more sensitive to other points of view,” says Lata Nott, executive director of the First Amendment Center at the Newseum Institute in Washington. But “what started out as something that was supposed to keep things civil has led to this idea that even hearing ideas that you don’t believe in is something that’s harmful.”

On the right, “You have some really extreme voices who are conflating their right to say something with the legitimacy of what they’re saying,” Batchis says. Just because it’s legal to express white supremacist ideology doesn’t mean the ideology itself is objectively good or morally defensible, he says.

With political polarization at an all-time high, such tensions are likely to keep sparking conflict. But, Batchis says, “Change happens slowly when it comes to interpretation of the Constitution. I feel cautiously optimistic about the ability of the courts to remain principled on free speech questions.”

Some are calling on universities – likely to continue to be the setting for such skirmishes – to take a more neutral stance to ease partisan tensions. Administrations should examine more closely whether or not they are teaching “that the left-liberal progressive perspective is the one right perspective,” Berkowitz says.

“A professor might have a preference,” he says. “But the job is for students to know the strengths and weaknesses of various arguments and ideas, not to direct students to advance one political agenda or another. Diversity and inclusiveness are not tradeoffs with freedom of speech.”

Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Ukrainian army soldiers patrol a street in the town of Kalynivka, Ukraine, Sept. 27, 20 kilometers (13 miles) from the site of an ammunition depot blast. More than 30,000 residents were evacuated after the explosion.

Ever since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, subsequently backing a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine that simmers to this day, the United States has responded with a mix of sanctions, diplomacy, and military assistance.

That final part – supporting the Ukrainian military – has included support of defense reforms, on both strategic and tactical levels; training; and $750 million-worth of non-lethal equipment.

But there are whispers of change in Washington, hints that a perennial policy option that former President Barack Obama long rejected may be receiving a fresh lease on life: providing lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainians.

Some analysts vehemently oppose such a move, worried mostly by the prospect of a Russian escalation in response.

Outlining the main concern of the Obama era, Rajan Menon, a political scientist at the City College of New York, described a 1,165-mile border that Russia shares with Ukraine, and the “thousands of Russian troops ensconced in military bases” along its length.

He compared this with some 6,000 miles that separate Ukraine from the United States.

“Why would the reaction of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin … not be to scale up what he can do very easily, which is to reinforce the separatists?” Dr. Menon asked, speaking at a panel discussion last week hosted by the Atlantic Council in Washington. “Let’s be clear, Vladimir Putin has weathered sanctions, political isolation, put his soldiers on the ground, and allowed them to die in this cause.”

Gleb Garanich/Reuters

A local resident shows a family photo in her home, which was damaged during fighting between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists, in the government-held industrial town of Avdiyivka, Ukraine, in February

But today there appears to be increased support in senior government circles – not least as part of a broader effort to push back against an increasingly assertive foreign policy coming out of Moscow.

At a recent press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis dismissed fears of an escalation. “Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you’re an aggressor,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, and Ukraine is clearly “not an aggressor” as the fighting is happening within its own borders.

“We are closer than we’ve ever been before on the possibility of arming the Ukrainians,” says Luke Coffey, director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. “But the administration should understand it’s not a panacea: Weapons should be just one part in dealing with Russian aggression.”

Draft legislation

The Russian incursions in 2014 were a shock – “surprising, uncalled for, unpredicted,” as Bill Taylor, US ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, describes it – and as the US sought to calibrate its reaction, high on the agenda was seeking a cessation of hostilities.

In September 2014, a cease-fire known as the Minsk Protocol was signed by Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The deal fell apart, necessitating a second one, known as Minsk II, but that one failed, too.

In exasperation, the US slapped sanctions on Russia, as did the European Union and other countries. Both the US and its allies have sought to bolster the Ukrainian military, providing equipment ranging from counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars to IT systems and secure communications.

