EDITORIAL – Terrorists

An increasing number of people, many of them government officials, now want the Moro Islamic Liberation Front classified as a terrorist group. Only now? They should have asked that long long ago.

Maybe it is because most people want peace that they decided, against their better judgment, to play along with the charade that these moros can actually be brought in as part of an integrated and functioning democracy.

But now the whole world has been shown the folly of charades. Governments must deal with rebels from a position of strength. If peace must be achieved, it should be these terrorists who must sue for peace, not the government.

Terrorists succeed only because they operate on a policy of treachery and duplicity, and in an environment that either fears them as to be incapacitated to do anything, or embraces them in such a way that they are unrecognizable from everybody else.

Armed Forces chief General Alexander Yano could not have said it better when he said these moro terrorists cannot forever be allowed to escape on the pretext that each and every atrocity is a perpetration of some renegade band without the sanction of the top leadership.

What kind of leadership are the moro terrorists trying to portray to us and expect us to believe --- a bunch of idiots who cannot control the actions of its members? That is such grand larceny it is consternating how the government allowed itself to be suckers all these times.

Most Filipinos have, at one time or another in their lives, been warned about the treachery of moro rebels. But because most Filipinos are educated enough to discern truths from biases, such warnings get grudgingly ignored despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Well, the evidence can no longer be ignored or explained by even the most magnaninous benefit of the doubt. You see it in the terror written on the faces of innocent civilians in Cotabato and Lanao.

To those who still cannot fathom the mind of a terrorist, Osama bin Laden explained it most clearly to the world: “The principal difference between you and us is that we love death while you love life.” Such a yawning difference precludes any negotiated peace.