WE VIEW with alarm and concern the move of the Philippine National Police (PNP) to profile Muslim students in high schools, colleges and universities in the National Capital Region as part of its supposed fight against violent extremism.
Targeting Muslim students in counterterrorism reeks of the police’s ignorance and Islamophobia. It poses serious risks to Muslim students including children. It promotes discrimination and severely undermines their safety and security.
This PNP move must be challenged because it’s only a matter of time before this becomes a nationwide practice and policy. Such move may create fear among Muslim youth of being falsely accused of joining in terroristic activities or sympathizing with violent extremists.
It is deplorable that the PNP would want to target these young Muslim students to supposedly counter violent extremism, which is short of saying that Muslims are more likely to become extremists or terrorists. But the reality is, these students and our schools have nothing to do with the government’s wars, and therefore should not be used as avenues in the furtherance of such. Schools should remain zones of peace, free of police and military intrusion.
We urge the PNP to respect our Muslim brothers and sisters; and observe existing laws on the children’s rights
As violence and impunity reign, we are concerned that the profiling may also be deliberately used by police authorities as a tool to target students and organizations in high schools, colleges and universities that are critical to government policies; or as a further basis for subjecting innocent individuals to unwarranted arrest, detention or worse to extrajudicial killings as we have witnessed under the war on drug campaign of the current administration. By the way, the same slanderous practices have been observed in other police and military activities in schools such as the Kabataan Kontra Droga at Terorismo and Executive Order 70 seminars, where legitimate organizations of students, teachers, and rights defenders are tagged as terrorists.
The lumping together of civilians, dissenters, and champions of people’s welfare with armed groups engaged in an actual war with the government is a dangerous and illegal practice that completely isolates the state and its forces from the very people it’s supposed to serve.
The Department of Education must prevent further rights violations of students – and teachers, too. As an education institution, it is its duty to protect students from such dangerous ignorance and discriminatory practices and more importantly, to counter these by ensuring that schools remain safe spaces where diversity of beliefs and thoughts is valued and respected, and critical thinking is honed without threats of any kind.
