Aquino thanks Chinese agency for name-calling

President Benigno S. Aquino III. LYN RILLON/INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

By calling him an “amateurish politician,” China’s state news agency merely affirmed the correctness of the Philippine position on the West Philippine Sea, President Aquino responded Friday.

The President said he had expected Xinhua to echo China’s position, but noted that it went further and resorted to name-calling.

But Mr. Aquino quipped: “I can only thank him (the Xinhua commentator) for this. If he intended to insult me, thank you because you’re showing that the Philippines has taken the right position.”

“If the guy who wrote that had a strong view of their position … if I were him, I would have used that position. But if one resorts to name-calling or insults, then that shows that he can’t stand by their original position,” Mr. Aquino told reporters after presiding over the Army chief turnover in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City.

There’s a saying that “If you can’t respond to an issue, you resort to name-calling,” he quipped.

The President drew a sharp rebuke from Xinhua after he compared the plight of the Philippines now locked in dispute with China over the West Philippine Sea to parts of Czechoslovakia that fell into Adolf Hitler’s hands without Europe’s help in the 1930s.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Aquino enjoined other nations to do more to help the Philippines in fending off China’s aggressiveness in the seas believed to be rich in oil and gas.

He said the Philippines, like Czechoslovakia in the past, has come under strong pressure to yield its territory to a stronger foreign power and needed support for the rule of international law to resist this.

“At what point do you say,  ‘Enough is enough?’ Well, the world has to say it. Remember that Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II,” he said.

Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia fell into the hands of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1938 after Western nations failed to back the Czech government.

Xinhua ran a commentary, bristling at Mr. Aquino’s remark, and said “he has never been a great candidate for a wise statesman in the region.”

“But his latest reported attack against China, in which he senselessly compared his northern neighbor to Nazi Germany, exposed his true colors as an amateurish politician who was ignorant both of history and of reality,” it said.

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