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."
The real pandemic today is not
the coronavirus, but cowardice. Nonetheless, even in these days of
political correctness, wokeness, the cancel culture, and “hate speech,”
there are a few public figures with courage. One of them is Rick
Phillips, a Republican Congressional candidate from Iowa, who has dared
to grasp the third rail of American public life and state that Islam is
not actually the cuddly religion of peace that every enlightened
American assumes it to be at this point.
The Des Moines Register
reported Monday that Phillips’ “platform calls for redefining Islam as
‘militant cultural imperialism seeking world domination,’” and that he
“drew fire Monday for saying he doesn’t believe Islam is protected under
the First Amendment. Phillips stated on Quad Cities
TV station WHBF that the Founding Fathers had only Christianity in mind
when they wrote the First Amendment. “They were not talking about
anti-Christian beliefs,” he explained. “Now, if a person doesn’t want to
believe in Christ, that’s their business. But to say that this First
Amendment right includes all religions in the world, I think, is
erroneous.”
The usual reaction ensued, Robert McCaw of the Hamas-linked
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), demanded that both the
Iowa Republican Party and the national Republican Party “repudiate these
Islamophobic, unconstitutional views.” McCaw thundered: “The
Constitution must protect Americans of all faiths. The kind of hatred
and anti-American views promoted by Mr. Phillips places in danger both
constitutional protections of religious freedoms and the safety of
ordinary American Muslims.”
Responding like the good
invertebrate that most Republican Party leaders are, Iowa party
spokesman Aaron Britt said that Phillips’ statements “are not reflective
of the views of the Republican Party of Iowa.” Lost in all this predictable
intimidation on the one hand and equally predictable pusillanimity on
the other was the question of whether or not Phillips was right. Surely
everyone can agree, or should agree, that the First Amendment is not and
was never intended to be a license to commit all manner of crimes if
such activity is mandated by one’s religion. No one, Muslim or
non-Muslim, should be considered anything but innocent until proven
guilty, but sooner or later the United States and all non-Muslim
countries is going to have to have a public conversation about how much
to tolerate a belief system that is itself radically intolerant,
authoritarian, supremacist, and violent.
Can Muslims in the U.S.
repudiate those aspects of Islam? Should they? This discussion needs to
take place, but right now it is covered over by claims of
“Islamophobia.” In the same way, lost in the shuffle also was the
question of whether or not Islam really is “militant cultural
imperialism seeking world domination.”
Inconveniently for Robert McCaw
and his ilk, there are certainly some Muslims who think it is. I could
quote violent passages of the Qur’an, but those might be waved away with
the dismissive and erroneous claim that the Bible contains similar
exhortations to violence. Let’s focus instead on what Islamic
authorities say. One might get the impression that Islam is not a
religion of peace from the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the
schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib):
Shafi’i school: A
Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics
at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic
world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad
that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until
they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment
by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence:
the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited
[Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and
practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social
order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining
in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).
