We Filipinos must be masochists in the extreme. If someone criticized you — and in the most condescending, insulting terms at that — for how you organized your household affairs, you wouldn’t let him inside your house, would you? In fact, that person would be persona non grata.

Yet here we have an undersecretary no less, Paul Gutierrez, former president of the National Press Club, not only inviting to the Philippines one Irene Khan, special rapporteur of the United Nations supposedly on “the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression,” but hosting a dinner in her honor.

This Khan is the same know-it-all who mocked our Court of Appeals when it upheld the criminal conviction for libel of Maria Ressa (of the much-derided Rappler) for wrongly calling a businessman of good repute (Willy Keng) a murderer, smuggler and drug dealer several times, and refuse to apologize for it, or even air his side. The same Khan who called our libel laws — an act of our Congress elected by the Filipino people, and which laws have served our society well for over half a century — erroneous, and insolently dared to say that our appellate court was wrong in applying our law. Not only were her acts constitutive of contempt of court for being sub judice, but coming from a foreigner, they smacked of out-and-out interference.

Not content with vituperating the second highest court, this same ulalo wants the Supreme Court — the highest court of our country, composed of the crème de la crème of our legal community — to let her barge into the proceedings of Ressa’s appeal by appearing as an amicus curiae in order to “provide the SC with international and regional legal standards on freedom of expression, especially regarding the law on defamation,” as her press briefer stated.

In effect, this person presumptuously thinks that our Supreme Court justices do not know enough of international law that she must lecture them, lest our learned justices make a mistake in resolving Ressa’s last chance at appeal. The gall!

Yet some people in government still think she deserves a dinner in her honor, inviting thereto the same persons she has repeatedly vilified. Albert Einstein was right, there are only two things that are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And he’s not so sure about the first.

Khan has been consistently criticized by many countries and entities for consistently reciting a leftist-liberal mantra, whereby she thumbs down the act of every government that does not conform to Western libertarian concepts of free speech and the press, using whatever suasion her lofty (but mostly empty) title of “special rapporteur” carries.

To her and her ilk, her concept of free expression is infallible and indisputable — and better than the laws and policies of any country in the world — and her ideas are superior to any national legislature and administration duly elected by the majority of the voters in any given country. Such hubris!

Even if her integrity were pure as driven snow, such an attitude would be unacceptable to any sovereign nation. But it seems that her activism is motivated by huge financial rewards and, it seems, from vested interests bent on advancing a leftist-liberal agenda worldwide. Among other things, it is a fact that Khan caused a scandal when it was found out that she was paid almost a million dollars by Amnesty International as its Secretary General, an amount that “caused outrage” among the donors to AI who did not expect the organization to become a cash cow for its officers.

Khan’s thoughts are the best example of Western European “holier-than-thou” thinking, of a feeling of intellectual superiority. Our sense of patriotism and self-respect should have rightly taken much offense necessitating a powerful pushback. Yet we not only tolerate her arrogance, we extol it. We are so screwed.