But with the simmering conflict having claimed more than 10,000 lives and the battlefront in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine still entrenched, the clamor in some parts of the US government for additional support is growing.

Recently, the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved a draft version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018, which authorized $500 million in “security assistance to Ukraine, including defensive lethal assistance.”

“Be sure we’re clear,” says Ambassador Taylor, now executive vice president at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, “there’s no talk about general offensive weapons – tanks, fighter jets, those kinds of things.”

The one weapon currently under consideration that stirs the most controversy is the shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile. It forms a part of some of the proposed packages being considered by top national security officials.

Costs of aggression

When proponents talk of the Javelin, they emphasize its “defensive” nature.

“Were we to arm the Ukrainians with ... things like the Javelin that can be carried by soldiers, the Ukrainians are not going to march on Moscow,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and another former ambassador to Ukraine.

“Part of my view was shaped by [conversations with] Ukrainians,” he adds.“The Ukrainian military understands that even if we gave them these weapons, they’re not going to be able to defeat the Russians or drive them from Donbass.”

The aim of supplying the Javelins would be to deter further Russian advances into Ukraine, by making the costs of such aggression unpalatable to the Kremlin.

“The Russians have demonstrated they’re very sensitive to battlefield casualties in Ukraine,” says Evelyn Farkas, former senior adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The one thing the anti-tank weapons can do is provide casualties.”

The idea of supplying Javelins or something similar has enjoyed substantial support in parts of the US government for the past couple of years, but is gaining ground as the Trump administration reconsiders ideas discarded by its predecessor.

“Look at Secretary Mattis, Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson,” says Ambassador Pifer, “people who share the beliefs of mainstream Republican policy – supportive of NATO, wary of Russia.”

The situation on the ground has also changed, as the Ukrainians themselves, says Mr. Coffey of The Heritage Foundation, have shown “through the ballot box” that they’re committed to a deeper embrace of the West.

A symbolic stand

And then there’s the bigger picture.

“[There’s] a political value, a political symbolism, to the West’s efforts to stand side by side with Ukraine,” says Laura Cooper, the acting deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.

Many analysts, both in and out of government, believe that Russia is pushing back against the current international order on multiple fronts, and that the West’s reaction to Moscow’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, and then Ukraine in 2014, has left the Kremlin emboldened. If a stand isn’t taken, the argument goes, where will it end?

But opponents of providing Ukraine with lethal weapons maintain the same objections that swayed the Obama administration: namely, that Russia could perceive this as an escalation to which they have to respond.

“The bottom line is that Putin cares more about Ukraine than the US or Europe does, so he’s prepared to put more skin in the game,” says Charles Kupchan, senior director for European Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council from 2014 to 2017, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “[We could be] beginning an escalatory cycle that Ukraine would lose.”

The retort from those who believe the time is right: What exactly would Russia do?

“The Russians are arming the separatists to the teeth,” says Coffey. “Short of giving them nuclear weapons, I’m not sure what more they could offer them.”

Edgard Garrido/ Reuters

A Salvadoran father (R) carries his son while running next to another immigrant as they try to board a train heading to the Mexican-U.S. border, in Huehuetoca, near Mexico City, on June 1, 2015.

Individuals migrating from Central America and Mexico to the United States without legal documentation are nothing new, but in recent years the context around these journeys north has changed dramatically.

Q: Who is trying to make the journey to the US these days?

Mexican net migration has been falling for the past 15 years, and in 2015 hit the lowest levels in more than five decades. That’s due, in part, to slower population growth and an improved Mexican economy. But hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers still try to make their way to the US southern border in search of safety or opportunity each year.

Migrants and refugees from Central America – primarily Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – account for the bulk of non-Mexicans arrested at the border. Some important sub-groups have emerged since 2014, including women and children traveling alone or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender migrants fleeing threats or persecution at home.

But migrants are traveling from much further afield as well. Haitians, Cubans, and migrants from parts of Africa and Asia have been making their way across South, Central, and North America in recent years in order to enter the US at its southern border.

