An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?

Credit to Author: RAMON T. TULFO| Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2019 17:55:43 +0000

RAMON T. TULFO

A GRENADE was thrown inside a mosque in Zamboanga City early yesterday morning, killing two of its occupants and wounding four others, just three days after two bombs exploded at the Mt. Carmel Cathedral in Jolo, Sulu, which killed 21 worshippers and wounded 111 others.

The Zamboanga City mosque was filled with preachers from Basilan who were preparing for the morning prayers.

That was apparently in retaliation for the bombing of the Jolo Catholic church.

It was meant as a warning that the bombing of Christian places of worship would be met with equal violence.

Many Muslim religious leaders know the terrorists among their flock.

The perpetrators of the mosque bombing could be soldiers or policemen out to avenge the death of some of their comrades in the Jolo Cathedral bombing.

The grenade that was used was the fragmentation type typically used by the military.

If the perpetrators indeed were government troops, they still practice their Christian faith as the object of their revenge were Muslim clerics and not ordinary members of the Muslim faith.

Twenty-one dead Christians against two dead Muslims is a lopsided exchange in favor of the latter.

That is not Israel’s way of retaliating against Arabs who kill Jews. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

We should learn from the Israelis on numbers.

***

Anyone who thinks that the perpetrators of the twin bombings at the Mt. Carmel Cathedral were not motivated by jihad, or the Muslim war against infidels or non-believers of Islam, is ignorant of the ways of the Islamic State, or IS.

The IS has owned up to the bombing of the cathedral in Jolo.

IS, which advocates the setting up of a theocracy in Muslim countries — or a caliphate — is in the Philippines where there is a large Muslim population.

Jihad dates back to the war between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages.

In the Philippines, Muslims in Sulu engaged Christians in jihad through the juramentados, or frenzied (amok) bolo-wielding Muslim warriors who were sworn to kill Christians or infidels in an early form of suicide attack. Juramentados hacked every Christian in sight, particularly soldiers.

The Moro amoks were so strong in their suicidal frenzy they would hack as many infidels as they could with their barong (the Tausog term for machete) before being killed in a hail of bullets from soldiers.

The juramentados of Sulu led to the development by the US military of the 1911-model .45-caliber pistol which could knock down an opponent with a single bullet.

When my father, Ramon Tulfo Sr., was a lieutenant assigned in Sulu in the late 1940s up to the early 1950s, there were incidents of killings of Christians by juramentados.

***

The bombing of the Mt. Carmel Cathedral was a failure of intelligence, the military itself admits.

Military intelligence was informed by its Indonesian counterpart that a church in Jolo would be bombed months before the incident last Sunday.

How were the couple — a husband and wife from Malaysia, according to military intelligence — who had strapped bombs on their bodies able to enter the church when soldiers were guarding the entrance?

The term military intelligence is really an oxymoron, ha! ha!

In case our military doesn’t know what the term is, the dictionary defines oxymoron as a combination of contradictory words, such as cruel kindness.

***

The Manila Hotel owes the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) P17 billion and does not want to pay, according to Clint Aranas, the GSIS president and general manager.

The Manila Hotel got a loan from the GSIS for P197 million between 1995 and 1996 for renovation and payment of employees who were on strike, Aranas says.

Since then, the hotel has accumulated P17 billion in unpaid interest and surcharges for non-payment.

Who says behest loans went away with the ouster of President Marcos?

Emilio Yap, the Manila Hotel owner and also the owner of the Manila Bulletin, was granted the loan because of his great influence with the government as a newsmaker.

In short, Yap used his newspaper to scare the previous GSIS managements into not charging him for the loan.
But Aranas is not scared of either Emilio Yap, who died in 2014, or his heirs.

Nor is Aranas scared of the Manila Bulletin, which has sometimes given him bad press, apparently to intimidate him.

Ramon T. Tulfo has been a journalist since the 1970s when he started out as a newswriter and newsreader for radio. From 1973 until 1975, he was a deskman at the Philippines News Agency. In 1975, he moved to the now defunct Times Journal where he covered various beats: transportation, health, labor, education and the military. In 1978, he joined the Manila Bulletin as a police reporter, becoming a columnist1982 until he resigned in 1987. Until October last year, he was columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Tulfo is a self-styled private ombudsman through his radio show, “Isumbong Mo Kay Tulfo.” The public service program has been responsible for the dismissal of numerous abusive policemen.

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