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."
For Israel, It’s Time to Recognize the Armenian Genocide
Saturday, May 01, 2021
Jihad Watch : The recognition by the United States of the Armenian Genocide now
puts more pressure on those nations that have yet to do so, and
especially on Israel, that has until now refused, for reasons of
misplaced — and increasingly nonsensical — realpolitik.
A report on why
Israel has for so long refused to recognize the first genocide of the
20th century, and the moral cost of that refusal, is here: “Why has
Israel not yet recognized the Armenian Genocide?,” by Jeremy Sharon, Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2021.
The mass murder of an estimated 1.5 million
Armenians from 1915 to 1917 by the regime of the Young Turks in Turkey
is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.
It is also an event that has for long pricked at the
conscience of the Jewish people, which suffered the horrors of the
Holocaust, the worst genocide of the 20th century and of modern times.
Despite the mutual experience of genocide, the State of
Israel, ever since its founding, has shied away from recognizing the
Armenian experience, a state of affairs that activists decry but others
assert has been and continues to be a necessary aspect of the Jewish
state’s delicate diplomatic and security position….
A few hours after this report was published at the Jerusalem Post, Joe Biden did recognize the genocide, which the U.S., and Israel, too, ought to have recognized many years ago.
ONE MAN who has struggled for decades to advance
this cause is Prof. Israel Charny, whose new book, Israel’s Failed
Response to the Armenian Genocide, details how and why the Jewish state
has refrained from acknowledging the atrocities as genocide.
The genocide itself was preceded by a failed Turkish assault
during the First World War against Russian forces to its east, and
Turkey’s attempts to capture the Azeri city of Baku.
The Young Turk regime subsequently blamed Armenians in
eastern Anatolia for betraying Turkey and accused them of being a fifth
column in the country seeking independence.
As a result, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were
disarmed and then systematically murdered by Turkish troops, and
irregular forces then began committing massacres of Armenian civilians.
The
proximate cause of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1917 was Turkish
fury at having failed to prevail over the Russians in World War I, and
the scapegoat was easy to find: the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority.
But it did not take a defeat in a war to let loose the hatred of the
Muslim Turks for the Christian Armenians. Already, between 1894 and
1896, there were the Hamidian massacres of up to 300,000 Armenians, who
were killed because some of them had dared to protest their treatment by
the government of Abdul Hamid II. Other Christians, too, were the
victims of the Turks at the same time, for no other reason than that
they were Christians: at Diyarbakir, 25,000 Assyrians were slaughtered
along with Armenians. The Turks did not need much of a reason in 1894,
or in 1915, to start mass-murdering Armenians, and what we carelessly
describe as a “cause” of the Armenian genocide ought to be called more
accurately an “excuse” for those killings.
In May 1915 the Turkish parliament authorized
mass deportations of Armenians from eastern Turkey to the south,
alleging their presence was a national security threat, and under the
oversight of civil and military officials, hundreds of thousands of
Armenian citizens were then marched to desert concentration camps.
Many were massacred along the way while others died from starvation and dehydration in the Syrian desert….
More than a century has passed since that genocide of 1915-1917, and
Turkey continues its policy of denying it, claiming that the numbers of
dead have been greatly inflated, that many of the Armenians who died
were killed by typhus and other diseases, that others died in pitched
battles between Armenian and Turkish soldiers.
Turkey has threatened to
reduce cooperation, and to downgrade or cut altogether diplomatic
relations with, any country that recognizes the genocide. It has been
quite successful in that effort: only in 2001 did France, despite its
large Armenian population, recognize the genocide, nor did the Soviet
Union, despite having Armenian SSR as one of its constituent republics,
until the Russian Duma did so in 1995, nor did the United States, with a
large and politically active Armenian population, until 2021.
Now there
are 32 countries that have recognized the genocide. Many of them,
weighing the likely consequences of a worsening of relations with
Turkey, took a long while to do so.
But now, with the momentous American
recognition, a diplomatic dam has burst and one can expect another
dozen states to soon follow suit.