Q: What role is Mexico playing in halting migration north?

Despite all the attention on the US-Mexico border, the gateway to the United States is no longer necessarily in Texas or California. The “border” could now be considered over a thousand miles south, where Mexico meets Guatemala. That was the realization, at least, in 2014, when tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from across Central America were arriving in the United States via Mexico. At the urging of the US, Mexico launched Plan Frontera Sur, a program that aims to formalize Mexico’s southern border entry-and-exit practices, and to decrease human rights violations suffered by migrants there.

As a result, detentions at the southern border jumped, and Mexico doubled the number of deportations along its southern border during the program’s first full year.

Gregory Bull/AP

A man is detained by Border Patrol officials after breaching border fencing separating San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico, Sept. 26 in San Diego. The man, who said he was from Chiapas, Mexico, was detained by agents as they prepared for a news conference to announce that contractors have begun building eight prototypes of President Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico.

Plan Frontera Sur changed the way migrants move through Mexico, and human rights groups say it’s made the journey riskier. Men, women, and children en route to the US are being pushed into the shadows in an effort to evade officials, whom migrants said were responsible for 41 percent of the crimes they'd experienced en route, according to a report from a migrant-support network.

Fewer migrants are traveling north on trains, which often led to life-altering injuries or death, but ran along a network of shelters that could feed or house migrants, and help connect them to medical or legal support. It’s also opened channels for criminal gangs to get more involved in moving migrants across the country, often charging a hefty sum and not providing any real guarantee of safety. 

Q: Are there destinations for Central American migrants other than the US? 

As the journey to the United States becomes riskier – and President Trump pledges to crack down on immigrants residing in the US without proper documentation – many migrants are halting their journeys early, or heading in new directions in search of safety or opportunity. Mexico has seen a sharp uptick in asylum applications, expecting numbers to reach 20,000 this year. That compares with 3,400 asylum requests in 2015. Nearby Belize and Costa Rica are also seeing more arrivals from the Northern Triangle, made up of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

And leaving home doesn’t always mean a lengthy journey: An estimated 714,000 people from the Northern Triangle are internally displaced, according to the Humanitarian Practice Network. Often people move to another town or city in the face of threats or economic hardship, before considering an arduous journey north. 

Q: What happened this summer, when 10 migrants died in a tractor-trailer incident? 

In July, a tractor-trailer filled with more than 100 people was discovered in a San Antonio, Texas, parking lot. The trailer was stifling hot with little access to fresh air and a malfunctioning refrigeration system. And despite passengers – undocumented migrants mostly from Central America and Mexico – banging on the walls of the trailer for help, eight people were already dead by the time the doors were opened. Another two people later died in the hospital.

The driver, a US citizen who says he wasn’t aware that he was transporting people, is being tried on human smuggling charges. The tragedy underscores the sophistication of human trafficking across the border today, as well as the desperation that fuels many migrants to reach a country of perceived safety at any cost.

The increased presence of US officials at the border, and more checkpoints moving inside the US, north of high-traffic crossing points, means migrants are taking increasingly big risks. That can mean crossing into dangerous terrain and perishing in desert heat – or cold – or paying criminal groups to help move them across the border. Trafficking across the border has become a lucrative business: The cost of transporting a migrant from Central America through Mexico has more than doubled since October 2016, going from roughly $3,500 to $8,000, according to Stratfor, a security analysis and consulting company.

Q: Why are people migrating to the US in the first place?

It depends. For many in the Northern Triangle, leaving home is a life or death decision. El Salvador and Honduras have two of the highest murder rates in the world for countries not officially at war. And a recent report by the Organization of American States found that hunger due to a prolonged drought that began in 2014 is becoming an increasingly central reason for Central Americans to flee.

