Why should any assurances be given by the American ambassador or anyone else? Why should the Philippines Government not be encouraged, in fact, to wage that famous "war of ideas" by noting that the islamized south is economically underdevelooped because Islam itself, with its inshallah-fatalism and habit of mental submission (the first discouraging effort and industriousness, the second discouraging entrepreneurial activity). The only reason the effects of this are not clearly seen is because an accident of geology gave unmerited and unearned wealth to a large number of Muslim states. But those states, despite having been the recipients of ten trillion dollars since 1973 alone, have failed completely to develop modern economies, and rely on foreign, often non-Muslim, wage-slaves from abroad, with a revolving cast of European and American doctors and teachers and engineers at the top, then South Korean contractors, Filipino nurses, and finally, house hands and sex-slaves from southeast Asia (only blacks are not among those wage-slaves admitted to serve Arab masters in these deeply racist societies of the Arab peninsula). Of course there are also some Arabs (often Christian Lebanese) also engaged, and even at the bottom of the economic pyramid those domestic workers and sex-slaves include Muslim women from Indonesia and India as well as non-Muslims from Thailand and India. But the general picture is clear -- and clear in the Philippines, to which those nurses return with their tales of mistreatment at the hands of Muslim Arabs.

Why should not the government of the Philippines combine a determination not to yield to the Moro Liberation Front in its local jihad, with an effort to win over, and to de-islamize, as many of the southerners as can be persuaded, over time, to listen. And the focus should be on Islam as the cause of economic failure, economic distress, not least in the southern islands.

This argument happens, after all, to be true. Why should it not, in the end, if repeated enough, and elaborated upon enough, also be effective?

Posted by: Hugh at February 20, 2008 8:16 AM

"The U.S. ambassador assured us the U.S. soldiers would not be involved in any combat activities,

Of course soldiers will not be involved in combat - their mission is purely humanitarian. It is registered nurses and doctors that will carry out combat duty. These are the ones that Jihadis have to concentrate their fire on.

And so in the age of multiculturalism, PC and "special" relativity, this is the way we fight a war.

Posted by: DP111 at February 20, 2008 9:53 AM

Our tax dollars at work.

Posted by: tanstaafl at February 20, 2008 11:25 AM

re: Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)

Interesting choice of an acronym for their little group, eh?

Posted by: Infidel at February 20, 2008 1:02 PM