GLORIA PARILLAS Earl, who claims to be both American
and Filipino, wants Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) columnist Ma.
Ceres P. Doyo—and, by implication, all others opposed to the
US-led war on Iraq including we in the Filipino Youth for Peace—to
rage against the killing of Nick Berg, a young American beheaded by
Iraqi rebels in retaliation for American abuses of Iraqi prisoners
(PDI, 5-18-04).
The abuses were photographed with the very cameras of US military
personnel, and shown to the world thanks to the courageous exposé
of Filipino-American Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.
Ms. Earl wants all of us who oppose the US-led war on Iraq to prove
that we truly value human rights by raising hell over the killing
of Nick Berg.
The timing of Nick Berg's beheading could not have been more perfect
for everyone who, with the air of someone who thinks no one else
could be more right than he, defends the war on Iraq as one where
"brave men and women run...where wimps and cowards dare not
go, to defend the world's freedoms against barbaric jihadists whose
dream is to wipe all infidels (you and me) off planet Earth,"
as Ms. Earl so eloquently puts it in her letter.
We in the Filipino Youth for Peace—and, we are quite sure,
Ms. Doyo herself—categorically place our sympathies on Michael
Berg, Nick's father, who puts the blame for his son's appalling
death squarely on the shoulders of those in the Coalition of the
Willing/Shameless, including our own incumbent president (and presidential
contender) Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Ms. Berg fails to ask the honchos of Wall Street and their servile
hirelings in the White House and the Pentagon why they propped up
Saddam in Baghdad in the first place and allowed him to gas Kurds
and slaughter Shiites, only to drop him just for not letting them
control Iraq's oil resources.
She fails to ask the vanguards of world peace in the US Armed Forces
why, if they aim to preempt "terrorism" by dismantling
weapons of mass destruction, they have attacked a country already
helpless from more than a decade of economic embargo and which had
dismantled such weapons years ago, and refuse to pick a fight with
North Korea and Libya who have no qualms about their missiles; why
they have attacked only a country known to possess some of the richest
oil reserves in the Middle East.
Ms. Earl has not thought of asking what gives US military personnel
the right to abuse Iraqis taken prisoner in the course of a war
that sheds blood for oil and gold.
She even expects us to thank her for not asking us to apologize
for our "Moro countrymen's barbarism"—totally oblivious
of the fact that our quest for peace has never and will never translate
to support for the likes of those who beheaded Guillermo Sobero.
Ms. Earl completely misses the fact that unlike her and her fellow
pseudo-Filipino-Americans, our notion of patriotism and love for
democracy has never meant support for hegemonic drives.
All that she can conceive is to lay the blame on the heads of the
Muslims, whose faith teaches them to resist those who would destroy
their way of life by enslaving them. While it is to be admitted
that there are some fanatical elements among them who have seen
it fit to resist by terroristic means, the fact remains that they
as a people are being provoked to fight. Their right to live as
humans has been ruthlessly usurped ever since the time of the Crusades—a
series of severely barbaric conquests of land they inhabited—for
"Christianization of the heathens," which brought about
rapes and mass murders in its wake, and brought chests of wealth
back to "Christian" Europe.
These facts are conspicuously absent from Ms. Earl's prodigious
knowledge. In so doing she contributes heavily to the exacerbation
of the Iraq dilemma and similar conflicts all throughout the world.
