Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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."
The day of reckoning is here. For over 30 years, the United States government and the institutions
that drive public opinion have made like Susan Rice when it comes to the
ideological threat that Islamic supremacists pose to freedom,
fabricating reasons to remain in denial. Thus inured, the American
people have elected, and now reelected, a president notoriously fond of
America-bashing Islamists. The attraction would not be hard to
understand if we were not so ideology-averse ā GOP strategists having
made Obamaās radicalism a subject nearly as off-limits as Islamic
supremacism, helpfully leaving the Left to fill the canvas with their
portrait of Mitt Romney: āWhere Gordon Gekko Meets Michael Vick.ā The president is a movement leftist who sees in our society a
condemnable legacy of racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation
that cries out for āfundamental change.ā That is not meaningfully
different from the Islamist perspective of America: The Brotherhoodās self-proclaimed mandate to
āeliminate and destroy Western civilization from withinā by āsabotageā
is, in effect, a cognate summons to āfundamental change,ā even allowing
that Islamists are driven to statism by sharia rather than Marxism. The
Brotherhoodās American mouthpiece, the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, brags that
the president nabbed 85 percent of the Muslim vote on November 6 ā
larger even than Obamaās lopsided share of the Hispanic vote, which has
GOP strategists hyperventilating. You wouldnāt want to take CAIR claims
at face value, but their ardor for Obama, like the Brotherhoodās, is
palpable. And as weāve seen for four years, it is not an unrequited
love. So along comes Hamas. Just
days before the presidential election, the terrorist organization ā
begotten by the Brotherhood and serving as its Palestinian branch ā
spearheaded an Islamist offensive, firing in just a few days over 120
rockets into the Jewish state from its home base in Gaza. You may not
have heard about it until a few days after the election. Like Iranās act
of war in shooting at a U.S. drone in international waters, it signaled
a further dangerous unraveling of the Middle East that undercut the
media narrative of Obama as foreign-policy chess master, so it was
tucked under the rug. But it could not be ignored forever, for it is not
just another spike in the ever-thrumming Gaza border skirmish. It is
the renewal of an unending war ā an existential one for Israel, which is
expected to fight āproportionately,ā with both hands tied behind its
back, yet blithely accept, as the international community has, the
barbaric Islamist claim that nothing short of Israelās destruction will
be satisfactory. By its own declaration,
Hamas will be at war with Israel until the latterās demise. Toward that
end, the jihad has now been taken to population centers such as Tel
Aviv. As of this writing, the Israeli death toll stands at three, kept
low only by the crudeness of the jihadist weapons and tactics.By the calculation of
terrorism analyst Ryan Mauro, the onslaught begun last week brought the
yearly total of missile attacks on Israel to about 700. That is, while
the Obama administration has been facilitating the Muslim Brotherhoodās
rise in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and soon Syria ā with Obama drawing ever
closer to Turkeyās Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even
as Erdogan champions and funds Hamas ā Gazaās jihadists have been
emboldened to step up their terror campaign. 1 2Next > National Review
