MALACAÑANG has clarified President Duterte’s pronouncements about Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, asserting that the Chief Executive was merely referencing to his “willingness to kill” three million drug dealers.
“The Philippines recognizes the deep significance of the Jewish experience especially their tragic and painful history. We do not wish to diminish the profound loss of six million Jews in the Holocaust–that deep midnight of their story as a people,” reads a statement released by presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella over the weekend.
Abella said Duterte’s reference to the slaughter was an “oblique deflection of the way he has been pictured as a mass murderer, a Hitler, a label he rejects.”
He said Duterte also drew an oblique conclusion, that while the Holocaust was an attempt to exterminate the future generations of Jews, the “extra-judicial killings” attributed to the government would result in the “salvation of the next generation of Filipinos.”
Abella said, “He was just addressing the negative comparison that people made between him and Hitler.
“Hitler murdered three million innocent civilians whereas Duterte was referencing to his ‘willingness to kill’ three million criminal drug dealers–to save the future of the next generation and the country. Those are two entirely different things.”
Duterte drew flak here and abroad for his controversial pronouncements on Friday.
Adama Dieng, United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide expressed alarm at Duterte’s public comments, saying the President reinforced a campaign to kill millions of drug addicts and compared it to the massacre of millions of Jews by Hitler during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany during World War II.
Adama Dieng qualified such a statement as deeply disrespectful of the right to life of all human beings. He reminded that the Holocaust was one of the darkest periods of the history of humankind and that any glorification of the cruel and criminal acts committed by those responsible was unacceptable and offensive.
He added that such statement was also undermining the efforts of the international community to develop strategies to prevent the recurrence of those crimes, to which all countries around the world should be committed to.
The Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide called on Duterte to exercise restraint in the use of language that could exacerbate discrimination, hostility and violence and encourage the commission of criminal acts which, if widespread or systematic, could amount to crimes against humanity.
He also requested Duterte to support the investigation of the reported rise of killings in the context of the anti-crime and anti-drug campaign targeting drug dealers and users to ascertain the circumstances of each death.
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