Photo by Racoles via Flickr

Members of New York City's Buddhist community are organizing a sit-in on Monday at the Burmese Mission to show support for the monks and citizens who are posing a challenge to the country's military junta and being met with violent reprisals.

The silent protest will begin at 12:30 pm in front of the Burmese Mission at 10 East 77th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues.

Soldiers killed nine protesters in Rangoon on Thursday and injured 31 others, according to an account read on official Burmese television. The Associated Press reports that that the number of casualties is much higher than that.

From the Washington Post:

In addition to cracking down with automatic weapons in the street, Burmese security forces arrested dozens of the robed monks who provided leadership and moral authority to the protests since they erupted in August. Those protests have grown during the past two weeks into a political movement demanding an end to military dictatorship.

The monastery raids, in which a number of monks were beaten and hauled away in trucks, resulted in a sharp reduction in the number of monks seen in the streets. Most of those seen protesting Thursday -- in video footage shipped out electronically -- were lay activists of student age.