The President is a weakling

“Don’t kill me, my sons,” Moammar Gadhafi, Libya’s despot, pleaded with his captors as he was being dragged out of hiding from a drainage pipe.

Moments later he was dead from a bullet wound in the head, a fitting death for a man who exported revolutions and mayhem to many parts of the world, including the Philippines.

Gadhafi, who stopped supporting Muslim rebels in Mindanao only after then first lady Imelda Marcos talked with him in his tent for many hours, got his comeuppance.

Once again, karmic justice has been served.

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If Gadhafi had been a brave man he would have committed suicide before Libyan revolutionary fighters could lay their hands on him.

He wouldn’t have suffered a humiliating death at the hands of his captors.

Adolf Hitler, who was worse than all the evil leaders in the world combined, shot himself in the head with a pistol so he wouldn’t give his enemies the satisfaction of killing him.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” (Julius Caesar, Shakespeare)

Gadhafi, for all his bravado, was a craven coward.

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Whatever he says to justify not going to war with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, President Noy is perceived as a weakling.

He can never appease the Moros who, when you give them your hand, will ask for your entire arm.

Moros smell fear: Don’t be surprised if they continue to pillage and kill.

The only time they will stop their mayhem and plunder is when the government launches a punitive expedition like what President Erap did when he was in power.

The Moros, especially the Tausugs, love to fight, and how!

The only way to earn their respect is to fight back instead of cowering in fear.

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I know I will receive brickbats from people advocating peace with the Moros.

Like that woman, a fellow Mindanawan, who said I should be ashamed of myself for writing the way I do about the Moros.

Let me assure my critics that I am not anti-Moro; I am against abuses committed by people whether they are Muslims, Christians or atheists.

It just so happens that when I severely criticize the Moros for their mayhem, it gets noticed, especially by those who love the Moros.

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Every day, thousands of cubic meters of logs from the mountains of the Agusan provinces are brought down despite the logging ban.

The efforts by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) against illegal logging have been inadequate, to say the least.

However, some illegal logs do get seized by local officials who do the job of the DENR.

Mayor Rey Uy of Tagum City, which is at the crossroads of Eastern Mindanao, is one such local executive.

Uy has been confiscating illegal logs that pass through his city.

But Uy doesn’t make money out of them like what other local executives do.

Instead, Uy turns the illegal logs into desks, chairs, tables and distributes them to public schools in remote barrios in Davao del Norte and Compostela Valley.

As of October 21, Uy has distributed 5,137 chairs, desks and teachers’ tables to public schools in the two provinces.

Mayor Uy invited me to the city’s three-hectare motor pool and carpentry shop last Saturday and I saw that more chairs, desks and tables were being made from the seized logs.

I also saw piles of seized logs still to be made into useful things for schoolchildren.

Hooray!