‘Hitler admirer’ among God’s chosen people

Benjamin Netanyahu, right, stands next to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during their meeting in Jerusalem on Monday, Sept. 3, 2018. AP PHOTO

While Las Islas Filipinas is barely 500 years old, Israel is as old as the Old Testament of Bronze Age antiquity in the Middle East. Unlike the Philippines, Israel was not discovered but appointed by God to be his own people when YHWH told Jacob: “You will be called Israel… because you have fought with God and with men, and prevailed” (Genesis 32:28).

Duterte once questioned the logic of Genesis stories, particularly the creation story and called the God of the Bible “stupid,” and the Jews remember. Unlike many Filipinos who can easily forget (at times ridiculed as national amnesia so much manipulated in PH politics), YHWH God’s chosen people do not forget.

Geographically surrounded by ancient non-Jewish/Arab/Islamic states such as Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, the Israelis know their origin, their strength as one nation, and their friends. And they do not overlook their enemies.

But most of all, they cannot forget THE HOLOCAUST, hence Yad Vashem, literally, “a monument and a name.” They cannot forget how the Nazi orthodoxy made the Aryan race a “superior race” and how the Nazi orthopraxis led to the so-called Shoah or the Jewish Holocaust.

There was fury in the eyes of every Jew after the Holocaust (1933-1945). Memory has power. Memory has influence. And they cannot erase from their collective memory how, as a ruthless dictator of bottomless powers, Hitler involved every able arm of Germany’s bureaucratic machineries in the logistics that decimated the entire Jewish people in Europe, thus turning the Third Reich into “a genocidal state.”

Is he really a Hitler admirer?

ADOLF HITLER (1889-1945) was a fascist strongman with mass appeal like Kim Jong-il of North Korea (1941-2011), Joseph Stalin of USSR (1878-1953), Mao Zedong of China (1893-1976), Benito Mussolini of Italy (1883-1945). Hitler was popular and charismatic, yada-yada, but ruthless. And so is Rodrigo Duterte.

Those who watch Duterte and his cohort do the fist salute, now notorious in the global radar, cannot but hark back to the equally notorious Hitler salute and Sieg Heil chant. And the Israelis can recognize the unpleasant similarities.

When President Duterte visited Yad Vashem on the second day of his official visit, what the Israelis remembered was how he compared himself to Adolf Hitler.

In September 2016, three months after taking power, Duterte likened his bloody drug war to Hitler’s Holocaust when he said: “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews (incorrect statistics by Duterte). Now, there are 3 million drug addicts… I’d be happy to slaughter them.” That the Jews cannot forget.

In their official encounter, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin had to remind Duterte that “Hitler was the devil on Earth.”

The Israelis cannot forget the cruelest time when Hitler played God without divine permission by deciding who lived and who perished among them. And six million among them perished, along with other millions of Gypsies (Romani), homosexuals, Poles, and others who assessed by Hitler as subhumans.

They cannot forget how the Nazis became Germany’s demonic minions, animated by Adolf Hitler’s ideology of Aryan supremacy. It’s a racial theory, a whimsical thought, that told the world: “All Jews were untermenschen” or subhuman.

Yesterday’s Jews for Hitler are today’s junkies for Duterte as Duterte has theorized: “Junkies are not human.”

Today’s Jews cannot forget that the persecution, experimentation, and genocide were so strategic and systematic that culminated in die Endlösung der Judenfrageor the “final solution to the Jewish Question,” just as in our day Duterte has made the EJK the final solution to the drug war.

Duterte, in general, was warmly received in Israel

While Prime Minister Netanyahu was politically correct to say that Israel “deeply appreciates” President Duterte’s visit, several intellectuals and politicians called Duterte, without hesitation, “an unwanted guest.”

Israel broadsheets Haaretz and The Times of Israel, and some protesters registered their cri de Coeur, chanting “shame, shame, shame!”

As Duterte delivered this solemn speech, “May the minds of all men and women learn to work together towards providing a safe haven for all who are being persecuted,” Haaretz was criticizing the government of rolling out the red carpet on someone who is now internationally infamous “for his dubious comments.” They cannot forget that his words cannot be trusted.

Meanwhile The Times of Israel made a declaration that Duterte “has no place” in that part of the world and Haaretz branded his visit as dumi, kalawang, or “diplomatic stain” in YHWH’s Holy Land. Israelis do not forget.

Jose Mario Bautista Maximiano is the author of The Church Can Handle the Truth (Claretian, 2017). Comments to [email protected]

(This article originally included the sentence “Unlike the Philippines, conquered multiple times over, Israel was never conquered, neither lost a battle nor subdued by a foreign superpower.” It has been removed. The author regrets the error. –Ed.)