But there are political reasons, too. An influx of Cuban migrants last year, for example, were racing against the clock to arrive in the US before rumored – and eventually factual – changes to the wet-foot dry-foot policy, which allowed Cubans who reached the US to stay and gain legal residency.

Dar Yasin/AP

Rohingya Muslims, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, wait for their turn to collect sanitary products distributed by aid agencies near Balukhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, Sept. 17. After a series of attacks by Muslim militants in August, security forces and allied mobs retaliated by burning down thousands of homes in the enclaves of the predominantly Buddhist nation where the Rohingya live. That has sent some 417,000 people fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh, according to UN estimates. There they have joined tens of thousands of others who have fled over the past year.

For many Americans, popular images of Buddhism have often included those of monks in saffron-colored robes, meditating peacefully on windswept mountains, revering all forms of life while seeking higher states of enlightenment.

In the context of such clichés, it has been jarring, many say, to see very different images coming out of Myanmar. Many monks, barefoot and clothed in the traditional robes of Burmese Buddhist monasteries, have been at the forefront of the violent repression of the Rohingya Muslim minority, which the United Nations has characterized as ethnic cleansing.

Over the past month, more than 400,000 Rohingya have fled their homes in what United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Sunday called “the most urgent refugee emergency in the world” right now. Often spurred on by Buddhist monks, local mobs and government forces have reportedly burned hundreds of Rohingya villages to the ground in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, slaughtering many of their Muslim inhabitants as hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Bangladesh. 

Many of the country’s Buddhists are afraid their own faith is in jeopardy, viewing the Rohingya Muslims as a threat. The military, as well as many monks, have used this fear to stoke a “Buddhist nationalism” that combines religious and civic identities.

Niranjan Shrestha/AP

Novice Buddhist monks wait for alms during Buddha Jayanti, or the Buddha Purnima festival, in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2016.

The mix of faith and nationalist politics has been combustible for many religions and societies. Religious leaders seek government backing, and governments use the imprimatur of religion to justify killing. And as with most religions, religious scholars point out, there’s the spiritual ideal and then there’s what happens among the less-than-faithful.

“Everywhere there are human beings, you find political violence,” says Joshua Schapiro, senior lecturer at Fordham University in New York and an expert in Buddhist intellectual history. “So it shouldn’t be surprising that in various cases there are both Buddhists and human violence.”

When it comes to religious extremism, in fact, Buddhism has often escaped the scrutiny faced by other groups: Muslim militants, fundamentalist Christians, and Hindu nationalists in India, observers say.

“There is a romantic, more often than not, Western and academic vision of Buddhism as pacifist,” says Scott Davis, professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

That romanticism brings with it, not only a disconnect between the violence on the news and Hollywood portrayals of the religion, but deeper consequences. Middle Eastern scholars point out that the world's reaction would likely be very different if Myanmar's Muslims were the ones doing the oppressing, rather than being oppressed.

Hollywood celebrities have taken up Buddhist practices, cultivating friendships with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. Films like “Seven Years in Tibet,” which starred Brad Pitt as an Austrian mountain climber who became friends with the Dalai Lama at the time of China's takeover, often emphasize such romanticized views, notes Daniel Stevenson, professor of religious studies and historian of Buddhism at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

“There’s a scene in which the Tibetan monks are plowing the ground and moving rocks, careful to remove the worms underneath and not cause any harm to them,” says Professor Stevenson, noting the popular images in other US media. “It’s this archetypal image of the life-loving Buddhist monk, careful and meticulous not to harm any creature.”

Reverence for life

In the US, romantic ideas of Buddhism have a long history. The blueblood Buddhist convert, Henry Steel Olcott, a Civil War veteran and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in New York City, once proclaimed, “As far as we know, [Buddhism] has not caused the spilling of a drop of blood.”

In his 1881 “Buddhist Catechism,” he described the practices he embraced as “a religion of noble tolerance, of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice,” without a taint of “selfishness, sectarianism, or intolerance.”

