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Written by Gonaranao B. Musor
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Sunday, 06 July 2003 |
This was Ramon Tulfo’s reaction against a letter published in the Opinion page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer last July 4, 2003. In his column “On Target” last July 5, Tulfo wrote: “I am not biased against Muslims. I am biased against people who commit abusive acts, be they Muslim or Christian.”
Tulfo claimed that being from Mindanao, he knows that the root causes of the problem there are poverty and ignorance. “Muslim leaders in Mindanao want their subjects to be in perpetual ignorance and poverty so they an hold them by their balls.”
During his elementary years at Camp Keithley Elementary School in Dansalan city (now Marawi), he supposedly witnessed “the bias of the Muslim majority in the area against the Christian minority.” According to him, typical uneducated Muslims hate non-Muslim Filipinos because they sided with the Spaniards. He blames Muslim leaders who are educated for not changing this kind of attitude among their fellow Muslims. Muslims promote anti-Muslim bias among non-Muslim Filipinos because of their own biases against non-Muslims. “It’s your (Muslims’) ‘us and them’ attitude,” Tulfo said that promotes such bias against Muslims.
Furthermore, Tulfo believes that the Abu Sayyaf is supported by the Muslim population which prevents the government from totally annihilating them. “To the Muslim majority in Basilan and Sulu, the Abu Sayyaf are SOBs but they are ‘your’ (Muslims’) SOBs,” he emphasized.
Tulfo’s statements in his column was in response to a letter sent by Professor of MSU-Marawi City and former ambassador to Kuwait Sukarno D. Tanggol to the Inquirer. “I am a Muslim but I would rather eat pork than swallow Tulfo’s venomous words which is filled with hatred and only nurture the seeds of conflict in Mindanao,” Tanggol wrote in his letter.
Tanggol sought to question the Inquirer for its tolerance for Tulfo whose write-ups about Muslims or Moros “betrays his deep-seated prejudice against, and ignorance of, Islam and its followers.” He further explained, “people of his (Tulfo’s) kind are partly responsible for the continuing malaise in Mindanao, including such phenomenons as the Abu Sayyaf. Tulfo, through his words, is much, much worse than any Muslim individual or group can ever be!"
End.
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