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Friday, November 8, 2019
Luke 16: 1-8 | Wall Street | The Parable of the Dishonest Servant
Now that Leni Robredo leads the War on Drugs, will media still report the “killings”?
The Philippines’ news media industry is in a conundrum now that “vice president” Leni Robredo has been given the reins of the government’s War on Drugs. Together with their cronies in the foreign media, they had been highlighting what they had referred to as “the killings” they took liberties to sensatoinalise in their “reports”.
What happens if these so-called “killings” continue under Robredo’s watch? Will the media continue to report them? Will “awards” continue to be thrown at “photojournalists” who scramble to make names for themselves on the back of their violence porn?
See, leadership is not just about coming up with great ideas and turning these into soundbites. This essentially is what Robredo’s “leadership” of the Yellowtard-led Opposition had been all about since she rose to fame on the back of the Philippines’ renowned necropolitics. That’s not to say that Robredo’s ideas are great or that her soundbites resonated for the right reasons, of course. But that’s a whole massive but different topic altogether.
What makes a good leader is execution — in all senses of that term. This is why the offices of the president and vice president are part of the Executive Branch in Philippine-style “democracy”.
Robredo will learn soon that results are what matter. More importantly, Filipinos will likely realise too what sort of news media industry they are subject to.
https://www.getrealpundit.com/2019/11/now-that-leni-robredo-leads-the-war-on-drugs-will-media-still-report-the-killings/?fbclid=IwAR0EyPBuCSfbQ5_YsiN3-0AlLZoWAvC_iwqkVYBm17Kz3Ff50LsKMoxzDEg
Have we forgotten that the Aquino-del Rosario tandem lost Scarborough twice over?
By Rigoberto D. Tiglao November 6, 2019
HONESTLY, I am astonished at the brouhaha over a Chinese “naval warship” shooing away the Greek-owned crude oil tanker “Green Aura” from the Scarborough (Panatag) Shoal, with the warship’s spokesman telling the tanker that the area was “under Chinese jurisdiction.”
Perhaps we are in denial mode, or the Yellows’ control of media persists to this day.
Have we forgotten that President Benigno Aquino 3rd and his Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario lost Scarborough Shoal to the Chinese in 2012 and then in 2016?
China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan have for many decades all claimed sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal. However, they were on a let-sleeping-dogs-sleep kind of policy, or chose to follow Deng Xiaoping’s wise admonition to let “smarter future generations” decide on these territorial dispute: No country tried to physically enforce its claim and allowed fishermen to fish in its rich waters undisturbed.
In April 2012, however, Aquino foolishly sent the refurbished cutter from the US Coast Guard, renamed the BRP Gregorio del Pilar and officially a Philippine Navy warship, to help arrest Chinese fishermen in Scarborough Shoal.
Marines
The Philippine Daily Inquirer published on its front pages pictures of heavily armed Philippine Marines watching over shabbily dressed, forlorn-looking Chinese fishermen — but who, on returning to China, raised such a nationalistic outrage that their social media was flooded with demands for the People’s Liberation Army to invade that “puny country.”
The Chinese of course went to the rescue of their countrymen, but sent their civilian maritime surveillance ships to block the Coast Guard and vessels sent by Aquino.
This was the now infamous Scarborough Shoal standoff that lasted more than a month. Aquino panicked, especially when China started using its economic leverage, as when it let Philippine mangoes rot in its ports, on the ground that there were reports that the shipment was infested, and had to be subjected to stricter quarantine.
1734 ‘Murillo’ map with Scarborough encircled, as presented in Carpio’s e-book Philippine Sovereign Rights and Jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea.
2010 Namria map, the latest publicly released: Bajo de Masinloc not within our territory, which was defined by the 1898 Treaty of Paris between Spain and the US.
Angry at del Rosario’s belligerence toward China — the country’s top diplomat even boasted the Philippines would get the US, Australian and Japanese military to help resolve the standoff — Aquino appointed then Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th as his special envoy to China.
