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."
(NYP)
Some West Bankers may still feel this morning as if they’ve just won
the $587 million Powerball jackpot — but they’ll soon realize that,
despite the dazzle of yesterday’s vote at the United Nations, they had
the wrong numbers: There’s no grand prize coming. Yes, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas managed to line up an
impressive number of General Assembly votes for his resolution naming
Palestine as a UN non-member “state.” Some 138 countries supported him;
nobody in “Old Europe” opposed. Only America, Canada, the Czech
Republic, Panama and several Pacific island states joined Israel in
voting nay (with 41 abstentions).
And, yes, the world media will wax poetic on Abbas’ diplomatic “victory.” His carefully crafted resolution enshrined Palestine as a non-member UN
“state” within the 1967 borders, including Jerusalem. (No territorial
swaps or anything else that requires negotiations with Israel.) It also
expressed the hope that the Security Council would soon accept the new
state’s request to become a full member. (America vetoed that request
last year.) Yet, privately,European and even some Arab diplomats were grumbling:
* Abbas’ move is a poke in PresidentObama’s eye, after a personal presidential appeal to delay.
* And — thanks to US law that defunds any UN agency that unilaterally
accepts Palestine as a member — it may harm the whole UN system.
And that’s from diplomats who voted for the resolution. Hey, that’s how Turtle Bay rolls. At the United Nations, no one flinched yesterday when the resolution was
introduced by world pariah Sudan, which is responsible for the Darfur
genocide.
Nor did anyone flinch hours earlier, when the ambassador of Sri Lanka
(which recently put down an insurrection in Tamil regions with
unprecedented ruthlessness), spoke in his capacity as chairman of the UN
“Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human
Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied
Territories.”
That’s the Turtle Bay way.
Last week, only Israel and Palau voted with America to oppose a
near-unanimous General Assembly resolution condemning the US embargo of
Cuba, a vote that’s recurred every year since 1960. The Castros crow
about their world popularity and the “isolation” of the United States;
the Union somehow manages to survive. So, yes, because of the UN’s near irrelevancy, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton was right in observing yesterday that the path to a
Palestinian state doesn’t go through New York.
But the “world community” fears that Abbas is growing irrelevant, so
even those who believed the resolution was ill-timed and bad for the
peace process supported it. (Still, none of Abbas’ Arab “brother”
statesmen bothered to show solidarity by sending a high-level
representative for the vote, as Turkey and Indonesia did.)
Yet the move will at best boost Abbas’ popularity among Palestinians for
a few days. After all, he’s been ruling over the West Bank by decree
since his term as an elected president expired back in 2009 — because
rival Hamas, which rules Gaza, would win any election by a landslide. And Hamas’ self-declared “victory” last month in Gaza has only increased
the appeal of the kind of “resistance” preached by the Islamist
terrorist organization.
So, in the long run, yesterday’s “historic” event won’t boost Abbas’ popularity among Palestinians.
Speaking of history: On Nov. 29, 1947, Arab leaders rejected a UN
resolution that recommended the establishment of two states, Arab and
Jewish, in then-British-mandated Palestine. Ever since, generations of
Palestinian leaders have preferred attacking the Jewish state to
building an Arab one. And yesterday’s maneuver, 65 years later,
continues that tradition.
Abbas called on the General Assembly to “issue a birth certificate on
the reality of the state of Palestine,” but back in the West Bank, that
state remains a mirage, and the vote won’t change that. Rather, as Abbas
& Co. proudly declare, it will empower them to drag Israeli leaders
to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Hence his pointed
talk yesterday about Israel’s “war crimes.”
Israel will survive. At the risk of stereotyping, it’d be a cruel joke
if in the end the Jews lost out because they’re bad lawyers.
But as long as Palestinian leaders keep busy inventing new ways to
bedevil Israel rather than improving the lot of their citizens, West
Bankers and Gazans will continue to celebrate imaginary winnings — only
to realize the next day that they’re still no closer to winning the
lottery prize. Hat tip: Eye On The World
