Movie brat Robin Padilla the ‘hero’ of Muslim protest? Give us a break!

The aggressive and resentful sector of the Muslim community is planning to stage a rally protesting the government’s crackdown on alleged Abu Sayyaf and other Moro terrorists.

Do they think they can intimidate the government – except for the wishy-washy Surrender Gang in the high echelons of the GMA Administration which, sadly, continues to kowtow to the noisy demands of Moro rebel groups?

The government is not "profiling" all Muslims as villains, surely not. However, it’s a coincidence that most of the terrorist "trouble" comes from either Muslim insurgents and mad-bombers, or the ideologically-based but actually extortionist NPA or New People’s Army – with whom, along with its political arm, the National Democratic Front (NDF), this often weak-kneed government is also "negotiating".

Taking advantage of the Administration’s need to court the so-called Muslim vote, the militants are now baring their fangs, raising clenched fists in the air, and insulting our government in the name of Allah.

They profane Allah’s name by claiming that His (God’s) glory comes from violence against infidels, kafirs, crusaders (Christians) and Jews. Isn’t Allah, after all, not just the Omnipotent but the All-Merciful? Didn’t the Prophet Muhammad’s Divine revelation come through the same Angel Gabriel who had announced in the Annunciation the coming of the Christ Child in the womb of our Blessed Virgin Mary?

Aren’t Christians, Jews and Muslims all "Children of the Book", springing from the same Holy Book? Didn’t, in the end, both the Arab nation and Israel come from the same father Abraham or Ibrahim – who built the Ka’ba, now enshrined in Makkah (Mecca), while on a visit to his son by Hagar, i.e. Ishmael, the father of the Arab nation?

It’s all there in the Holy Quran. And it is the Ka’ba – which means "cube" – which is the center of the annual Hajj which draws devout Muslims from all over the planet to converge on Holy Makkan on pilgrimage.

How the terrorists, including al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, and those other Islamic gangs distort the idea of jihad and their religion. Unfortunately, Muslim communities everywhere seem to play host, willingly or unwillingly, to these desperate plotters.

And guess who’s one of the foremost "leaders" of this Moro protest against government crackdown on suspected Islamic terrorists? A former convict, released from prison, Movie "Bad Boy" Robin Padilla who converted to Islam while in jail. If this is the finest example of upright faith our Muslims can produce, then they had better re-read the Holy Quran and pray harder for enlightenment in the Golden Mosque in Quiapo. Is Robin to be a role-model and example for our Moro youth? Heaven help the future Moro generation.

As for our government, we must stand firm. The law is the law. Unruly mobs must not rule the streets. The ungodly must be punished, and evil men frustrated, whatever their faith or creed.

The troublemakers are even calling on their "Brother Muslims to unite and condemn those ‘arrests’." Unite how? To fight the government with bomb and gun?

Those crazies are the ones "causing fear among innocent Muslims". If you ask me, they must be wiped out – for the good of their fellow Muslims

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In Spain, it’s now clear that Islamic terrorists were responsible for the terrible train bombs which killed 191 commuters – men, women, children and babies – on the Estacion Atocha-bound trains in Madrid last March 11. I was there, and you cannot imagine the carnage.

We lost one of our own, young Rex Ferrer, 21, an Iglesia ni Cristo devotee, bound from his home in Torrejon for the INC capilla in the Plaza de España in central Madrid. Half the earnest young man’s face was blown away, and his body mutilated, when one of the ten bombs planted by the terrorists in knapsacks (Goma-Dos Echo explosive-type) blew up right behind him in his coach on one of the doomed trains.

How can you deal with such barbarism? A dozen Muslim immigrants and workers, along with 24 other foreigners, were among the victims of that heartless series of explosions which sundered four coaches on the Atocha, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia railway lines.

Eleven million Spaniards, at least 2.3 million of them in Madrid alone, marched in angry "protest" at this terrorist outrage. Hundreds of homes were bereaved, many of them having to bury just "bits and pieces" of their dead. More than 1,400 were grievously injured and most of them are still in hospital. Some of the wounded may still die of their wounds. Many will be maimed for life.

