Big Democracies at the Crossroads

• In a balloting year filled with surprises from India and Venezuela, and with Americans battered by the Bush-Kerry race, what do Russia and Indonesia tell us about the future character of democracy as a globally expanding project?

Too Much Global?

• By pairing the global and the local with the national and the personal, we introduce a more perfect union of inquiry into a world caught in the throes of globalization and confronting a loss of communal meaning and values

Philippines an unwitting stage
for ‘good versus evil’

By Eric F. Mallonga
Commenting from Manila, The Philippines

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khoumeini once called American president Ronald Reagan “The Great Satan.” After leaving such a legacy of stigmatizing all other American presidents who came after him as such, the world of Islam has often come together in brotherhood against America and Israel, rejoicing in evil acts of mass destruction and massacre.

Many Moslems all over the world rejoiced when the World Trade Center was razed to the ground by an evidently planned conspiracy to attack the landmarks of America, notwithstanding the deaths of an estimated 3,000 innocent civilians. Today, the evil followers of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are seeking the blood of innocent civilians in retaliation for the prisoner abuse that has occurred in the Abu Ghraib prisons of Iraq and in the Guantanamo prisons of Cuba.

As international television news broadcast the beheading of Nick Berg, a 26-year-old civilian contractor in Iraq, audiences were shocked at the crudeness of the bloody beheading and mutilation of an innocent person. I would like to believe that even Moslems around the world were themselves outraged that their Islamic brothers could engage in acts that can never be justified by any of the teachings of their holy Prophet Muhammad. Their vengeful act was not even performed on an American soldier engaged in the war or, for that matter, any American soldier who may have committed prisoner abuse and torture on the Moslem captives in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo prisons. But it was certainly a public performance to dramatize the inhumanity of these self-proclaimed jihadists that rises to their satanic hatred for America.

How can a people, claiming to fight in Allah’s holy name, torture and kill an innocent, unarmed man they picked from the streets, who might even have been thinking about the welfare of the Iraqi people in thinking of business strategies to stabilize Iraq’s economy?

In the Philippines, leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, began distancing themselves from the evil Abu Sayyaf as the cruel bandits started mutilating and beheading their captives. But the MILF used their youth leaders, in their desire to regain credibility, to profess their distinction from the Abu Sayyaf.

But the MILF had allied itself with so many other extremist Islamic groups such as Jemaah Islamiah and even Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda that it could not profess innocence in the crimes committed by Abu Sayyaf. The Abu Sayyaf was itself the creation of extremist Islamic groups, among them the MILF, all claiming to possess proper interpretations of the Quran and the Sunna.

More properly, these Islamic groups were out to subvert the greatness and teachings of their own Prophet in bringing down America. Their intention is to achieve the greatness of superpower America so that they could claim their own greatness in the world. Their struggle has nothing to do with their worship of Allah. Their evil equals the evil that they see in America.

In the same light, America cannot claim that the tortures committed upon their captives in the Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo prisons were not systematic. Every military academy in America, which has been replicated in the Philippines, is a university of torture. It is where they teach the most advanced methods of killing people and dehumanizing captives. They start with brutal hazing as initiatory phases into the military system. They graduate into learning scientific methods of eliciting answers from their captives. The same techniques are used by extremist Islamic movements, where initiation requires utmost secrecy and knowledge of crude forms of killing and torture.

The “Great Satan” is really not in a nation or in a religion. It is inside people who wish to impose their own values on others. It is inside people who wish to achieve power over others, with fear and hatred and rage, camouflaged as a purpose of “making the world safe for others.” It is inside people who delude themselves—and so declare—that they have a better sense of morality than others, that they represent the “good,” and all their opponents are “evil.”

Then they embark on a war waving the banner of “good vs. evil” with one hand, while wielding a sword with another, cutting down everyone in its path. It is inside people who refuse to see the lies of their leaders, and then find it just to avenge some injustice, by slaying the innocent child of his tormentor.