This article was written based on the view of the Filipinos and their media. Readers can simply click on the respective links to read the full content.

Under International law, it is not the distance of those islands that determines who they belonged. If that is the case, Cocos island in Australia should belong to Indonesia as it is closer to Indonesia and the natives are Muslims and speak Indonesian.

The main objective of this article is to present the views of the parties in the dispute. Mainstream Western media is shockingly untruthful in the way they report the incident. They have totally ignored the voices of those involved in the dispute and simply asserted the personal opinion of the journalist or writer as facts.

To understand the art of media disinformation, read this: http://outcastjournalist.com/index_files/media_disinformation.htm

Dear Mr Wei,

Of course, Filipinos are entitled to consider a shoal or reef or island barely 200 km from their capital city to be part of their country, IF the shoals are well within their territorial waters, AND there is no other country for many hundreds of km AND if they have been fishing there for more than a thousand years.

Of course, Cocos Island and Christmas Island should logically be Indonesian territory, but as it happens, they were settled and populated by British interests in the days of colonialism, and Australia inherited responsibilities for them. As well, they are much further away from Indonesia than the Scarborough Shoals are from the Philippines, outside of Indonesia's territorial waters.

Back during the Ming dynasty, the neo-colonialist assertion goes, a Chinese ship visited the Philippines - but this was in the days when there were very active trade relations between the Champa Hindu kingdom (in present-day Vietnam: does this give Vietnam the right to claim the Philippines?) and the Philippines (tablets have been excavated around Manila written in various Indian languages), between the Thai kingdom and the Philippines, and perhaps the Japanese and the Philippines, not to mention the trade activity between all of those countries and Sri Vijaya and other Malay and Indonesian kingdoms, as well as Arab traders.

Many of these traders also visited Chinese ports (there were Hindu and Muslim temples in old Canton): did this give their governments the right to claim the coasts of China ? I don't think so.

The faintly colonial notion that China has some sort of claim merely because a Chinese ship once visited there, really does hark back to the nineteenth century, but it's an interesting principle. Perhaps the visits to various Chinese cities by German, French, British, Russian and Japanese ships in the nineteenth century, give those imperialist countries some rights to claim Chinese territory - is that what you are suggesting ?

You really do need to get your history right, and to remember that - thankfully - the days of imperialism are over :)

Cheers,

Joe