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."
Manipulating math to rescue ‘Palestine’ By Moshe Phillips
Friday, March 07, 2025
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas arrives to the Samaria city of Ramallah after his return from Berlin, Aug. 18, 2022
JNS : A prominent Washington think tank analyst
has added up various terrorism statistics to “prove” that a Palestinian
Arab state might not be such a bad idea after all. The problem is that
his math is all wrong.
Writing in Mosaic this week,
Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy implores
Israel not to give up on the Palestinian statehood idea. Because, he
says, the math shows that having the Palestinian Authority around has
reduced terrorism.
Except that it hasn’t.
Satloff compares three periods. There were
the 18 years from 1968 to 1985, when there was no Palestinian Authority
and there were 542 Israeli deaths in terrorist attacks. Then there were
the fifteen years between 1986 and 2000—leading up to the Second
Intifada—when the number of terror fatalities dropped to 472. Then he
skips the Second Intifada years, and looks at the eighteen years between
2005 and 2022—when that number dropped even further, to 334.
Satloff’s conclusion: Thanks to the
creation of the P.A. in 1994, terrorism has decreased. Therefore, he
argues, it’s good that there’s a P.A., and maybe Israel should even give
it a sovereign state at some point.
Part of the problem with this math is that
his conclusions are based on body counts, but body counts don’t tell
the whole story as to whether or not terrorism overall is increasing or
decreasing. The outcome of a terrorist attack is determined by numerous
factors. Last week, for example, terrorists failed to correctly set the
timers on their bus explosives, so nobody was killed. In Satloff’s
calculation, that would count as a “zero.”
