Still Keeping An Open Mind About Closed Caskets?

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After 14 Philippine Marines were ambushed by MILF rebels and killed on July 10 near Tipo-tipo, Basilan looking for the kidnapped Italian priest, Giancarlo Bossi, the local RTC Judge Leo Principe issued 130 Arrest Warrants against the suspects in their gruesome deaths, which included the beheading of ten of them. The ambush was readily admitted by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. But the MILF quickly denied being involved in, or even knowing who carried out the decapitation, mutilation and robbery of the dead or dying Marines, despite claiming that they killed the Marines for daring to enter "their territory" without "coordination." At the point when local police were going to serve the arrest warrants and detain the suspects, Peace Advisors Jess Dureza and General Rodolfo Garcia stepped in, illegally stayed the arrest warrants, organized a "joint independent investigating committee" that included MILF representatives, then took a week to add four names to the list of suspects, submitted its report but never released it, and blamed the whole incident on "lawless elements of the Abu Sayyaf". Then an "all-out war" was declared, although there was really little evidence of that, but it naturally attracted the 100 point headlines from the usual Media Leftists, who suddenly found it profitable to publish front page pictures of cute, wide-eyed toddlers in the foreground of arriving tanks and and heavily armed soldiers. This lasted for about a week, while peaceniks got a chance to remember with self-satisfied nostalgia what it was they used to believe in with such passion. The deaths of the soldiers were blamed on all sorts of other things than the murderous intent of the rebels, who only want Peace in the Archipelago. (Or is it a PIECE of the Archipelago?) Since those events, a total of some 57 Philippine Marines and Army servicemen have been killed in action in Mindanao.

I'm beginning to wonder if there is anything at all connected to the outside world inside all those OPEN MINDS arguing that all these are WASTED LIVES, that Law Enforcement is nothing but "all-out war" when directed at "defenseless" Muslims, and that "peace talks" are the only way to alleviate the "root conditions" that are the alleged true causes of lawless violence and savagery. They fumed and fulminated at all the war mongers "hungry for vengeance" and "full of blood lust" while counseling that everyone keep an open mind and not lose their heads [sic!].

The problem with heartless intellectuals is...they are heartless intellectuals!

Fact is, there never was an "all-out war" --only a half-hearted and showy effort-- to arrest only the beheaders of those Marines, because it so happens that their ambush-killers are all the government's "partners in the peace process" -- the MILF in Tipo and-tipo, the MNLF in Maimbung, killed the majority of those 57 soldiers in Mindanao since July 10.

It's all been one big moro-moro of a whitewash perpetrated by the patrons of Eid Kabbalu and Hashim Salamat within the administration, who had to delay "peace talks" for a month to let things cool down a little after their murderous ambuscades these past few months. Of greater conern to these big-time patriots is that the United States might get involved and decide to "violate Philippine sovereignty."

And that is why not a single one of those killers or beheaders has been brought to Justice, and probably never will be. Some of them are probably on the Peace Panel sitting across their counterparts in the peace process, waiting for the President's grant of Ancestral Domain, aka Bangsamorsostan, whose hard, cold soil is warmed and watered by brave Filipino blood.

Related: Zamboanga Journal reports on the Abu Sayyaf's foreign funding efforts.