Perhaps worried that Trillanes would resolve the crisis, del Rosario begged the Americans to intervene militarily, like escorting our ships into Scarborough Shoal. No way, the US said.
Campbell
Then in June, US Assistant State Secretary Kurt Campbell told del Rosario that the Chinese vice minister for foreign affairs, Fu Ying, had agreed to the two countries’ ships’ simultaneous withdrawal from Scarborough. Del Rosario believed Campbell and, according to Trillanes, ordered our Coast Guard ships to leave the shoal, without even bothering to get Aquino’s permission to do so.
Fu denied there was such an agreement. Campbell did not deny Fu’s claim in media nor in his 2016 book Pivot: The Future of Statecraft in Asia Most diplomatic experts said such a major move on China’s part would have taken weeks to decide on, especially as the Communist Party’s top leadership took over management of the Scarborough Shoal crisis, since it had inflamed nationalist sentiment in China.
When the Philippine ships withdraw from Scarborough, our government effectively gave up our sovereignty over it, on the principle that occupation is nine-tenths of possession.
A November 2014 report of the Center for Naval Analyses — a private think-tank for the US military — titled “The South China Sea: Assessing US Policy and Options for the Future,” pointed out matter-of-factly: “From its perspective, China resolved the sovereignty dispute with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal in 2012 when it established control over the shoal. Again, it is unlikely to relinquish it. The government of the Philippines is in no position to even begin to contemplate the use of force to recover Scarborough, and the United States is not going to become involved in any attempt to expel the Chinese.”
The Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative, a think-tank and data center for the South China disputes set up by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, lists Scarborough (Huangyan Dao to the Chinese) as among the features in the Spratlys that China controls. It described the shoal thus: “Scarborough Shoal is effectively controlled by China, which has maintained a constant coast guard presence at the feature since 2012.”
Face reality. We lost Scarborough because of Aquino and del Rosario’s bungling. That is one of the biggest damage that Yellow Regime has done to our country. No international court, no arbitration tribunal will ever rule on sovereignty issues without the consent of the parties involved.
Greek-owned
Why should we be surprised, and the Yellows angry, that a Chinese ship asked the Greek-owned oil tanker to leave Scarborough Shoal, a dangerous area for ships because of its shallowness and tricky sea floor that could have grounded a huge oil tanker of 60,000 tons, and stopped its crude oil from even reaching our shores?
Aquino and del Rosario lost Scarborough a second time, when they filed a suit against China in 2013, overtly to clarify our maritime claims but covertly to nullify the superpower’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Del Rosario said the suit was filed in order to recover Scarborough for us, although it certainly seemed that it was their very expensive smokescreen (costing P700 million in legal fees and other expenses) to cover up for Aquino-del Rosario’s stupidity in losing Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough).
Their plan backfired, big time. The tribunal ruled in July 2016 that it has no jurisdiction on this Philippine claim, as that is not an issue of maritime entitlements under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) but of sovereignty over an island. The tribunal merely admonished China that it must allow Filipino fishermen to “engage in traditional fishing at Scarborough Shoal.”
Page 318 of the tribunal’s decision reads: “The tribunal records that this decision is entirely without prejudice to the question of sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal.”
It is astonishing that there is still much confusion over our claim over Scarborough Shoal.
Bajo de Masinloc
Our claim over what we call Bajo de Masinloc, as the Department of Foreign Affairs explained in its April 18, 2012 position paper, is “not premised” on its proximity to our mainland nor on the fact that it is within our 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Indeed, international courts have long dismissed “proximity” as a basis for sovereignty. The EEZ is a maritime entitlement that cannot negate a sovereign territory, contrary to many media men’s assertions.
Our claim, according to the Foreign Affairs department, is based on the international law principle of effective occupation and jurisdiction, that is, that from Spanish times to the US occupation to the Republic, the Philippines has exercised jurisdiction over it, and occupation even if in the form of patrols to the area and at one time, the setting up of a lighthouse.
