Despicable 3: Hontiveros, Aquino and Pangilinan
THESE names will forever live in infamy in the country’s collective memory, together with Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the dictator’s son: the Yellow Senators Risa Hontiveros, Bam Aquino and Francis Pangilinan. Even if all his other crimes against the nation — such as overseeing the hijacking of the budget — are forgotten, Marcos Jr. will be remembered for kidnapping a former president, who was a key factor in his winning the presidency in 2022, and delivering him to a dubious foreign “court.”
The three Yellows voted against a Senate resolution which merely asked the International Criminal Court (ICC), because of the deteriorating medical condition of former president Rodrigo Duterte, now age 80, to place him under house arrest. The resolution was even agreeable that he be subject to conditions imposed by the ICC “or a similar appropriate arrangement.”
How unreasonable would those conditions be? Duterte is 80 years old, frail, never before jailed, and therefore extremely vulnerable to the severe psychological toll of imprisonment. He would never be able to make a great escape, nor disguise himself so that Interpol could not find him.
How cruel and hypocritical can these three be who delight in being photographed praying to the Deity. Senator Hontiveros, in explaining her vote, even stupidly puts Duterte on the same category as that of Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, who were convicted of genocide and are spending their old age in jail, refused by the ICC to be freed on house arrest.
Of course, in her hypocrisy, she doesn’t point out that the two were leaders of the Bosnian (Christian) Serb Army who ordered the Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre (1995), in which over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed — the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. And such atrocities were so much documented by news reports, with the two even boasting of their vile deed, claiming in interviews that the massacre was part of a “holy war,” similar to the “Crusade” undertaken under the Pope Urban’s orders for Christian Europe to kill Muslims in Palestine in the 12th century.
Bam Aquino should be the first to sympathize with Duterte.
After being sentenced to death by a military court, his uncle Benigno Aquino Jr.’s imprisonment resulted in the severe deterioration of his health — and he was only 48 years old — leading to a heart attack. Yet the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. — whom the Yellows vilify as the Devil Incarnate — granted Aquino’s wish to have heart surgery in the United States, even if the Philippine Heart Center was already operational with world-class cardiologists and heart surgeons at its call, such as Dr. Denton A. Cooley, Dr. Michael DeBakey and Dr. Christiaan Barnard.
Marcos kidnapped Duterte to be delivered to the ICC, ironically with the help of the Communist Party — against which he had waged a war as intense as that on illegal drugs. Never again! The communists mobilized all their nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including their international network, and assigned a top-level cadre, the Manila head of its National Union of People’s Lawyers, Cristina Conti, to portray the “war on drugs” as mass murder falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction. Conti’s genius was that she managed to get a position as assistant counsel at the ICC itself, continuously feeding the ICC prosecutor with lies.
Puppet
A certified American puppet, Marcos had to follow the orders of the US Deep State, which wanted to send the message that you cannot be friends with its rival, China. The US plan was that by politically paralyzing Duterte — even moving him out of the country to rot in a Dutch jail — it would weaken the prestige and political force of his daughter Sara, a shoo-in for the presidency in 2028, who would likely revert the country back to a pro-China, cautious-with-the-US foreign policy.
For the US, the stakes are high to prevent Sara from becoming president. The Philippines has become the only country in Southeast Asia to continue to be a US puppet, and its nine military bases here, disguised as mere forward bases, will be crucial in its war against China when it invades Taiwan.
There are two things that make my blood boil over this issue. First, Marcos and the Left — which claim to be diehard nationalists — have surrendered our sovereignty in allowing the ICC to try Duterte, even though our legal system is functioning. Imperfect maybe, but way ahead in efficiency compared to the sub-Saharan countries whose crimes against humanity the ICC has claimed jurisdiction over, because they are incapable of prosecuting such crimes themselves.
Only Filipinos have the right to judge Duterte. We have courts. We have Congress. We have a Constitution. We have elections. For the ICC to presume that, it can reach into our territory, handcuff a former president, and fly him thousands of miles away is nothing less than the recolonization of our justice system.
Aren’t Hontiveros, Aquino and Pangilinan ashamed that we are the only country outside primitive sub-Saharan states whose former president — a leader beloved by his people — is being tried by a foreign court not recognized by the world’s main powers: the US, China, Russia, India, Israel and Saudi Arabia?
In fact, in our part of the world, Southeast Asia, only Cambodia and Timor-Leste — which became an independent nation only in 2002 — are members of the ICC, because those two countries hoped the ICC could investigate the mass murders inflicted on their peoples: in the former case by the Khmer Rouge, and in the latter by Indonesian Army elements resisting its bid for independence.
Livid
The second reason why I am livid over the ICC case against Duterte is that the charge that his war against illegal drugs constitutes crimes against humanity is one of the biggest hoaxes in our history. I have observed it since Day 1, and I have uncovered (and written 28 columns) how Rappler manipulated police figures to inflate the casualties from the official 6,000 to 30,000 — a figure even the ICC cites but which is a total lie repeated again and again by NGOs cross-referencing each other.
And who funded Rappler and these NGOs? The American National Endowment for Democracy, the same outfit that has funded protests against pro-American governments from Ukraine to more recent ones in Indonesia. The lesson the US is telling the world — you cannot cross the American hegemon.
The campaign against Duterte over his war on illegal drugs is a classic case of expertly executed propaganda. Incidents of rogue policemen killing innocent victims — including dramatic, tear-jerking photographs, such as the Pieta-like image of a lady cradling her bloodied boyfriend — were portrayed as the thrust of the antidrug campaign rather than the exception, which is to be expected in such campaigns. Compared to the 30,000 claimed by Duterte’s critics, casualty rates in similar campaigns in Mexico, Colombia and other countries were at least 100,000.
In fact, even the most vociferous of Duterte’s accusers, after seven years of investigation and research, have come up with only 50 police killings of innocent people, or less a percent of the 6,000 officially reported killed in the war vs illegal drugs, a level of collateral damage that can’t be avoided in a war against armed criminals. Ignored have been the justice department’s prosecution of over two dozen policemen found to be involved in extrajudicial killings. Yet Pangilinan claims “thousands” were ordered killed by Durerte.
The common-sense proof that there were no mass murders is the fact that from 2016 to 2018, when the war on drugs was at its height, homicide rates did not increase compared to the average of previous years. There were no reports of a surge of murdered bodies in the country’s funeral parlors.
Hontiveros, Aquino and Pangilinan: Mahiya naman kayo!
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com
Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/shop
The post Despicable 3: Hontiveros, Aquino and Pangilinan first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Despicable 3: Hontiveros, Aquino and Pangilinan
Source: Breaking News PH
No comments: