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."
Hugh Fitzgerald: Columbus and His Muslim Connection
Friday, November 10, 2017
Jihad Watch : John Hamed, Jr. repeats as fact several myths about Muslims. The first one, discussed in the previous piece,
is the claim made by the zoologist and amateur epigraphist Barry Fell,
of an Arab presence in the New World as early as 700 A.D.
This was
followed by the three distinct claims made by Muslim āscholarsā about
Muslims and Christopher Columbus. These are: first, the assertion that
Columbusās navigator was an āArabā and āMuslimā; second, that the Pinzon
brothers, one of whom was captain of the Nina and the other the captain
of the Pinta, were Muslims (or Moriscos, outwardly converts to
Catholicism); third, that Columbus recorded in his papers having seen a
āmosqueā on top of a mountain in Cuba. Note that word āadmitted,ā as if Columbus had wanted to hide any evidence of a Muslim presence in Cuba. Why did Youssef Mroueh not quote Columbus?
Hereās why: Columbus wrote āSeƱala
la disposiciĆ³n del rĆo y del puertoā¦, que tiene sus montaƱas hermosas y
altasā¦, y una de ellas tiene encima otro montecillo a manera de una
hermosa mezquita.ā
[unnamed editor] Relaciones y Cartas de CristĆ³bal ColĆ³n (1892), p. 49
In English: āRemarking on the position of the river and portā¦, he
[Columbus] describes its mountains as lofty and beautifulā¦, and one of
them has another little hill on its summit, like a graceful mosque.ā ā Clements R. Markham (tr.), The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1893), pp. 62-3
Columbus did not write that he had seen a mosque but, rather, that he
had seen one hill atop another, looking ālike a graceful mosque.ā
Youssef Mroueh surely knew this, but didnāt want to let his readers know
it. So he didnāt quote from Columbus, changed the description from a
simile (X is like Y, the hill is like a mosque) and made it a straight
description (āthereās a graceful mosque on the hillā), and hoped he
could get away with it. And in fact, his version has been accepted by
some Muslims, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claimed in 2014 that
āIn his memoirs [sic], Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a
mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba.ā Columbus never did.
Columbus and His āArabā Navigator
The next claim made by Muslims is that Columbus had an āArabā navigator. But where did this particular story, about Columbusās āArab navigator,ā come from. It came from Muslims themselves. And it is based on a case of
mistaken identity. For it was Muslims who, when they learned of an
āArabic-speaking Spaniardā on Columbusās first voyage, decided that this
must refer to a Muslim Arab.
In fact, the reference was to one Luis de
Torres, a converso (a Jew who accepted Catholicism). Luis de Torres knew
Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and some Arabic, and was taken on not as a
navigator but as an interpreter by Columbus, who thought his knowledge
of Hebrew would be useful if in Asia they ran into any Jewish traders
(who were known to travel far and wide) or into members of the Ten Lost
Tribes of Israel.
But Muslims, in their eagerness to put themselves into
the picture with Columbus, have committed two historical errors: first,
they thought that the interpreter, the āArabic-speaking Spaniardā Luis
de Torres, was the navigator, and then they assumed that if someone on
Columbusās crew spoke Arabic, as Torres did, he must have been an Arab
and a Muslim. Wrong on both counts.
