EDGEDAVAO
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HEN Cristeta hollers that her boyfriend has been sexually abusing her and the broadsheets and tabloids headline it all hook, line and sinker, is that a national crisis? When a starlet and her boyfriend sing “Careless Whisper” in wild abandon and have a video of their steaming tryst and the broadsheets and tabloids publish the scandal and their broadcast cousin pitches in, is that a national crisis? When 44 Filipino soldiers are mercilessly massacred and all the media jump into the fray and air and print in screaming banner headlines the tragedy, is that a national crisis? When nine foreign tourists and several others are killed and injured in a hostage-taking incident and the President comes out on national television only three hours after, do we have a national crisis? If you answered “yes” to all, I won’t blame you. That’s your perspective and I will respect it. If you answered “yes” only to the last two questions, I would say you have a remarkable
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VANTAGE POINTS
VOL. 9 ISSUE 117 • TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2016
What is a national crisis
grasp of pubSPECKS OF LIFE lic issues and affairs. While the first two grabbed headlines for quite a time, it is because the subject Fred C. Lumba matter was so hot it increased street sales and earned huge revenues by way of commercial advertisements for both print and broadcast media. But the last two have such great proportions involving the national leadership that is why I consider them national crises. So, now that there is an intensified war against illegal drug lords and merchants and the PNP campaign has netted hundreds of dead suspected drug pushers nation-wide, would this qualify as a national crisis? No less than Pres. Duterte has said so. Since the presidential campaign, the tough-
talking former Davao City mayor has publicly pronounced that he will go after criminal elements involved in illegal drugs trafficking if he gets elected. He has announced time and again that the drug menace has engulfed the country, that even those in the rural barrios have become target markets of unscrupulous shabu agents, accepting payments in kind (chicken, fowls, vegetables, fish/rice harvest) to ply their nefarious trade and sustain their hold. The President is at the forefront of the country-wide campaign and that makes the issue a national concern. He has calendared to slay the dreaded and multi-headed dragon within three to six months, a timetable that some cynical jerks and observers feel is not possible (if not impossible) to achieve. Tell me, when a president has the political will to accomplish something - whether noble or not - doesn’t he have all the government resources at his beck and call? When PNoy called in his musketeers and ordered them to impeach SC Chief Justice Re-
nato Corona and programmed it to be finished in less than a year, did not PNoy utilized all, everything up in his sleeves to get rid of Corona? He was alleged to have used several hundred millions of taxpayers’ money disguised as carrots to convince his henchmen to vote for the ouster of the beleaguered chief magistrate. Did the mainstream media pummel PNoy and his cohorts with sustained critical comments enough to make it as a national crisis? Now, the question is asked consequently: Is the mainstream Manila-based media accurately and objectively reporting and covering the on-going anti-illegal drugs campaign? Without pinning the blame on anyone, it is very obvious that the drug menace grew from infancy to adulthood under the very noses of the past administration. Only Pres. Digong had the gall to call a spade a spade. Damn the torpedoes. The President made his oath to save the country and the Filipino people. (email your feedback to fredlumba@yahoo.com.) God bless the Philippines!
