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."
When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:
Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom
some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil —
these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even
Path!
You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates
that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren
on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support
them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from
the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains
to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last
vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.
The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi.
It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60
of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim
commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.
Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both
sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen
insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern
Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through
exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of
Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently,
despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.
You may recall hearing this little ditty from the Hamas charter —
often echoed by ministers of the Palestinian Authority and in the
preachments of Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on whose every word
millions hang weekly on al-Jazeera (or is it al-Gore?):
The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war
against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and
tree, and the rock and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah,
there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”
Again, these are not sentiments dreamt up by “violent extremists”
waging a modern, purely political “resistance” against oppressive
“Zionists.” The prophet’s admonition that Muslims will be spared the
hellfire by killing Jews is repeated in numerous authoritative hadiths
(see, e.g., Sahih Muslim Book 41, No. 6985; Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, No. 791).
Hadiths, it is worth emphasizing, are the recorded actions and
instructions of Mohammed, who is taken by Muslims to be the “perfect
example” they are to emulate. And in case you suppose, after years of
listening to Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama, that the
prophet must ultimately have come around on the Jews, you might want to
rethink that one. Another hadith, relating Mohammed’s dying words,
recounts his final plea: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians.”
(Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 8, No. 427.)
Now of course, none of this is to say that it is impossible for Islam
to evolve beyond anti-Semitism. As individuals, millions of Muslims
want no part of the ancient hatreds. As scholars and activists, a number
of Muslim reformers admirably endeavor to erase this legacy by limiting
it to its historical context, reducing it to allegory, or casting doubt
on its provenance. Let’s hope these efforts eventually bear fruit.
After all, as noted above, anti-Semitism stains the West’s legacy, too;
and as discussed in this space before,
the history of Christianity in America is a history of evolving beyond
punishments and practices akin to those we today presume to look down
our noses at as if we were total strangers to invidious discrimination
and assaults on freedom of speech and conscience.