On the other hand, other than references to Chinese documents as early as the 13th century, Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan to them) was listed in 1935 as part of China’s Zongsha islands, and declared to the world as such in its 1958 Declaration on the Territorial Sea and its 1992 Law on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone. Zongsha islands, with Huangyan, were declared in the 1990s a prefecture of Hainan province. (I have yet to see a Philippine map showing Bajo de Masinloc as part of Masinloc municipality.)
We really should blame our leaders.
Regime of islands
It was only in 2009 during President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s term that we officially declared Bajo de Masinloc as ours, as a “regime of islands” that we exercise sovereignty over. This was through Republic Act 9522 enacted into law in March 2009.
The main intent of the law was actually to specify our “baselines” from which will emanate our territorial sea, contiguous zone, and exclusive economic zones. Unclos had set a May 2009 deadline for all nations to submit their baselines. If not for that deadline, we probably wouldn’t have formally declared Bajo de Masinloc as part of Philippine territory.
Guess what? Despite that 2009 law, our government has not put in our official map Bajo de Masinloc as part of Philippine territory, even as the Yellows, including retired Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio have been raving that a 1734 map by a Jesuit, called the Murillo map, incontestably proves Bajo is part of Philippine territory.
But that’s become a bit moot and academic, hasn’t it, after Aquino and del Rosario lost Bajo de Masinloc to the control of China?
Doesn’t that Filipino captain of Green Aura read the newspapers? If his ship had instead strayed near heavily fortified islands occupied by Vietnam (the biggest occupier of Spratly features), the combat veterans stationed there would have shot him.
Note: My series on the Malisbong massacre hoax will resume on Friday. I am hoping that former Commission on Human Rights chairman Loretta Ann Rosales, who is partly responsible for the hoax’s success, e-mails me her comments.
Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao
Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/debunked
https://www.manilatimes.net/2019/11/06/opinion/columnists/topanalysis/have-we-forgotten-that-the-aquino-del-rosario-tandem-lost-scarborough-twice-over/653790/
What Is This I Hear about You?
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Thursday, November 7, 2019
Keeping the Right Company
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‘Malisbong massacre’ during martial law: a hoax, with alleged victims’ relatives given P40M
First of 4 parts
EVERY September in the past few years when martial law again becomes a topic of debate, the purported massacre of some “1,500 Muslims and over a thousand women raped” in Malisbong village in Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat in September 1974 by a Philippine Army battalion is presented as evidence that Marcos’ strongman regime was a ruthless, bloody era.
The Commission on Human Rights (CHR), headed by Jose Gascon, in a September 2018 resolution claimed that the massacre happened and declared September 24 as a day for officially commemorating it.
Reparations: That’s what it’s all about? (Photo from Facebook account ‘Malisbong Massacre Victims.’)
Strangely though, the resolution based its recognition on the fact that the Human Rights Victims Claims Board awarded “46 claims from Palimbang, 33 of which relate to the Malisbong Massacre.” The schedule of compensation called for P1.2 million compensation for each relative of the alleged victims, all of whom allegedly vanished without a trace after they were killed. These totalled P40 million.
The fake victims could have gotten more than P300 million, as more than 300 alleged victims’ relatives applied for compensation. But to its credit, the Claims Board did not bend over to the demands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and local politicians to ignore its criteria for proof that they were indeed alleged victims’ relatives.
That this Malisbong allegation has become — but only in the last few years and why so I explain below — a crucial element of the Marcos-era-was-horrible narrative is evidenced by the fact that it is now listed by anti-Marcos propagandists as topping the strongman’s list of atrocities.
After the alleged Malisbong massacre in which 1,500 Muslims were killed, next in the list of “atrocities’ is an alleged one in Bingcul village in Mindanao in 1977, in which 42 Muslims were also supposed to have been killed.
