A century before American soldiers fought Muslim terrorism in the Middle East, they fought it in the Philippines. Their attackers were Moro Muslims whose savage fanaticism appeared inexplicable. A formerly friendly Muslim might suddenly attack American soldiers, local Muslim rulers promised friendship while secretly aiding the terrorists and the yellow left-wing press at home seized on every report of an atrocity to denounce American soldiers as murderers whose honor was forever soiled.
Much of what went on in that conflict, including the sacrifices of our soldiers, has been forgotten. The erasure has been so thorough that the media casually claims that the American forces did not use pig corpses and pig’s blood to deter Muslim terrorists. Media fact checks have deemed it a “legend”.
It’s not a legend. It’s history.
The practice began in the Spanish period. A source as mainstream as the New Cambridge History of Islam informs us that, “To discourage Juramentados, the Spaniards buried their corpses with dead pigs.”
Juramentados was the Spanish term for the Muslim Jihadists who carried out suicide attacks against Christians while shouting about Allah. American forces, who had little experience with Muslim terrorists, adopted the term and the Spanish tactics of burying Muslim terrorists alongside dead pigs.
It was a less sensitive age and even the New York Times blithely observed that, “The Moros, though they still admire these frenzied exits from the world, have practically ceased to utilize them, since when a pig and a man occupy a single grave the future of the one and the other are in their opinions about equal.”
The New York Times conceded that the story “shocked a large number of sensitive people,” but concluded that, “while regretting the necessity of adopting a plan so repugnant to humane ideas, we also note that the Moros can stop its application as soon as they choose, and therefore we feel no impulse either to condemn its invention or to advise its abandonment. The scheme involves the waste of a certain amount of pork, but pork in hot climates is an unwholesome diet, anyhow, and the less of it our soldiers and other ‘infidels’ in the Philippines have to eat the better for them.”
Colonel Willis A. Wallace of the 15th Cavalry claimed credit for innovating the practice in March 1903 to dissuade the Muslim terrorist who believed that “every Christian he kills places him so much closer in contact with the Mohammedan heaven.”
“Conviction and punishment of these men seemed to have no effect,” Colonel Wallace related. After a “more than usually atrocious slaughter” in the marketplace, he had the bodies of the killers placed on display and encouraged “all the Moros in the vicinity who cared to do so to come and see the remains”.
