Posted on 01/25/2015 4:26:01 PM PST by bunkerhill7
MANILA, Philippines – More than 30 police commandos were killed in a clash with Muslim insurgents Sunday in the southern Philippines in the biggest single-day combat loss for Philippine forces in many years, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Thanks for clarifying.
They weren't, really. They're not the crooked pols and oligopolists who kept the economy stagnant for 7 decades. They're not exploiting anybody. Pinoys could do with more wealthy Americans moving there - they'd help employ the hordes of people currently headed abroad as domestics to places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East, postings where they get to see their families once or twice a year. Heck, a number of American Freepers post from the PI.
That was about the time that the .45ACP Model 1911 was first used in combat.
>They’re not exploiting anybody.<
.
Perhaps not, but don’t boast about your financial status.
Worked and lived in some very poverty stricken countries (including Yemen) but I was almost embarrassed to show my relative wealth in those countries.
This is not a universal cultural trait.
Displays of wealth, abilities, and power are sometimes even a requirement in some places.
In the Philippines, for instance, in a small town, if you are known to be wealthy, being unwilling to hire people as servants may give you a reputation as an ungenerous miser, by denying poor people opportunities to earn a livelihood.
There is a continuum here. Danes and other Scandinavians find Americans boastful.
Big world. Best rule, most of the time, is “when in Rome ...”.
A very sorry business. The INP is not well equipped and I suspect they were probably betrayed into an ambush.
My old friend has lived and worked near manila for 12 years. He is comfortable but not rich, and has had as many as seven employees at once. Drivers, housekeepers yayas, cooks, gardeners. Most of them are a revolving cast of his wife’s sisters and cousins who come up from Mindanao, but others are local. He’s helped a lot of people to find jobs.
That’s indeed the way it works.
In a sense its the Filipino version of welfare.
Works better in many ways, as these are legitimate jobs where people can have some pride in earning a living, develop contacts for other employment and education. Many teenagers, especially the very talented, get their school fees paid by their employers or find a patron through their relatives employers. No longer living there, but the family in former days put a lot of Leyte and Samar (Waray) girls through nursing school and the like. And perhaps most important, a kid with no family or far from home finds a family to be loyal to, and who will reciprocate with loyalty. Family is a huge thing there.
Of course like any human institution it can be abused in thousands of ways. Back in the day a popular theme in Filipino movies was the servant girl abused by (or perhaps just developing a passion for) the wastrel son. Nora Aunor was in a bunch.
Consider the phenomenal popularity of Disney on Ice "Frozen" shows. The monetary outlay for a small family excursion to one of these runs into several hundreds of dollars, at a minimum. Yet they are packed, to the point where it can take an hour or more to drive the last few hundred yards into the venue. Of course, I speak from recent experience. Who has the money to spend on this sort of thing? Evidently a lot of people, and it was certainly a "diverse" crowd, I might add, from my vantage point. I observed a diversity of diminutive Elsa's ( that is, wearing the blue dress ) among the attendees. Very retro.
Unfortunately, they (Philippine gov't) cave in to these criminals (actually, they are far more than criminals) regularly.
This Mayor Ampatuan is evidently part of the same clan ("warlords", says my Filipina wife) whose forces killed a large group of local journalists and other civilians on 11/23/09. If anyone is not familiar with this horrific crime, you should be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguindanao_massacre
Note the lack of justice...
That said, the Ampatuan clan probably did not attack the police in this case - at least not directly. In this latest incident, and drawing from the Fox / AP article, it is notable that the target of the police raid is one Zulkifli bin Hir, a Malaysian terrorist who's been hiding in the Muslim part of Mindano for over a decade. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is strong in the area (as in so many parts of the Muslim world, there are various factions who may or may not cooperate with each other, any given minute.) It's a pretty safe bet the Moro's (or friends) have been shielding bin Hir. I would not even be surprised to learn that this was a flat out ambush with the Philippine police carefully "set up".
It's also interesting that "foreign truce monitors intervened". Too bad it wasn't a couple of U.S. helicopter gunships or A-10's.
Prayers for the police killed & wounded, and their families.
“——Disney on Ice “Frozen” shows.”
.
Truly never heard of it.
This is horrific! Gives meaning to the saying “Give them an inch and they will take a mile.”
He was shot in the head, his wife`s cousin said.
She also said the Moslems have killed reporters who go in that area to find out more information.
MILF- that’s the group California’s Democrat senator Yee was going to for missiles in his little arms smuggling endeavor.
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