The Swiss filmmaker might have been frightened, but for many in the West, the terror still does not connect on a visceral level. People are unable to see a Buddhist in a saffron robe as someone who might incite genocidal violence on a grand scale. For example, Wirathu was featured in a July 2013 TIME magazine cover story with the headline “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” The accompanying story enumerated on the dangers faced by Rohingya and the tactics used by militant monks to fuel anti-Muslim violence in Southeast Asia. Despite this prominent report, the news barely made a ripple on the national stage.

QUESTION: Why does saffron robe imagery defuse threat perception despite documented atrocities? What cognitive mechanism drives this disconnect? SEED: A meditation on how religious visual identity overrides factual threat assessment could be a compelling essay on perception bias.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 139