In fact, the first of Buddhism’s Five Precepts is indeed a commitment to undertake training to refrain from taking the life of any living creature, Buddhist thinkers say. And in some ways, its injunctions against killing are similar to Jewish and Christian traditions, which share the 7th of the 10 Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” In Islam, too, the Quran proclaims that if anyone kills a person, “it is as though he has killed all mankind.”

In the Abrahamic faiths, however, the divine injunction against killing is mostly limited to other human beings. And the commandment has to do with the murder of innocents, not evildoers who wreak havoc in a community, or in what theologians later articulated as a defensive “just war.”

“But as I give as an example in my classes, look, one of the primary teachings of Jesus in the Gospels is to turn the other cheek,” says Dr. Schapiro. “So when confronted with explicit violence, what is the Christian thing to do if you’re following the teachings of Jesus?”

“So the project of awakening, or liberating one’s self from the daily forms of suffering and committing one’s self to refrain from killing, is a major part of Buddhist teachings and a facet of the lives of some Buddhists,” he continues. “But that does not stop Buddhists at large from being human beings and living in a society.”

Romanticizing the religion can have deeper consequences, too, observers say.

“Just imagine, for a minute, if it were Jews or Christians, or else the ‘peaceful Buddhists’ who were the subjects of Muslim persecutions,” wrote Hamid Dabashi, professor of Middle Eastern and Asian studies at Columbia University in New York, in an op-ed in Al Jazeera earlier this month.

“Compare the amount of airtime given to murderous Muslims of ISIL as opposed to the scarcity of news about the murderous Buddhists of Myanmar,” he continued. “Something in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination is cancerously callous. It does not see Muslims as complete human beings.”

Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka, too, have fomented violence against Hindu Tamils in recent years, citing scriptures to assert their primacy as “sons of the soil.” In Thailand, Buddhist monks in the 1970s offered religious justification for the mass killings of communists.

And from Indian King Ashoka in the 3rd century BC to medieval China and Japan, Buddhism has played a role in justifying violence and killing. “In almost 2,500 years of development in South and East Asia, the urge to protect the community and disseminate the teachings has been tied to the use of military force,” says Professor Davis. [Editor's note: this story was corrected to accurately reflect where King Ashoka ruled.] 

'Saffron Revolution'

The jarring images coming out of Myanmar, too, seem ironic, since Buddhist monks have been one of the primary forces of democratic change. In 2007, many helped lead what is now known as the “Saffron Revolution,” a movement of mostly nonviolent protests against Myanmar’s long-standing military dictatorship.

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

Rohingya refugees stand in their shacks in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Sept. 27.

Nearly a decade later, their efforts helped Aung San Suu Kyi, the dissident who spent years under house arrest and who won the Nobel Prize in 1991, to become the country’s first democratically-elected leader in 2016. Now the State Counsellor, she shares power with the Myanmar military.

Yet as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled the country during the recent brutal campaigns, human rights and other global leaders have criticized the Nobel laureate, who has appeared to downplay, if not justify, the Rohingya pogroms.

Indeed, for decades, the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, who make up about 4 percent of the population, have been viewed as foreign outsiders.

Practicing a mystical Sufi form of Islam, many Rohingya trace their origins to waves of immigration dating as far back as the 15th century. Others, however, arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants who arrived as part of the colonial bureaucracy in Rakhine, when the state was under the jurisdiction of British India.

This has placed the Rohingya within the crosshairs of lingering anti-colonial resentments. And many of the same politically-active monks behind the push for democracy have embraced a strident ethnic and religious nationalism seen in other religions in other areas of the world. Proclaiming that their religious traditions and culture are under siege, they often cite Islamic conquests from centuries past in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other regions.

“Buddhism will never die!” proclaimed one leader of Ma Ba Ta, a radical group of Buddhist monks, at recent rally in Mandalay, reported by The Guardian. “This is our cause!” the crowd responded.

