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."
‘Blame It On the Video’ Was a Fraud for the Cairo Rioting, Too By Andrew C. McCarthy
Monday, May 13, 2013
With
all the attention the Obama administration’s lies about the Benghazi
terrorist attack are, at long last getting, an aspect of the scandal
remains under-examined: the assumption that the anti-Islamic video so
tirelessly touted by President Obama and his minions as the provocation
causing the Benghazi violence did, in fact, cause the rioting at the
U.S. embassy in Cairo hours earlier on September 11, 2012. This
conventional wisdom is wrong. There is a kernel of truth to it, which is
more than you can say about the video’s connection to Benghazi, but no
more than that. As we have covered here before (see, e.g., here), the release and return to Egypt of the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman (whom I prosecuted in the Nineties), has been a cause célèbre in Egypt for many years. On September 10, 2012, the day before rioting at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, an Egyptian weekly, El Fagr, reported that several jihadist organizations, including the Blind Sheik’s group (Gamaat al-Islamia,
or the Islamic Group) and al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group
(Egyptian Islamic Jihad), were threatening to burn the American embassy
in Cairo to the ground. The promised action against the embassy was an
effort to extort the release of Abdel Rahman and other jihadists jailed
by the United States.
We know this thanks to the invaluable
Raymond Ibrahim — who makes it his business to scour the Arabic press,
where Islamic supremacists are actually covered. Ray published a post on it in the PJ Tatler. The post echoes my observation,
from back in July, that the Blind Sheik’s son, Abdallah Abdel Rahman,
was threatening to raid the U.S. embassy in Cairo and hold our people
hostage to coerce his father’s release.More significantly, as an alert Bryan Preston notices at PJ Media, Ray’s post the day before the Cairo rioting and Benghazi Massacre dovetails with Stephen Hayes’s latest excellent report
on Benghazi. In discussing the CIA’s first round of talking points
— later substantially erased under pressure from the State Department
and the White House — Steve points out the Agency’s assertion that “on
10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a
demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were
threatening to break into the Embassy.”
Note that neither the
Egyptian press report outlined by Ibrahim, nor the CIA report outlined
by Hayes, made any mention of the video. The fear was threatened violence from al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists.So
how did the anti-Islamic video makes its way into the story? It
increasingly appears that the Obama administration did more to publicize
and the video and make it relevant than anyone else did.As I
said above, there is a kernel of truth to the claim that the video
factored into the Cairo rioting. On September 9, two days before, the
Grand Mufti publicly denounced
“the actions undertaken by some extremist Copts who made a film
offensive to the Prophet.” This denunciation led some of the Cairo
hooligans to inveigh against the video.
It was, however, only one
item in a broad list of grievances Islamic supremacists lodged against
the United States. Many of the rioters focused on demanding the release
of the Blind Sheikh and other jihadists. More to the point, many of them
expressed their support for al Qaeda. They gleefully chanted,
“Obama, Obama, there are still a million Osamas!” They tore down the
Stars-and-Stripes from our flagpole, replacing it with al Qaeda’s
notorious black jihad banner. The claim that the Cairo rioting was
over the video traces from the fact that the State Department –
specifically, the U.S. embassy in Cairo – put out nauseating statements
in the hours before the rioting started, deriding “the continuing
efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of
Muslims,” and indignantly condemning “religious incitement.”
Then,
in the days after both the Cairo rioting and the massacre in Benghazi,
President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador Susan Rice,
White House spokesman Jay Carney, and other administration figures
repeatedly cited the video as the catalyst. The Obama-friendly press,
naturally, ran with this spin: the video caused the rioting at the
embassy in Cairo, which seamlessly spilled over into neighboring Libya,
where a similar “protest” spontaneously erupted into deadly violence. As we know, that is not what happened.Obama’s
re-election campaign was premised on the claims that he had decimated
al Qaeda, that the war on terror was thus nearing an end, and that his
Middle East policy of aiding Islamic supremacists in places like Egypt
and Libya was stabilizing the region and fostering the birth of real
democracy. The campaign could not afford powerful demonstrations that al
Qaeda was anything but in its death throes; that terrorists were still
targeting American facilities and killing American officials; and that,
under Obama’s policies, Egypt and much of Libya were now controlled by
rabidly anti-American Islamic supremacists.
The video fraud
enabled the administration and Obama’s reelection campaign to stay on
offense – aggressively pummeling the strawman of “Islamophobia” – rather
than in the defensive crouch required to explain, or try to explain,
the Obama administration’s performance in Egypt, Libya, and the broader
Middle East. It worked: The Romney campaign was cowed and accountability
for the Benghazi massacre would have to wait many months. National Review
