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."
Twenty Years after the WTC Bombing - We are today more willfully blind by Andrew C. McCarthy
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Lars Hedegaard :.... we simply insist on our right to defend freedom, democracy, the rule
of law, and individual and sexual equality. We also insist on our right
to criticize religious fanatics of every stripe who try to impose
theocratic laws and customs on free societies. When I was a young Marxist during the 1960s and ’70s, these opinions
used to be described as characteristic of the political left. Nowadays
the defenders of such positions are routinely labeled as right-wing or
as belonging to the “extreme right.” Meanwhile, what used to be the left
is cozying up to holy men who want adulterous women to be stoned,
homosexuals to be hanged, apostates from Islam to be killed, and
1,200-year-old laws emanating from somewhere in the Arabian desert to
replace our free constitutions.
Today
is the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. It also
marks three weeks since the attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard, the
intrepid Danish champion of free speech. These events are not unrelated. Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort to limn the WTC bombers as
wanton killers. They were, we were to understand, bereft of any coherent
belief system, unrepresentative of any mainstream construction of
Islam. In reality, though, they were devout Muslim operatives who
belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the New York area by Omar Abdel
Rahman — whose notoriety as the shadowy “Blind Sheikh” obscured the
basis of his profound influence over Islamists across the globe.
Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an
internationally renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in
the jurisprudence of sharia — Islam’s societal framework and legal code
— from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic
learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by
several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of
building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination —
in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful
to a terrorist organization . . . other than leading it. It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s indisputable mastery of
Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give present-day vitality to
a seventh-century summons to holy war, that vaulted him to the
forefront of the jihad. The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic supremacism’s declaration
of war on the United States. It was a blunt statement by the savage
shock troops of a worldwide movement that America — “the head of the
snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us — could be struck at home, right
in the beating heart of economic liberty. Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind
to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 — back when
our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming
invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our
reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam — the dynamic Islam of the Middle
East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time,
while settling in non-Muslim lands — is aggressively hegemonic. As
proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder
Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be
dominated.” And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the
irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray
them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the
systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities
in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to
undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always
the same: the imposition of sharia. The rationale of jihadist terror is to diminish our resolve to resist
the gradual erosion of freedom and the relentless demands of Islamists —
especially, Islamists of the Brotherhood variety. After the Blind
Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have softened up the target, it is the
Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably well-mannered and wearing neatly
tailored suits, they flack for Hamas and maintain, straight-faced, that
free speech is not so much a right to condemn their totalitarian
ideology as a responsibility to suppress examination of it.
In that ideology, the implementation of classical sharia is the
necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. Sharia is the
architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s president,
Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that when
elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia, then
the sharia, and finally the sharia” — a promise on which he has followed
through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they terrorists, or
faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue totalitarian
ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses who celebrate
9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power. We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20
years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks
on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture.There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of
Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive,
like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan — President
Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director — distort
the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not
merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the
objective examination of Islamic supremacism. National Review
