Duterte says foreign critics can be ‘human targets’ for military 

This is another bad Duterte joke, we hope.

During a visit to a military camp in Tarlac yesterday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said foreigners criticizing his deadly drug war can act like “human targets” for soldiers.

He said the statement to a group of soldiers, no less.

“Go ahead, one day if you run out of targets, and you want live fire and live human target, I will send three there, all of them white,” he said in Filipino, ABS-CBN News reported.

This came just a day after The International People’s Tribunal (IPT) ruled that Duterte was guilty of human rights violations, a decision Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque called a “sham.”

In January, the Human Rights Watch said that the Duterte-led war on drugs has killed more than 12,000 people since it started in 2016.

But Duterte said he has no plans to listen to these foreign critics, saying yesterday that he will only “bow to the Filipino people.”

“These white people, they come here to look for our faults,” he said.

The president said that unlike with foreigners, he would never take it against Filipinos for criticizing him.

Except this isn’t totally true.

In August last year, he joked about abolishing the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) if it would get in the way of his anti-narcotics crackdown. He also verbally attacked CHR chief Chito Gascon by calling him a pedophile for being “fixated” about the teenage deaths under the drug war.

Duterte’s latest statement about foreigners being targets is not the first inappropriate offer he raised to the military.

In May last year, he said that he would back soldiers who will rape women while manning the island of Mindanao under martial law.

This also isn’t the first time he vilified foreign critics. One example is the ongoing deportation case against Australian missionary Sr. Patricia Fox.

Duterte has admitted that he was the one who ordered an investigation on Fox, who in April was arrested and detained in the Bureau of Immigration (BI) for allegedly participating in partisan politics.

On Sunday, the BI denied Fox an extension of her missionary visa. On Tuesday, Fox was one of the witnesses who testified against Duterte in the IPT hearing in Brussels, Belgium.