US officials are so fond of claiming that their country and the West stand for a rules-based international order — but one only they can correctly interpret.

Israel’s horrible war against Hamas certainly exposes the fact that the US is exempted from following such rules-based order — remember its Afghanistan and Iraq wars, among others?

So is the tiny Israel, which could not have grown to be a superpower in the Middle East if not for the $159 billion that the US has given it since its creation in 1946 to 2023. As that figure is not adjusted for inflation, it is bigger than the $173 billion US Marshall Plan that helped Europe recover from the ashes of World War 2. Indeed, the US defense industry has had a steady market for its weapons, with the American Congress having allocated since 1948 $3.3 billion yearly in military aid to Israel.

Second of three parts EDGARD Arevalo and Rafael Alunan 3rd's fake news that they've disguised as opinion pieces in this respected newspaper are not just of the vilest kind, as…

First of 2 parts

EDGARD Arevalo and Rafael Alunan in this much-respected paper two weeks ago wrote similar columns claiming that China was preparing for an invasion of the Philippines by establishing armed “sleeper” cells and that the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) had arrested such infiltrators, arresting eight Chinese in their residence which had assault rifles with markings “From the People’s Republic of China, and “military patches.”

That is such colossal, blatant fake news. The NBI has officially and totally denied Arevalo and Alunan’s claims. Their similar reports reveal the two amateur columnists’ gullibility and incompetence as writers, arising from inexplicable hatred of China. In the case of Alunan, once President Ramos’ Interior and Local Government secretary, he even insanely called for the mass killing of the Chinese “until the last drop of the (their) blood.”

It is astonishing how these two could be so maddened after reading fake news published in a report of a single spurious website.

WELL before the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7, scholars and respected geopolitical analysts were already writing pieces asking this question.

Indeed, the famous Doomsday Clock started in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its hands back in January to 90 seconds to “midnight,” or the end of the world, mainly because of the “mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine.”

I bet the Israel-Hamas conflict would have it moved to 30 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe the clock has ever been.

That superpowers and near-superpowers could stumble into war was deemed a high possibility then, mainly because Russia could decide, because its invasion of Ukraine seemed to have bogged down after 19 months, to use tactical (i.e., weaker than the Hiroshima killer) nuclear bombs against the Ukrainian armies.

I’M quite sure media started to call the Filipino feast of trooping to the cemeteries to honor their departed on November 1 as “Undas” only in the past several years.

I never heard the term used in our family. Instead, that must-observe ritual was called “Todos los Santos” or even “Araw ng mga Patay.” I was puzzled, though, why the cemetery-going day was on Todos los Santos or All Saints’ Day. Logically, we should be honoring our dead on November 2, All Souls Day, officially called by the Catholic Church “The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed.”

I thought it was merely that I didn’t know much of the Filipino language, so “Undas” was unfamiliar to me. However, even the legal scholar Fr. Joaquin Bernas wrote in his column several years ago that he was also baffled by the term, but that even his colleagues who were either steeped in Tagalog or Spanish couldn’t explain its origins. Filipino dictionaries, both printed and online, just translate “Undas” as “All Saints’ Day.”

WHILE the decline in Chinese investments into the Philippines* has obviously been due to the souring of relations between the two countries — what with even our top officials like Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. calling China criminals of international law — another factor has been a rising fear of kidnappings of Chinese citizens in the metropolis.

The Philippine National Police’s Anti-Kidnapping Group has reported that kidnapping cases have drastically decreased in the first half of the year, with only 12 kidnapping incidents, about half of the 22 cases in 2023.

However, sources in the Chinese Filipino community claim that this is grossly under-reported as relatives of Chinese kidnapped are no longer reporting such incidents, whether the victims were killed or were released. “They fear that ranking police officials are involved with the kidnappers, and once they report the kidnapping cases, the criminals are informed of this and they immediately retaliate,” the source said.

TO be honest, I was a bit shocked that Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. conducted the government’s press conference on the Ayungin Shoal incident. It was conducted in a Palace room, near the Office of the President, but the President wasn’t there, nor even the Foreign Affairs secretary.

With Teodoro were mostly security officials and the military’s top brass, including the new Armed Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr.

Are we at war with China now as a result of the Ayungin incident in which the Chinese blocked our Navy and Coast Guard’s attempts to supply the marine contingent living in the grounded BRP Sierra Madre? If you ask military men what to do about a certain problem, what do you think you will get?

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FORMER Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio, since 2012, the ideologue of the hostile stance against China over our maritime and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, has changed his tune, but in an absurd manner.

Toward the end of his two-hour presentation in the UP College of Law Magister Lecture Series on October 10, he made the following surreal recommendation:

“The Philippines should invite China, Vietnam and Malaysia to submit the territorial dispute in the Spratlys to voluntary arbitration by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It should also invite China to submit the territorial dispute over the Scarborough Shoal to voluntary arbitration by the ICJ. This will finally settle by peaceful means, as mandated by the UN Charter, the territorial disputes in the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal.”

THE short answer is, ‘yes.’ After all, Americans themselves have done it before, and with the US’ powerful propaganda machine, the world will forget about it.

We are seeing every day in our living rooms the videos of Israeli genocide — what else would you call the nonstop bombing of buildings in Gaza, children and the elderlies’ bodies rushed to the hospital, the cutting off of electricity, fuel, food and even water to the areas, with residents blocked from leaving the place?

The US’ often repeated claim that it is a nation that values human life is a myth, a total lie. Several times in its history, it has had no qualms in sacrificing innocents to advance its military goals.

I call this the “Hiroshima worldview,” since the US’ willingness to kill civilians and innocents — hundreds of thousands of them — had been most demonstrated in its dropping of atomic bombs in 1945 in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which 214,000 mostly innocent lives were snuffed in an instant and many, many more years later, due to radiation and other effects of a nuclear bomb.