Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Self-described Sufi moderate Imam Rauf may prove to be an Islamic version of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. With Wright, the Left kept insisting that outrage over his racist and anti-American remarks was driven by right-wing racism, and for a while, the narrative worked — hence Obama’s pre-under-the-bus assertion that he “could no more disown Reverend Wright than” etc. But then Wright committed the mortal sin of insulting the elite media right at their embryo, at the D.C. National Press Club.
So too Imam Rauf. He has a vast record of quackery — the latest tidbit is his 2005 contorted assertion that Westerners have more innocent Muslim blood on their hands than does al-Qaeda (e.g., “We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims”), presumably because between 1991 and 2003 America tried to stop Saddam’s aggressions and WMD program through non-violent sanctions. Given Rauf’s long paper trail and bad habit of talking in different personas to different audiences, much more will drip out each day, as was the case with Wright’s DVDs and occasional outbursts. And that might necessitate a correction of Obama’s grandstanding, disingenuous remarks to his iftar Muslim audience, in which the president deliberately conflated legal right with ethical and moral sensibility and earned a standing ovation for his distortion.
Perhaps with two or three more disclosures from Imam Rauf’s corpus of speeches, we will hear a stronger walk-back from the president — something analogous to “The person I saw yesterday is not the person I met 20 years ago.” Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review