We Are All Abu Sayyaf Now

The Philippines has SEVENTEEN decapitations to its name just this year alone, starting with those seven young men kidnapped for ransom and beheaded last April by the Abu Sayyaf's Al-Bader Parad. Add to that this past week's ten Marines who were beheaded andmutilated reportedly by Isnilon Totoni Hapilon, who has a five million dollar bounty on his sorry head.

But the Philippines now has the terrible distinction of being the Decapitation Capital of the world. Not even in places where they stone the women for adultery in darkest Africa and chop off robbers hands and women’s clitorises, as in the House of Saud, have they had ten of their soldiers beheaded by “bandits” and then have the biggest newspaper call for more and fairer peace negotiations with the cutthroats that did it:

PDI: Savages on the Loose -- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo called it right. Last Tuesday’s ambush of a search-and-rescue military convoy in Albarka, Basilan -- 14 Marines looking for kidnapped Italian missionary Fr. Giancarlo Bossi were killed, 10 of them beheaded -- was a bestial act, the work of savages. To this deliberate provocation the national leadership must respond with both iron fist and open mind. The Armed Forces of the Philippines must bring the savages to justice. But the government must also push peace negotiations with Moro separatists, finally, to a fair conclusion.

How does one respond with an "iron fist" and and "open mind"?? Does the paper mean the government ought go ahead and bribe the MILF leaders with ancestral domain grants all over Morolandia in those so-called peace talks? Then have the NMLF (Next Moro Liberation Front) split off the main trunk of crooked warlord timber and begin a new belligerency?

The editorial uses all the right buzz words, but it is dripping with insincerity, disingenuity and manages to blame the authorities for the tragedy. The motivation of the editorial is to embarrass the govt and excuse the terrorists.

Now mercifully they didn’t take video in Basilan, but in the world of horrors, nothing horrifies like for example those head choppings done by what look like teenage boys sawing off another human being’s head.

We are now automatically in the big leagues of that subterranean class of savages.

We are the Porno Stars of the Real World of Snuff films.

We are National Geographic material.

We are head-hunters, as of old.

We are savages and amoks worthy of having new calibers invented to deal with our savagery.

These are the ineluctable messages about us going out into the world.

They are not true!

And this is what I hate the most about the Abu Sayyaf.

They have convinced strangers that we are all Abu Sayyaf.