“Those who insult our religion,” the leader shouted, “are our enemies!” the crowd returned.

When Burma became independent in 1948, successive governments denied full status to the Rohingya, denying their historical claims and refusing to even consider them as one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups – each a branch of one of the “8 Major National Ethnic Races,” Myanmar officials say.

In 1982, the Rohingya were officially denied citizenship. During the 2014 census, too, most were forced to be identified as “Bengali” – in essence, unofficial resident aliens denied status, effectively stateless. The UN has called the Muslim minority population in Myanmar as “the most persecuted minority in the world.”

Is it fair to judge a faith by its violent fringe?

Even so, other Myanmar monks have resisted the deeply embedded prejudices against the nation’s Muslim minority. Experts caution that Buddhism, like other faiths, has a wide diversity of interpretations and its adherents are hardly monolithic. The actions of an unfaithful cadre of any religious group, many argue, should never be seen to represent the deeper fullness of a major global religion. 

“It seems unhelpful to characterize an entire society based on the behavior of a fringe element,” says Doug Carnine, professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Oregon, and a lay Buddhist minister. He and his wife, also a Buddhist minister, taught English to the monks at the Thone Htat Monastery in Myanmar, and he says they experienced a culture of compassion and peace.

“The male monks, children and adults, eat only what is given when they do their alms rounds, so sharing is deeply embedded in the culture,” Professor Carnine says. “Some radical anti-Muslim Buddhist sects do not believe in sharing with Muslims – but other Buddhist groups do feed poor Muslims at the end of Ramadan.”

Matt York/AP

The Dallas Cowboys, led by owner Jerry Jones (c.) take a knee prior to the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Arizona Cardinals in Glendale, Ariz., Sept. 25. What began more than a year ago with a lone NFL quarterback protesting police brutality against minorities by kneeling silently during the national anthem before games has grown into a roar with hundreds of players sitting, kneeling, locking arms or remaining in locker rooms, their reasons for demonstrating as varied as their methods.

Over the past week, the news media covered a number of the country’s most pressing issues: ongoing threats from North Korea, the Senate’s efforts to dismantle Obamacare, the Trump administration’s late-Sunday-night announcement of its Travel Ban 3.0.

President Trump’s offensive quip about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem last Friday at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Ala., however, was the story that resonated most around the country – and by far.

Many critics, however, have faulted the role the news media has played in highlighting Mr. Trump’s inflammatory style, identifying a “disturbing symbiosis” between news outlets seeking viewers in a competitive marketplace and a showman who is master of the provocative tweet. What’s lost is a deeper focus on the country’s more pressing needs, many say.

“He’s like catnip to the traditional broadcast media,” says Paul Levinson, a professor of media studies and culture critic at Fordham University in New York. “When Trump says something like that, they probably realize that it makes things worse, but they can’t help themselves. It’s still shocking.”

On Monday, reporters asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether the president’s crude statement had “taken up so much oxygen” in the news that little was now being said about his legislative agenda.

John Bazemore/AP/File

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick (7) and outside linebacker Eli Harold (58) kneel during the playing of the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Atlanta Falcons in Atlanta in December 2016.

“Well, that’s determined by you guys,” Ms. Sanders said, adding that the president was being patriotic and taking the lead on this issue.

After Trump’s election, a number of news organizations began to rethink their coverage of the presidency, both in reaction to the number of the president’s false factual assertions as well as his barrage of criticisms of “the dishonest media.”

Organizations such as Reuters, The New York Times, and Politico began to experiment with different kinds of headlines, signaling the president's false assertions and contextualizing his tweets. “We shouldn’t take his bait, but that’s not the same as ignoring him,” wrote Jack Shafer, Politico’s senior media writer, who last year advocated less journalistic focus on Twitter, and the need to understand Trump’s long-developed methods of handling the media and generating attention.

