EDITORIAL - America should mind its own business

The United States, through its embassy in the Philippines, has issued a statement expressing concern over what it calls as the spate of extrajudicial killings in the country. Given the facts at hand, it is difficult to argue against the legitimacy of such concern, not just of the United States, but of other groups as well, both foreign and domestic.

But what the US and others like it have in legitimacy, they utterly lack in fairness. In all the comments made so far about the Philippine government's aggressive war against illegal drugs, only the victims of such aggressiveness seem to merit concern and sympathy. Only on their behalf are calls for due process being made.

But what about their own victims, the innocent people who are also getting killed, raped, robbed, hurt or otherwise had their lives disrupted and perhaps changed forever as a result of crimes that are rooted in illegal drugs? Who is speaking out on their behalf? Not the United States. Not Amnesty International. Not the Philippines' own Commission on Human Rights. Not any of the bleeding hearts that conveniently beat when the news is hot.

These crimes also happen everyday but they are swiftly swept under the rug as just part of everyday life. No one pays attention to such crimes, and the single most common denominator that strings them together, which is illegal drugs. Concern for these daily crimes has no p.r. value and cannot justify the lucrative grants that certain advocacies attract from wealthy donors needing to write off taxes.

It is not that the killings deserve no attention. But it squeezes the sensibilities of the real victims of illegal drugs to be ignored and passed over, with nary even a peep of acknowledgement of what befell them, if all the "Sturm und Drang" are heaped on one thing to the complete exclusion of the other. To understand the killings, it is necessary to go back to where the victims had been.

If the United States wants to go shopping for concerns, why doesn't it pay more attention to its own long-simmering racial and human rights crisis that has now gained a new and ugly face involving blacks getting killed by cops with increasing regularity, a fact that has sparked retaliation against mostly innocent men in blue. It would have been so easy to get flattered by America's concern if only it is so adept at concealing its hypocrisy.

But its hypocrisy is so effortlessly palpable. It jumps at you right out of its institutions. Look at the mess American politics is today. What a sight to see the greatest democracy in the world getting rattled by a Donald Trump exercising his right to free speech. If only Trump was not so prominent and so white, he would already be silenced. America has lost the moral ascendancy to mind the business of other countries.