By coincidence the Madrid mad-bombers happened to be Muslim. The plane hijackers who rammed fully loaded jets into the Twin Towers in New York were Muslims. (Sixteen of the 19 suicide-hijackers, who brought the screaming passengers of those jetliners helplessly to their deaths, and cost the lives of 2,792 innocents in the N.Y. World Trade Center when those Towers crumbled in debris and flame on 9/11, even happened to come from Saudi Arabia – the homeland of Islam’s holiest cities, Makkah and Medina. (The Arab world, in denial, later claimed it had been "a Jewish plot"!)

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Last Saturday – just hours after the Spanish press had revealed a letter in Arabic claiming responsibility for the train bombings, and vowing more bomb attacks – police units closed in on a building in the working class district of Leganes, on the outskirts of Madrid.

The police had followed three Muslim suspects, Moroccans, into the edifice. A two-hour shootout ensued, and the police evacuated the neighborhood hastily before sending in an elite brigade to storm the three-storey flat.

At 9 p.m., a blast completely destroyed the front of the building, killing one member of the police attacking unit and injuring 15 other cops, three very seriously.

It turns out that the ringleader and three other suspects had blown themselves up after being cornered. The police identified one of the charred and shattered corpses as that of Sarbane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, 35, alias "The Tunisian", who they said was the mastermind of the train bombings. There were two other charred bodies, but at least two or three suspects are believed to have gotten away. They will strike again, it’s feared.

The group is said to have coordinated the train bombings, as well as planted another Goma-Dos Echo bomb on the railway track some 60 km. from Madrid, over which the Madrid-to-Sevilla bullet train, AVES, passes daily. Fortunately, the latter bomb was discovered and quickly defused before being detonated.

What’s worrisome is that the police, searching what remained of the three-storey building in Leganes uncovered 200 detonators and 10 kg. of the same "Goma-Dos Eco" explosive used in the Atocha train explosions. This means that the Islamic terrorist ring is well-organized and continues to have the most devilish of intentions.

Only last Thursday, the police foiled a letter-bomb campaign against a "conservative newspaper and radio channel," and Antena 3, a TV channel.

In France, police also rounded up a Muslim terrorist cell two days ago. In a country which has millions of Muslims, many from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, who are French citizens, fighting Islamic terrorists is even more difficult.

Incidentally, most of the 24 Moroccans arrested in Spain were long-time Spanish residents, not infiltrators or new-comers. The threats in Arabic only recently revealed had been contained in a letter delivered to the Spanish Embassy in Cairo (Egypt) two weeks ago. Diplomats in other European embassies in Cairo had also received threats that same day in the name of "The Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri".

The Spanish authorities are trying to establish if the terrorists are linked to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which conducted a suicide-bomb attack in Casablanca, Morocco, in May last year in which 43 were killed, including the suicide-bombers themselves.

How can we deal with such widespread Islamic terrorism if our police don’t go into Muslim communities to weed out the fanatics, the assassins and the crazies? Our Moro population had better take heed of the monsters in their midst. We have our own monsters in our Christian communities, too – and our government has been dealing with them on a secular basis.

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I’ve disagreed often enough with the pronouncements of our Catholic Bishops, as anyone who reads this sometimes "heretical" column knows. But this time the bishops, led by Archbishop Fernando Capalla, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), are absolutely right.

Monsignor Capalla warns that while Muslim communities in Metro Manila are assailing the government for allegedly "targeting" them in its anti-terrorism drive, the Muslim Ulamas and Imams ought to also protect their Islamic schools (madrassahs) and Mosques from being infiltrated by terrorist-preachers and agitators posing as Muslim "missionaries" or teachers.

Some madrassahs have, indeed, become hotbeds for the training of Moro young people in the tenets of hatred and anti-Christian violence. In a nation 90 percent Christian – mostly Catholic – we’ve taken pains to respect our Muslim Filipinos (though too many of them don’t consider themselves "Filipinos", it’s beginning to appear) as brothers and sisters under our common racial ties, our flag and our Constitution. But remember, when aroused, Christianity can breed religious fanatics as well.

Witness the almost open-ended wars between Islam and Christianity in every hemisphere, or the seven-century Islamic rule in Spain, starting in 711 A.D., which was overthrown during the Catholic Reconquista, culminating in the ejection of the last Moro ruler, yep the same name, King Boabdil from Granada.

Such wars must never be provoked again. We must beware of that. But the world may be on the brink. That’s what should haunt humanity, not those ego-bloated political debates.

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THE ROVING EYE . . . There was a big, no-holds-barred meeting in the FPJ camp to discuss what’s going wrong in the campaign. Abangan, the results to be revealed later.