“Traditional media, having increasingly looked to Twitter as a source of news, it’s beginning to become what people expect, which is sad and dangerous in its own way,” says Professor Levinson, noting the shrill and relatively low level of discourse that flourishes there.   

Off the presidential cuff

From the opening moments of his presidential campaign, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable ability to dominate the news media with a provocative, off-the-cuff style rarely seen before in United States politics. What might have been considered career-threatening gaffes for politicians less talented in the art of cultivating media attention, Trump has used to inflame a base of supporters that propelled him to the presidency.

“It does seem that, whether he’s thinking this out in advance or not, we have to say he really has his thumb on the pulse of his base,” says Jeanne Zaino, a political scientist at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. “These are the issues they want to hear about.”

There’s also something deeper going on, suggests Aram Sinnreich, professor of communication at American University in Washington. Critics have often dismissed the president’s off-the-cuff riffs at such campaign rallies as “rambling.” But in some ways there’s an intuitive and media-savvy method in the kinds of provocative riffs Trump employs when he speaks.

“I don’t think he’s some kind of a super genius,” says Professor Sinnreich. “His brand of self-promotion just happens to fit like a key in a lock with a social media, promotional, targeted marketing environment. And the results are exponential in nature in producing rhetorical power.”

“You can watch him do it in real time,” he continues. “OK, I’m going to try this riff, I’m going to try that riff, I’m going to try this riff. Oh, I got that one. OK, now I’m going to double down on that one and go to Twitter and reinforce the message. Then he sends us all spinning, and we all go scrambling to rationally analyze or critique what he’s saying.”

It’s a tried and true technique often called A/B testing, he says, in which marketers test variations of particular messages to see what goes viral. “In a way, the stuff that the big data companies are now doing algorithmically, Trump is doing organically.”

It also has the ability to divert attention from a legislative agenda that has produced few wins. On Tuesday, for instance, GOP senators' latest effort to overhaul the Affordable Care Act failed to make it to a vote, and the candidate Trump went to Alabama to support, Sen. Luther Strange, lost to firebrand jurist Roy Moore in the Republican runoff.

“But he goes there to Huntsville – and he already wasn’t getting much traction in the Alabama race, or health care, or his new travel ban, which he never mentioned – and they didn’t seem to be giving him too much of a reaction early on,” Professor Zaino continues. “But he says this about NFL players, and then all of the sudden he gets this enormous reaction.”

The Huntsville speech

Indeed, the crowd’s reactions to many of the president’s well-worn riffs were bordering on the tepid last Friday.

The president touted his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. “How about a thing called your Second Amendment? Right? Remember that? If crooked Hillary got elected, you would not have Second Amendment, believe me. You’d be handing in your rifles,” he said, pantomiming handing a rifle over.

The crowd did react, and a lackluster chant of “Lock her up!” started to ripple across the crowd. “You gotta speak to Jeff Sessions about that,” the president said.

And in touting Strange, Trump defended his efforts to pass the Republican health care bill. “I’m on the phone screaming at people, for weeks,” he said.

With an eye-rolling braggadocio, the president admitted his distaste for the role, describing the process of schmoozing for votes as “brutal, brutal.”

And then it came: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b---- off the field right now? Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’ ”  

The crowd exploded. A buzz went through the arena. For the first time, the crowd began chanting “USA! USA!” The president beamed.

By Sunday, the topic dominated the news. Every NFL game, too, was watched closely as much for the teams’ reactions to the president’s quip as for the games themselves. As of Wednesday, Trump had tweeted at least 25 times about the NFL controversy, but only 4 times about the devastation in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria.  

The topic began trending on Facebook and Twitter. The alt-right media personality and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich posted a video on Facebook in which he quoted the president verbatim multiple times. “Proud Americans Stand Up,” he labeled the video, calling it an “experiment” urging users to “share this video if you agree with Trump's statement concerning the NFL's disrespect of America.”

