Mark of total desperation

Consistent with the yellow propaganda mill’s elaborate portrayal of the “ruthless regime” of President Rody Duterte, the shooting of Brandon Lee, a 37-year-old American citizen living in Ifugao province is being weaponized to push the US Congress and the United Nations to pursue a probe into the Philippines.

“Communists and the yellow foes of Rody… have failed to whip up enough international pressure for the conduct of an international investigation on the allegations of EJK.

Foreign media which are getting feeds from the yellow network said Lee, a San Francisco native who married a Filipina, was “believed to have been targeted and shot in an extrajudicial assassination attempt by the government of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.”

Lee survived the attempt on his life but is in critical condition. He took four shots to the back and spine outside his home in Sitio Dugong, Barangay Tungngod, Lagawe, Ifugao while walking with his 7-year old daughter.

The San Francisco Chronicle broadsheet said Lee was “red-tagged by the military in 2015 for his advocacy to protect the land and rights of indigenous people in the Cordilleras, and has been subject to surveillance and threats over the past four years.”

It reported that a rally was held in the US city to get their Congress “to put pressure on the US embassy in the Philippines to provide protection for Lee.”

Then comes the usual appendage of the narrative on “wide-ranging abuses, including killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and persecution of rights activists, journalists, lawyers and members of the political opposition” and to top it all off, coup plotter Antonio Trillanes IV’s manufactured 27,000 extrajudicial killings (EJK) are then mentioned.

“The Philippine police have said that they have killed 6,600 people in shoot-outs, however human rights groups believe the number of people killed in the last six years of Duterte’s presidency could be as high as 27,000,” according to the Chronicle.

The military, however, said Lee has been helping deliver various programs of the government and non-government organizations to far-flung communities in Ifugao through cooperation with the Philippine Army.

Maj. Noriel Tayaban of the 5th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army said there were many instances where the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) conduct atrocities in remote areas and then blame such acts on the military.

“The CPP-NPA-NDF are at the back of the shooting incident which is being blamed on the military to incite the people of Ifugao. They have killed mercilessly thousands of their own cadres, red fighters and supporters for the past 50 years. This could be just one of those sacrificial purges on the altar of a discredited and irrelevant communist movement,” 5th Infantry Division commander Maj. Gen. Pablo Lorenzo said.

Lorenzo said communist front organizations are responsible for the red-tagging of Lee to discredit the military.

“The ‘red-tagging’ didn’t come from the AFP. It was (CPP chairman) Joma Sison himself who enumerated the organizations that are part of, allied with and affiliated with the CPP-NPA-NDF,” the general noted.

Lee is a Chinese-American and the assassination attempt can have a far-reaching effect if the opponents of Rody will be successful in making the world believe that state forces were behind the dastardly act.

The communists and the yellow foes of Rody, so far, have failed to whip up enough international pressure for the conduct of an international investigation on the allegations of EJK which have as the only basis the curses and vicious threats of Rody in his public speeches.

They needed a major push to keep alive their flickering effort to weaken the administration of Rody.