Orchestrated
That there has been a well-financed, well-orchestrated plot to create such a colossal deception is also evidenced by the fact a so-called “documentary” on the alleged Malisbong massacre was produced and released in November 2016, which tugged at people’s emotions without providing any proof or evidence, except the dubious claims of “victims’” relatives that the killing happened. The film’s real intent is shown in it sensationalist, melodramatic title. “Forbidden Memory: The Greatest Marcos Horror Story Never Told.”
The film was funded by Cinema One with its Cinema One Originals film festival declaring it as the best documentary film in 2016. Cinema One is a unit of ABS-CBN television network, owned by Marcos’ archenemy, the Lopez clan.
The “massacre” did not happen. It is a hoax.
That it occurred rests entirely on claims of relatives — mostly parents — of the victims. Not a single skeleton or even fragment of bone of the 1,500 victims has been presented.
These accounts by individuals — as against the general claims in the insurgent Moro National Liberation Front’s (MNLF) propaganda material in the 1970s — were made only starting in 2014, when CHR Chairman Loretta Ann Rosales gave official recognition of the alleged massacre in a “commemoration” ceremony on Sept. 25, 2014.
Rosales acted entirely on her own as it would be only four years later, in 2018, that the CHR as a commission, with all members signing the document, recognized that the massacre happened. The CHR didn’t even bother to ask the National Historical Commission (NHC) its assessment of the claim of a “massacre” as the latter did in the case of the alleged “Jabidah massacre,” which I had proven to be the first such hoax of Muslims’ mass murder. (The NHC refused to confirm that there had been a Jabidah massacre, stating that “the events that led to it and the actual occurrence in the morning of 18 March 1968 were never really ascertained.”)
Compensation Law
Why did this claim of a massacre suddenly emerge in 2014, four decades later?
The “forbidden memory” suddenly no longer became forbidden and was “remembered” in 2014 because a year earlier, in 2013, the very strong possibility emerged that the so-called victims’ relatives could claim huge amounts of money as “compensation” under Republic Act 10368 or the “2013 Human Rights Victims Compensation Law.”
Pathetic sign on the site of, if it really happened — where 1,500 Muslims supposedly killed and 1,000 of their women raped — the worst atrocity against Muslims in our history. Photo from MindaNews.com
Before this law was passed, proceeds of alleged ill-gotten Marcos wealth could not be given to any individual despite a US Hawaii Court order, because of the government’s stance that such funds should go to its General Fund for use in the national budget, a position the Supreme Court upheld.
This makes the claims of victims’ relatives highly questionable, as they had a clear motive to fabricate lies: At least P1.2 million for a relative of a victim, authorized by the HR Compensation Law.
It was after the 2013 law was passed that a campaign was undertaken to resurrect what was a long-abandoned, a failed propaganda tack of the MNLF in the 1970s.
Even without any research on whether the massacre occurred or not, the CHR in 2015 produced a “documentary” on it, written and directed by personalities I know to have been past or current cadres of the Communist Party, whose overarching propaganda line has been that the Marcos regime was a bloody one.
MILF
It was the separatist MILF, aided by Benigno Aquino 3rd’s pink-party Akbayan, especially its representative Mario Aguja, which lobbied the administration and the CHR to recognize that the massacre happened, and for money to be paid out to the alleged victims, as one of its many demands for it to sign a peace pact with the government.
The “Malisbong Massacre” was an insidious black propaganda that the MNLF — from which the MILF broke away in 1987 — tried to disseminate in the 1970s.
Drawing from its success in creating outrage among Muslim youth with its claim of a Jabidah massacre, the MNLF at that time wanted to enrage the Muslim, oil-rich Middle East nations against the Marcos government with the allegation of a Malisbong Massacre that it claimed was part of a genocidal campaign against their brother Muslims here, so that at the very least they would impose an oil embargo on the country, and even provide the insurgents with arms and money.
That propaganda tack though it soon abandoned, as it could not convince even the Muslims themselves that there was a massacre when not a single corpse could be found. It also went against all Muslim practices that the “victims’” relatives didn’t bother to look for the corpses.
