In Mindinao, Phillipines, the war there got startly partly because drunk Chrisitan soldiers from Luzon tried to talk to pretty young girls without their fathers or brothers having introduced them. And when they tried to lead their daughters away, the soldiers, average age 16 years old, shot the fathers and brothers and raped the girls in one instance I had intimate knowledge of, while I was there.
The bridge I was about to cross was dynamited when two cars of front of me were crossing it. They Muslims had to do it, because that stopped the Catholic Marcos invaders from Luzon.
It was done to protect the Muslim village from Catholic invaders from Luzon sent by the now deceased Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe crazy wife, Imelda.
My Filipino Muslim friends who were murdered shortly after I left, some of them only 12 years old, killed by Marco's army under orders to murder the families than owned the properties so Marcos could take over the resources on their vast ancestral properties.
I saw with my own eyes that the war there is due to the government from Luzon, where Manila is, was killing inheritors of ancestral lands and taking over their lumber forests. Then the dishonest dictator back then, Marcos, massacred a Christian village and blamed it on the Muslims so he would have an excuse to kill them and take their resources, and stupid America believed him because he called them communists, and gave him weapons to massacre the poor land owners.
I am not a Muslim and I didn't tell the Muslims I was Jewish and American. They assumed I was Arab, since Arabs and Jews look similiar.
I saw the injustice with my own eyes in this situation. I helped the people not because they were Muslims but because they were people who were in grave danger, and had their ancestors not been invaded by Muslims they would not have been Muslims. They'd have been spirit animists, or people who revered nature and the animals that lived with them in the rainforests and mountains.
I got the truth to President Ford, then president, who thanked me in a letter saying the U.S. government needs private citizens to come forth and tell the truth because national leaders with hidden agendas can't always be trusted not to twist the truth. In fact, I saw on television in Manila an actor portraying a real Muslim leader I had met named Rashid Lukeman.
That actor was on the news giving a speech as if ihe was Rashid, the leader of that area's resistance to Marcos' invasion -murder-land grabbing.
The actor pretending to be Lukeman was saying terrible hateful things and making threats I'd never expect to come out of Rashid's mouth. I respected Rashid,.
The fake news reel made Christian citizens in Luzon believe Muslims were killing the Christians there so they were the bad guys, and not their own government, when it was the opposite.But then it became true, later on, because they retaliated eventually, of course, to fight back.
The power hungry government leader from Luzon, Marcos, was behind all this misery making.
I felt sorry for my Muslim female friends I met in Mindinao though because as Muslims, they were being treated the same way Jewish and Christian women used to be treated. They were sold for dowries to men much older than they were and were raped on their wedding nights, two admitted this to me. They were basically treated like breeding cows.
The advantage their families saw might have been that an older man was stable and could feed them while their parents, impoverished, often could no longer do so.
I supported the cause of the Moro Liberation Front against the evil dictator, President Marcos, who had canceled democratic elections to remain president and who some said cheated during elections.
A friend was smuggling them in some antibiotics and much needed medecal supplies to save them after they were badly injured. Anyone who had been there at the time would have felt for them.
The bottom line is, people are people and its like two basket ball teams except they are fighting to the death.
I wish there was some way to cause all holy books to vanish and give everyone collective amnesia so we could stop killing each other. Maybe killing each other is nature's way of keeping down the human population from destroying all the rest of nature.
Anyway, that war in Mindinao got worse because there, at least, it is very true that women are forbidden to speak to boys or men without being introduced by their fathers uncles or older brothers.