I take back everything I’ve said about Leila de Lima, except that I’ve always found her fetching. Indeed, there’s plenty to love there and even more after she slapped down a Palace official who said, “Only refugees with Philippine visas, genuine passports and other travel documents will be allowed in the country.” This was in reference to Rohingyas and other religious and ethnic minorities kept off the coast by Malaysian gunboats.
To that de Lima said, “The Philippines is ready to shelter boat people from impoverished Bangladesh and Myanmar should the migrants’ boats land on Philippine shores.” Bam! With that statement, we landed on the front pages of the world’s most respected newspapers, like The Guardian.
De Lima explained to the village idiot that refugees are not tourists, “but victims of persecution.” To expect asylum seekers, she said, to approach the very governments that want to exterminate them for travel documents in order to escape the fate that those governments have prepared for them is to expect a black man to go to a police station for a letter of recommendation for a job up north before he is lynched down south.
“In their desperation to leave the territory where their life and freedom is threatened and their human rights seriously violated, they even become willing victims of human trafficking,” de Lima added, thereby revealing her broad understanding of the humanitarian crisis on which the rest of the world has turned its back, and waited with Malaysia for the refugees to solve the problem they pose by drowning off the Malaysian coast or killing each other on the boats out of desperation.
De Lima pointed out that we have not just treaty obligations to refugees and stateless persons under UN conventions, however, useless the UN is, we also have a discreet history of taking in the huddled masses that the Statue of Liberty turns away: like Jews fleeing Nazis, Vietnamese fleeing the victorious communist armies that the Americans enraged, and, today, the savagery of Buddhist and Muslim nations toward minorities, like the lumad sure to be slaughtered under the Bangsamoro basic law after it passes. Communications Secretary Herminio B. Coloma Jr. added, “the Philippines extended humanitarian” assistance to boat people and even established a processing center for them in the 1970s. We shall continue to do our share in saving lives.”
What all this proves is that there is only one Christian
country on the planet today and we are living in it. Oh, we are also giving away a part of it to jihadists, but who said we are smart aside from being Christian?