News:
The Philippine president has likened present-day China to Nazi Germany, hinting that the world cannot continue to appease Beijing as it claims ever more territory in the South China Sea.
Benigno Aquino’s comments – made during a speech in Japan – came as disquiet grows over the quickening pace of China’s land reclamation programme in international waters, including its construction of a runway long enough for large military planes.
“If there was a vacuum, if the United States, which is the superpower, says ‘we are not interested’, perhaps there is no brake to ambitions of other countries,” he told an audience of business leaders in Tokyo.
Aquino, who is in Japan on a four-day visit, has previously made similar comments comparing China’s actions to those of the Third Reich.
“At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’? Well, the world has to say it – remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II,” he told the New York Times last year.
That provoked fury in Beijing, which labelled the Philippine president “amateurish”, “ignorant” and “lame”.
Aquino’s comments came after the US president, Barack Obama, this week weighed in on the growing tensions in the South China Sea, urging regional powers – particularly China – to respect the law and stop “throwing elbows”.
China has rejected US demands to stop all reclamation works in the South China Sea, saying it was exercising its sovereignty and using the outposts to fulfil international responsibilities.
Beijing insists it has sovereignty over nearly all of the South China Sea, a major global shipping route believed to be home to oil and gas reserves, but rival claimants accuse it of expansionism. (Source: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jun/03/china-nazi-germany-south-china-sea-philippine-president-benigno-aquino, 3 June 2015)
Comment:
Again, Muslim territory is threatened. Those waters and islets also belong to Malaysia and Brunei as based on ‘international law’ established after World War II.
How are we to protect our lands from China’s expansionism?
Aquino thinks the US and possibly Japan would be the powers that could ‘champion’ our sovereignty. Is he correct? Does the West possess a moral and strength of principles such that they would champion our cause?
As alarmed as President Aquino and the people of the region are, China’s behaviour is no different to the way the US and western colonialists.
For all the ideals of freedom and human rights, time and time again we see it soaked in hypocrisy and regularly bathed with Muslim blood and suffering. The West cannot shed their colonialists’ roots, repeatedly we see their machinations, usurping Muslim lands, imposing their puppets over us and pillaging our wealth with impunity.
It is clear that the ideologies of the world today, secularism and communism (in the form of the communist party dictatorship), does not possess a concept of true good and bad, right and wrong, everything is relative to national self-interests. Indeed it is economic self-interests and power that drives their moral compass. They all pursue national self-interests as their prime directive and never allow principles of territorial sovereignty nor do right and morality get in the way.
US and Japan are no better than China. The only difference is that China is projecting regional, national, racial hegemony as opposed to the ideology of secularism / capitalism that the US and the West imposes and propagates. Even if the US were to ‘pivot’ in to redress the balance of power, it would be merely to serve the interests of their capitalists and possibly their taxpayers.
When the Islamic Ummah was divided into nation states, the colonialists did so knowing that divided, and befogged by nationalism and secularism, the Ummah would never be able to rise again. Secularism has no solution to China’s land grab. Nor for that matter does it possess the answer to the US and the West’s ongoing colonialist hegemony the world.
The answer from Islam is clear, the reimplementation of the Daulah (the Islamic State) – as was done by our beloved Rasulullah Muhammad ﷺ. Only then would our divided lands and peoples be united under the shade of the true Khilafah. Only then would we be able to defend our blood, property and honour, our anxieties calmed and our pains healed.
«إنما الإمام جنة يقاتل من ورائه ويتقى به»
“Verily the Imam is a shield behind whom you fight and are protected”.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Muhammad Hamzah