BAGUIA
Several news organizations ran a story in the aftermath of the Marawi siege that began last month claiming that Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon is a graduate of the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Engineering.
The source for the information was the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their website contains a dossier on Hapilon whom the agency counts among the most wanted criminals.
It turned out that the piece of information is wrong. In the first place, there is no UP School of Engineering, only a College of Engineering at UP Diliman.
When the UP Diliman alumni office checked its records, it found that no Isnilon Hapilon ever enrolled in or graduated from the university. In fact, as reported in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Isnilon was a high school dropout in Basilan.
This sorry episode, which has been used by some fanatics of the current dispensation to call for the bombardment of the national university on account of it being supposedly a breeding ground for terrorists, is a source of a couple of lessons.
First, even a highly reputed organization such as the FBI cannot be taken as a guarantor of truth in the first instance. Local, national and global news agencies should have verified the item about Hapilon’s education instead of reflecting the agency’s say-so since it is not a school registrar’s office.
Second, even news reported by legitimate media organizations needs to be verified by readers before they disseminate these stories in their social circles.
In this particular instance, the point is not so much that the university where I work wishes to dissociate itself with any of its wayward children, alleged or otherwise, as that academia (and other communities of dissent) must remain a bastion of free thought to be protected above all in times like these when the state is flexing its muscles and can easily tag students and professors who have alternative thoughts as threats to security that must be eliminated.
We already see vain but persistent attempts on the part of some in the administration to associate persons of a different mind with the President’s favorite targets.
We can only hope that there is no intent in the likes of our Justice secretary to, in effect, eliminate opposition via negative labeling.
It is troubling enough that a clearly contrived narrative is being foisted on the populace to the effect that persons from both the terrorist and narcotics blocs prompted by opposition leaders have coalesced to destabilize the government. What is even more disturbing is the vastness of the crowd that is willing to simply say “Amen” to this yarn.
To top off this tragicomedy, the Justice secretary has, after apologizing to families in the Islamic City of Marawi and to Sen. Paolo Benigno Aquino IV for implicating them in an alleged plot to bring down the government, commanded the National Bureau of Investigation to build up the case against destabilizers who, from where many sit, are but figments of his imagination or characters spawned by conspiracy theorists among the President’s rah-rah girls and boys.
Let us not forget that administration likewise appears to be painting the media as enemies too, charging with reporting without context or with misquoting those practitioners who faithfully echo its controversial pronouncements.
It seems that we are on the brink of a historical period akin to the ones that saw the Salem witch hunts or the French “Reign of Terror.” If only most of us did not forget to be vigilant and critical of behavior that subjects to cavalier treatment our Constitution’s martial law provisions.
Are we not finally seeing the rotten fruit of a mentality that vis-à-vis our own dark days under Ferdinand Marcos screams, “Move on”?
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