Quote of the Day

This comes courtesy of Mark Finkelstein of  NewsBusters, quoting one of the tolerant and inclusive guys who replaced Don Imus on MSNBC’s morning show:

“I suppose if we all go to Pensacola [host Joe Scarborough's hometown], we’ll have a sidetrip where we’ll go to a revival and then go to Guantanamo Bay and torture some people just for fun.”

–MSNBC correspondent David Shuster

Feel the love.

Deja Vu All Over Again

For the usual suspects fro the mainline churches, it is always 1969 and Vietnam, or 1981 and El Salvador. This time, it’s 2007 and the Philippines, where there is again a desire to hold a government’s feet to the fire for human rights violations while totally ignoring those of the other side. In a letter written to members of Congress this week, the heads of the PCUSA, Episcopal Church, UCC, Unitarian Church, the Council of Bishops of the UMC, and other assorted worthies (including Bob Edgar and far-left historian Howard Zinn), they stated:

In August, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Philip Alston, reported to the United Nations General Assembly that:

Many in the Government have concluded that numerous civil society organizations are “fronts” for the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed group, the New People’s Army.” [sic] One response has been counter-insurgency operations that result in the extrajudicial execution of leftist activists. In some areas, the leaders of leftist organizations are systematically hunted down by interrogating and torturing those who may know their whereabouts, and they are often killed following a campaign of individual vilification designed to instill fear into the community.

This policy has resulted in extrajudicial executions aimed at eliminating “key civil society leaders, including human rights defenders, trade unionists, land reform advocates, and others.” The Government of the Philippines’ own Melo Commission, appointed to investigate the causes of the human rights abuses, found evidence to link the military to the killings. Furthermore, the Melo Commission also noted that “the likelihood . . . of violence increases after senior military officials label those organizations as communist fronts and ‘enemies of the state.’”

As a result of the attacks on certain segments of civil society, including church groups, clergy, opposition political parties, labor unions, and NGOs, democracy in the Philippines is suffering. Abuses by the military have prompted Freedom House, in its annual 2007 survey, to downgrade the Philippines from a “Free” democratic country to a “Partly Free” country, citing “minimal concrete steps to reduce these extrajudicial killings . . . [and] doubts as to whether the perpetrators would be held accountable under [Pres.] Arroyo, who remained heavily dependent on military support to stay in power.”

Now, this is all true. There have been at least 200 extrajudicial killings in the Philippines over the last several years, and if they aren’t directly carried out by the police or military, then they are done by paramilitary groups that get a wink and a nudge from the government. Such violations must stop, and the government needs to retake the moral high ground by cleaning up its act.

So, what’s the problem? Well, first, there’s specific policy proposal in this letter that amounts to clergy trying to micromanage foreign policy:

We are very concerned, however, that the amount of military aid provided to the Philippines in the Senate bill is nearly three times the $11.1 million originally requested by the State Department for FY 2008. Increasing the amount of aid by $19 million over the State Department’s request has already sent a message to Philippine Government that the United States government supports the Philippine military’s counter-insurgency strategy cited by the U.N. Rapporteur as the cause of many serious human rights abuses. We urge the Committee to limit military aid to the Philippines to no more than $11.1 million, a figure that was not altered by the House. In addition, all of the military aid should be conditioned on the State Department reports described in H.R. 2764 EAS.

What’s contained in those two amounts ($11.1 million and $30 million)? I have no idea. But I do know that this isn’t the full amount of “military aid” provided. According to the Center for Defense Information, over the last six years (2002-07), the amounts of military aid given to the Philippines have been $100,720,377;
$78,147,000; $62,029,000; $91,175,000; $61,828,000; and $96,463,000. So in any event, they are only talking about a small portion of the total aid we give, which naturally leads me to believe that, as usual, the authors haven’t done their homework, and are advocating very specific policy on the basis of inadequate information, much less expertise. But here’s the bigger problem:

There’s no acknowledgement anywhere in the letter that the Philippines is fighting a pair of violent insurgencies.

The quote from Alston above is the only hint that Communists are waging war against the government and people of the Philippines. There is no mention of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and its regional ally Jemaah Islamiyah at all. This is despite the fact that the latter have killed or wounded over 1700 people, mostly civilians, since 2000, and the former has killed thousands (possibly tens of thousands) since it began its war in the 1970s. Just as the rebels in El Salvador, and the Viet Cong in Vietnam, never seemed to commit atrocities worth noting by the religious left, so too here do we have a typically one-sided approach that refuses to recognize that there are actually extremely dangerous people out there that the government of the Philippines is charged with protecting its people from.

That is not to say that this letter should have included a routine condemnation of the violence of the insurgents (frankly, that’s the approach with Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., and it never convinces anyone). Rather, there should have been an acknowledgment that while the Philippines military and police must clean up their act, they are nevertheless fighting a difficult war against a ruthless pair of enemies that must be defeated, for the sake of the human rights of all Filipinos. By issuing a statement such as this, they effectively demonstrate that their sympathies lie, not with the victims of human rights violations, but with the perpetrators of some, perhaps most, of them.