2:00 - 3:30
Anthropologist Thomas McKenna brings a dramatic story of Philippine guerrilla fighters to life in MORO WARRIOR.
MORO WARRIOR tells the remarkable true story of the Philippine Muslim (Moro) resistance fighters of World War II—the most successful and least-known guerrillas of the Pacific Theater. It is the story of Mohammad Adil, a sword-wielding warrior chieftain commissioned as a junior officer in Douglas MacArthur’s guerrilla army while still a teenager. Confident in his secret protective powers learned from a Sufi master, Adil roamed the highland rainforests with a price on his head, attacking Japanese outposts, surviving ambushes and gaining a reputation as a man who could not be killed.
Thomas McKenna, Ph.D. is an anthropologist who has lived and worked for years in Moro communities in the Philippines and has spent decades writing and conducting research on their culture and history. As an academic, he has won writing and teaching awards and has been invited to present his work on the Moros at Oxford University, the U.S. State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Muslim Rulers and Rebels and a number of other published works. He lives with his wife in San Francisco.
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Filipino American Interest
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