(now owned FAST BACKWARD by the Chua family of CNN Philippines and Philippine Graphic). Magdalena married Juan Ysmael, founder of a steel company, now Antonio V. Figueroa defunct, that bore his surname. When he died, she married a Hemady, another Lebanese, as her second spouse. Elsewhere in the Philippines, traces of Christ’s genetic relatives are still identifiable. The former Philippine envoy to Lebanon, Al Francis Bichara, was the grandson son of the former Lebanese ambassador to the country. The Carams of Iloilo are of Lebanese descent, and so are the Deen and Jureidini families of Cebu. The mother of Actress Marie Rachel Taleon, known also as Dawn Zulueta, was a Lebanese scion surnamed Salman. Other celebrities with Lebanese blood include singer Kuh Ledesma, Marinella Adad (Ana Roces), Yasmein Kurdi, and Jessica M. Tawile (Jessy Mendiola). In Davao region, the Lebanese community originated with the arrival in 1892 of John Awad (Juan Awad), a Syrian-Lebanese Maronite Christian from Beqaa Valley in modern-day Lebanon, from Iloilo. He is best remembered for three historical facts: he was the first recruiter of Japanese labor to work in abaca plantations in Davao; the first foreigner
to successfully cultivate a hemp plantation in barrio Belen (now Lapanday); and the owner of the first tallest structure in Mindanao. Awad’s three-story edifice, built in 1917, was constructed at the corner of C.M. Recto and San Pedro Streets where the offices of Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) and Philippine National Bank (PNB) are situated. The tallest part of the building housed the pre-war Cine Esperanza, named after his wife, a Cabaguio scion. The ground floor, on the other hand, was occupied by Awad’s general merchandise store, while the right ground was leased to the PNB, which first rented the property in 1918. But when the war arrived, the structure “where the local folks held cultural shows before the war… collapsed like a dollhouse at the blast of US bombs.” Less than three decades later, the Borghailys (Aburjaily) and the Sasins, both Awad relatives, arrived in Davao. The newcomers, finding extensive opportunities in town, engaged in merchandising. Salim Borghaily, the earliest to come, opened Borghaily Hermanos Store in 1929. Brisk business and a peaceful environment were considerations that encouraged him to stay. When his wife died, he went home to Lebanon bringing with him his Davao-born daughter but returned to the city after the war. Rashid travelled to Davao to take over Salim’s business. His initial commercial venture inspired his elder brother Jose to join him. Later, Charlie Sasin, a nephew, added his name to the list of Lebanese migrants who found success in Davao. Charlie’s brother Kamal and nephew Najib Borghaily followed to help manage the Borghaily trading firm.
It was Charlie who managed the first Borghaily branch at Santa Ana. The store was smaller compared to the original business, but was popular among the elite due to the fine Lebanese textiles, silks, and laces it exclusively sold. With the clan’s businesses safely ensconced, Charlie and uncle Rashid elected to become naturalized. Rashid took a Lebanese as wife, while Charlie wedded a Filipina who bore him four children. When war broke out, Charlie joined the local guerrilla movement but had a falling out with the leader of the resistance movement in Tagum. However, he became a good friend of Col. Thomas ‘Jock’ Clifford, the American military officer killed in Davao days before the city was liberated. Following Clifford’s death, Sasin was handpicked to handle the distribution of the goods placed under the supervision of the Philippine Constabulary Auxiliary Unit (PCAU). Against the rubbles of war, Borgaily’s Store reopened but was housed in another building along San Pedro Street. Habib, who had just arrived in Davao from Lebanon, took over the management of the store after his brother Najib opted to open his own business in Manila. Charlie, meanwhile, decided to venture into movie business by opening the Universal theatre, directly competing with the Liberty theatre owned by the pioneering Carriedo family. Going full circle, Sasin’s cinemas later hosted the showing of immortal films like The Bible (1966), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)—movies that depict the life of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus Christ.
Christ’s genetic kinfolk in Davao
HIS sounds extraordinary but true. In Davao City, the genetic relatives of Jesus, the central figure in Christianity, has been with Dabawenyos for over 130 years now! Harry Ostrer, M.D., director of Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine and author of a study conducted by an international team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Israel said “Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham.” In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 9, 2000, the scientific study discovered “that Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and these signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this region.” In short, the Jews, including Jesus Christ, and the Arabs “share a common ancestor [that stretches back thousands of years] and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world,” making Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese as genetic brothers. This genetic strain, in over a century, has become part of some migrant Filipino families from the Middle East, mostly Syrian-Lebanese, who arrived in the country at the tailend of Spanish rule and in the first quarter of the American colonial regime. In Manila, for instance, Magdalena Hashim, a member of the Lebanese elite, was known for the sprawling estate named after her, now known as the New Manila. Her family built the old Manila Grand Opera House
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