The fake-news disseminators had claimed that the Army threw the corpses to the sea, and were eaten by sharks. But this had seemed highly unlikely as the waters off Malisbong were known not to be shark-infested. Not a single corpse out of the 1,500 allegedly killed and thrown to sea was swept to shore.
Propaganda
The propaganda tack was totally discarded when the MNLF in 1976 was arm-twisted by Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi — who had been trying a year before to get Muslim nations to help the insurgent group — to agree to a peace pact with the Marcos government. Obviously he was unconvinced by the MNLF’s claims of massacres of Muslims by the Marcos government.
I had researched the Malisbong massacre starting June last year, after I saw that “Forbidden Memory” film. I had never before heard of it, even as I had written many articles since the 1990s on the Muslim insurgency. After telling former CHR chairman Rosales that I was convinced it was a hoax, I asked for evidence and arguments to prove it wasn’t. She hasn’t.
I was the first ever journalist, in 1996, to cover the MILF, visit its camps, and interview its top three leaders, its founder and Chairman Hashim Salamat, the late Vice Chairman Ghazali Jaafar, and its Military Commander (now Chairman) Ibrahim Murad. None of them talked about a Malisbong massacre, which by the number of those killed, 1,500, and by the horror of the mass rape of 1,000 women would have been a casus belli, a rallying issue for the Muslim struggle that would have made another hoax, the Jabidah Massacre, look like a street fight. It wasn’t.
I had passed in 1996 through Malisbong itself on my way to one of the many MILF camps in Sultan Kudarat, and nobody — my guides were all Muslim fighters — bothered to show me the Taqbil Mosque, where there is now a crude, pathetic sign that announces that it was “a placed (sic) where more than one thousand Muslims civilians was massacred (sic) by Philippine Army 15th Infantry Battalion on 24 September 1974.” The sign had the note “Complement (sic) by: Comdr. Tuan Bazar G. Tacbil (MNLF) and Tacbil Family.”
If 1,500 Muslims had been killed there, wouldn’t the MNLF, which had huge funds at its disposal since the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao was set up, have erected a huge monument there to honor its martyrs?
Not one of the 1,500 killed survived to say he escaped the massacre. Not a single woman from the over 1,000 alleged to have been raped has come out to narrate her ordeal.
At least in the case of the other hoax, the Jabidah Massacre, the Liberal Party creators of that black propaganda were more clever in that they presented one eyewitness, who later turned out to have lied to follow the script written by the opposition politicians.
On Wednesday, I will present accounts of three types of “witnesses,” so to speak, that incontestably prove there was no Malisbong Massacre of Muslims.
Weyerhauser
What really happened, quite ironically, was that the people who were killed en masse at that time were 20 unarmed civilians, non-Muslim employees of an American logging company Weyerhauser, by an armed Muslim group, although it could not be determined whether they were regular MNLF troops or the ruthless Ilonggo vigilantes called the Ilagas.
The MNLF fabricated that Malisbong Massacre, first to cover up for their killing of innocent civilians and the consequent economic crisis in the area that resulted when the logging firm closed down because of the killings. Second, the propaganda aimed to frighten Muslims all over Mindanao that they would be better off taking up arms with the MNLF.
It may have been understandable in the 1970s for the MNLF to fabricate this hoax to gain sympathy for their cause.
It is unforgivable, however, for Yellows and the gullible CHR to disseminate such hoax today that paints a picture of our country as one where 1,500 innocent civilians were mercilessly killed and a thousand of their women raped by Filipino soldiers, and we Filipinos — especially us journalists — didn’t care about it, and hid it in fear of the Marcos dictatorship.
How dare they?
Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao
Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/debunked
https://www.manilatimes.net/2019/11/04/opinion/columnists/topanalysis/malisbong-massacre-during-martial-law-a-hoax-with-alleged-victims-relatives-given-p40m/653500/
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