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."
Raymond Ibrahim : While monuments to heroic Americans of a former age—including abolitionists who died fighting slavery—get
toppled and dishonored, a land-grabber, mass-slaver, terrorist, and
pedophile—Ottoman sultan Muhammad II—was recently honored by the
president of Turkey.
During his recent public address
celebrating the July 10, 2020 decree to transform the Hagia Sophia,
which for a millennium had functioned as Eastern Christendom’s greatest
church, into a mosque, Turkish president Erdoğan repeatedly saluted
Sultan Muhammad (1432-1481), also known as al-Fatih (“the Conqueror”),
for violently transforming Christian Constantinople into Islamic
Istanbul.
Of the apparently intolerable decades when Hagia Sophia served as a
museum (1935 to the recent decision), Erdoğan began by quoting a Turkish
poet:
Hagia Sophia, O magnificent temple, do not worry: the
grandchildren of Muhammad al-Fatih will overthrow all the [Christian]
idols and convert you into a mosque; they will perform their ablutions
with tears and prostrate; tahlils [recitations of the Islamic credo] and takbirs
[cries of “Allahu akbar”] will replenish your empty domes … Your
minaret balconies will light up in honor of Allah and his Prophet
Muhammad. The whole world will think that Muhammad al-Fatih has
resurrected. This will be Hagia Sophia; this will be a second conquest,
a new resurrection”
Erdoğan’s and much of Turkey’s adoration of and desire to emulate
Muhammad al-Fatih—this, to quote Erdoğan, “happy, blessed servant of
Allah,” who in fact behaved like an ISIS chieftain—should (but won’t) be
cause for alarm.
Consider: Sultan Muhammad’s sole justification for conquering
Constantinople was that Islam demands the subjugation of “infidels,” in
this case, Christians. He had no other “grievance” than that. In fact,
when he first became sultan, he “swore by the god of their prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian
contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their friend, and would
remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.”
Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest
arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on
his lips while war was in his heart.” During the siege of Constantinople, he regularly exhorted his
followers with jihadi ideology, including by unleashing throngs of
preachers crying: