Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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 "Islamophobia" Regime by Dexter Van Zile - Middle East Quarterly
Thursday, February 16, 2023
In a number of recent books, Muslims living in the West are
portrayed as hapless victims of oppression and their non-Muslim
neighbors as the eternal oppressors.
Middle East Forum : If the nearly uniform narrative offered in a spate of recent books
about "Islamophobia" is to be believed, Western Muslims, who enjoy
freedoms denied to their brethren in most places in the world, are being
tyrannized by hateful white Westerners afflicted with an irrational
"phobia" of Islam and its adherents, which drives them to blithely
reenact the crimes their ancestors perpetrated in previous centuries
against indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere.
In these books, Muslims living in the West are the hapless victims of
oppression, and their non-Muslim neighbors are the eternal oppressors.
Accordingly, these oppressors can only offload their burden of
civilizational guilt (and the punishment it invites) by confessing their
sins (and those of their ancestors), engage in acts of contrition, and
convert, either to Islam itself or to a political agenda that acquiesces
in Islamist assaults on the rights historically accorded to citizens in
Western democracies. Under this arrangement, the only rights that need
to be protected are those of Muslims; non-Muslims have no rights, only
rules and liabilities.
To stay out of trouble under this arrangement, non-Muslim Westerners
must offer effusive praise for Muslims or remain silent about all things
Islamic. They must agree to have their speech policed by a coalition of
Islamists and their leftist political fellow travelers and the public
institutions this coalition has either captured or rendered ineffective.
To enforce this silence, non-Muslims who dare speak about the
relationship between Islamic doctrine, Islamism, and jihadist violence
are lumped in with Islamic terrorists who "misunderstand" or "pervert"
their faith and kill people in its name. In the upside-down environment
created by the "Islamophobia" charge, people who speak critically of
Islam, Muslims, Islamism, or Shari'a need to be monitored as much asāif
not more thanāthe Islamists and jihadists themselves.
The Blame Game
The precipitating event for the publication of these recent
"Islamophobia" books and the popularization of the narrative they offer,
appears to be the candid, unrestrained, and, in some instances,
admittedly hyperbolic discussion of Islamic violence and unregulated
immigration into the United States that erupted during Donald Trump's
2016 presidential campaign. The authors of these books deploy the
"Islamophobia" accusation in a transparent effort to put the genie of
free speech about these issues back into the bottle from which it
escaped with Trump's rise to power.