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."
Why Turkey Will Never Join the EU By Andrew C. McCarthy
Sunday, September 30, 2012
When
Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister of Turkey, it was anything
but clear that he would last more than a few months. The military, the
constitutional guardian of AtatĆ¼rkās secular order, had killed the
Islamist administration of Erdoganās mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, only a
few years earlier. At the time, Erdogan was jailed for several months as
a seditionist. Though he was nonetheless permitted to assume the prime
ministerās office in 2003 after leading his Islamist party to victory,
the man who famously proclaimed āI am a servant of shariaā still aroused
great suspicion. To survive and thrive, Erdogan would have to find ways to erode and
nullify his Kemalist opponents. Thanks to Europe, he had cards to play.
In their obsession over not being seen as Islamophobic, in their
purblind insistence that aggressive supremacism is not the nature of
mainstream Islam, European elites assume that they know Islam better
than did such Muslim giants as AtatĆ¼rk and his contemporary, Hassan
al-Banna ā the Muslim Brotherhood founder who notoriously wrote that āit
is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominatedā and that Islam
sought āto impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the
entire planet.ā It is an unremitting fact that mainstream Middle Eastern Islam is
totalitarianism packaged as āreligion.ā To be sure, critics of Islam can
go too far with this point. It is wrong to say, as some do, that Islam
is not a religion. The doctrine has a number of spiritual principles ā
the oneness of Allah, to take a prominent example. There are, moreover,
interpretations of Islam that focus only on its spiritual and mystical
elements. If such interpretations were dominant, Islam would be of no
more moment to us than it would if it were true, as the fiction holds,
that Islam is a āreligion of peaceā that has been āhijackedā by
āradicals.ā But the fact is that Islamic supremacism is the preponderant Islam of
the Middle East. Yes, it is a religion, but it aspires to be so much
more: to control every aspect of life, to impose shariaās political,
social, and economic strictures on civil society. Therefore, the
guidelines for religions that pose no threat to free societies cannot be
applied to Middle Eastern Islam without putting liberty in grave
jeopardy.
