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 horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were
concealed from the wider Nazi population for very good reason: they were
not cruel enough to stomach it, despite their rabid anti-Semitism. This
is why comparing Hamas to the Nazis makes no sense at all.
In reaction to legacy media reports on the pogrom against Jews in
Amsterdam following a football match between a Dutch and a visiting
Israeli team on 7 November 2024, many criticised the characterising of
the Israeli fans as “football hooligans,” and the assertion that the
melée was spontaneous.
Shocking as the media and police conduct were, it
was not surprising. In this horrible episode, as in so many others, the
propaganda machine that is the media and the supposed Western European
forces of law and order have much to answer for.
What was surprising, however, was that the media consistently described the brutal perpetrators as Muslims,
rather than jihadists, extremists, fundamentalists or “Islamists”. In
this case, thankfully, we do not have that shameful obfuscation of
Muslim behaviour to contend with alongside everything else. As analyses
started coming in, though, other bad habits became evident. Notable is
the notion that Muslims learned their anti-Semitism from the Nazis.
In some instances, blaming the Nazis for Muslim Jew-hatred is an attempt to exculpate Muslims, such as in the work of Dr Matthias Küntzel, and in the others, such as J-TV
in the present context, it could be down to simple ignorance. The close
collaboration between the Nazis and Arab Muslims, and the existence of Arab Nazis,
are well-established, as is the Nazi promotion and encouragement of
Arab Jew-hatred.
Undoubtedly, Muslim Jew-hatred intensified and took
more organised forms as a result of Nazi cultivation of a relationship
with Middle Eastern Muslim leaders. "August 14, 1938. Ahmed Hussein,
leader of Young Egypt, returns from Europe more active in calling for
fascism and Nazism in Egypt," Said Shahat in Youm7, (electr. translation).
It
can equally easily be shown that German and Muslim authoritarianism, in
the coinciding aspects of their mindsets, sought each other out, and
had found each other already before the outbreak of WWI, when what was
later to become Nazism manifested only as its still uncoalesced
components.
These components appealed to both the Turkish and the Arab
intelligentsias, who admired the pre-WWI Germans as suitable role
models, while in the 1920s, both Mussolini and Hitler looked up to
Ataturk as the model dictator, a dictator’s dictator, one might say.
Even Rohullah Khomeini spent many an hour absorbing Nazi radio
broadcasts from Berlin.
The fascist Young Egypt Party (Green Shirts), of
which Gamal Abdel Nasser was a member, modelled itself on the Nazi
Brown Shirts. The Muslim Brotherhood goons were described as the Supreme
Guide Hassan al-Banna’s Gestapo. The governance system that the Muslim
Brotherhood had, and still has, in mind is akin to what Adolf Hitler had
in mind. According to Al-Banna:
We are not eager to have a Parliament of the representatives
of the people, or a cabinet of ministers, unless such representatives
and ministers are Qur’anic Moslems. If we do not find them, then we must
ourselves serve as the Parliament. Allah and the religious councils
will limit our authority so that no one has to fear dictatorship.
(Hassan el-Banna, quoted in John Roy Carlson, From Cairo to Damascus, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1951, p92ff.)
By
the time the Nazis started their persecution of Jews, Arab Muslims of
all classes were wild with enthusiasm for Nazism, some seeing it as a
form of Islam. The Nazis were managing to accomplish what Muslims could
only dream of. The most that can be said, though, is that the Nazis
showed Muslims a way towards their goal, and that goal, right from the
beginning, has always been the extermination of the Jews.
The
last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews
and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves
behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the
servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the
tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Sahih Muslim 6985)
