Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. is currently in hot water after he refused to apologize in a recent interview for President Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 remarks about the Holocaust.
Journalist Arnd Henze interviewed Locsin for ARD-Hauptstadtstudio, a Berlin-based television network on Monday.
In the interview, Henze showed a clip of Duterte’s 2016 speech where he said that like Hitler who killed three million Jews, he was willing to slaughter three million drug addicts.
When asked by Henze whether he wanted to apologize for Duterte, Locsin said: “No, I won’t. That’s how he expresses himself. Remember his policy, according to surveys, has inspired greater confidence. Why would we give up on that?”
In the video, Locsin added: “I myself said the same thing even before he (Duterte) said it.”
In another tweet, Henze said that this was not the first time Locsin made offensive comments. Henze added screenshots of Locsin’s tweets where he mentioned Nazis and the Holocaust.
In 2016, Locsin apologized after he made some pro-Nazi tweets on Twitter. He has since deleted them.
In our interview, Philippine‘s Foreign Minister embraced remarks of President #Duterte about Hitler and slaughtering 3 Million drug addicts. It‘s not the first time he made extremly offensive comments with reference to the Shoa. pic.twitter.com/IU5EFsoyu8
— Arnd Henze (@arndhenze) February 19, 2019
In a direct message sent to Coconuts Manila, Locsin said Duterte’s remarks were a figure of speech.
“I told him the President referring to Hitler killing 3 million Jews is a metaphor or figure of speech. The killing of twice that number of Jews by the Germans is a fact, along with the killing of 20 million Russians; the near-unanimous election of Hitler as Chancellor; the passage of a law after millions of Jews were already born making it a capital offense to have been born a Jew; and since brought it up later the killing of Anne Frank,” he said.
Henze also divulged on Twitter today that the acting Philippine ambassador to Germany was summoned by the German Foreign Ministry because of Locsin’s refusal to apologize.
Locsin became the center of controversy last month after he said that a contractor took off with passport data, only for him to backtrack and say that they didn’t.
He also made headlines earlier this week when he said that he was going to “kill” whoever asks for a birth certificate from a person who is getting his passport renewed.
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