As of Wednesday, the video had more than 12 million views and nearly a half million shares.

“We have a president who seems to have a knack for drawing an audience,” says Zaino, “and that makes it really tough for the news media. He’s really got no wins under his belt – and the point is, this is what he’s going to try to win on.”

“One thing the media can do better is ask, ‘Is this the most important story of the day? No,' ” she continues, adding that it can also get better at identifying distraction tactics, even as his words and actions resonate with his restive base.

“Yet you can say that, but when you look to getting ratings and readers, it’s a really tough thing to follow through,” she says.

AP Photo

A Rohingya refugee girl at a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Sept. 28.

We have seen this in too many places – from Rwanda to Bosnia to Syria – over recent decades. A country erupts in extreme violence between different groups. The rest of the world condemns the human rights violations and either intervenes with force, imposes sanctions, or does nothing. Afterward, lessons are drawn on how to fix the international moral order.

Now it is Myanmar’s turn. The majority Buddhist country, also known as Burma and still largely under the thumb of the military and not Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, is being condemned for recent attacks on the minority Muslims known as Rohingya. More than 480,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh. At least 1,000 have been killed.

On Sept. 28, the United Nations Security Council held its first open session to discuss the crisis. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Another UN official said Myanmar’s military operation is a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. France went further and called it “genocide.”

Such responses by those upholding the universality of human rights presume that exposing such evil is good enough. That it will somehow shame the Myanmar government into submission. Or that extolling universal values such as tolerance will somehow persuade the Buddhist nationalists to view their country’s Muslims not as “the other” but as individuals in a shared society.

Yet, as in other crises with similar atrocities, this kind of condemnation or the assertion of rights does not always work.

Why is this too often the case?

A new book by a leading human rights advocate, Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian scholar and rector of the Central European University in Hungary, offers a compelling case for a different approach. The book, “The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World,” took him on a three-year, eight-nation journey to listen to vulnerable communities under stress. He talked to slum dwellers in Brazil, people in an isolated village in South Africa, those in a Japanese town devastated by a tsunami, former enemies in Bosnia, and people in the diverse neighborhoods of New York’s borough of Queens. He even talked to militant, anti-Muslim monks in Myanmar.

Dr. Ignatieff discovered that societies living under harsh social, economic, or physical conditions do indeed have their own inherent values, or “ordinary virtues,” such as compassion and mercy. But they may not regard this “moral operating system” as universal. They frame it as local. Such virtues – including equality – are seen not as an obligation but as a “gift,” negotiated between individuals, one at a time within society and in the spirit of reciprocity and solidarity. Whatever values are held in common are a result of transactions and are not a right. And gratitude is a necessary part of those transactions.

When outsiders such as the UN try to impose ideals and rights as universal, such communities often reject it. In the current case of Myanmar, the UN’s voice is not persuading the country’s majority. “At the moment, international human rights is a bystander on this story,” says Ignatieff. “It is not where we are right now.”

The real issue, he says, is how to change the political discourse in a country to focus more on its “ordinary virtues,” such as hospitality, in ways that will allow people to accept “the stranger” and break down stereotypes. In Bosnia, for example, Ignatieff found victims of a 1995 genocide were able to resume living side by side with perpetrators after dealing with them as individuals and not as people with a collective identity, such as “Serb.”

Too often a society with different types of groups is co-opted by leaders who exploit the ordinary virtues and create fear. They might claim one group has betrayed the other’s generosity. Or that a group’s current suffering is a result of those different from them. Or they use false categorization, such as the way Myanmar’s military and some monks claim all Muslims are terrorists.

To save the Rohingya, the UN and others may need to speak not to Myanmar’s military but directly to the people. They could try to use the language of “ordinary virtues,” and not the language of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They could listen carefully to fears of “the stranger” in Myanmar.

If such compassion can beget compassion in that country, ordinary virtues might someday become more universal. The world’s moral order might then become strong enough to prevent another mass evil.