Let me say, right here, in the opening line of this column, that before you write any knee jerk letters about my "lack of patriotism", please do remember that I was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot for twelve years, flying in both World War Two and Korea, and personally decorated by the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
The United States today is on a "God Bless America" binge, (drunk). Bumper stickers by the millions are offering this prayer for the car behind them. Flags are sticking out of car windows, on billboards, stuck on business fronts, everywhere. Politicians and entertainers can hardly make a statement without ending it with "God bless you", or "God bless America". The massive hypocrisy of this obscene display makes you want to throw up.
At the National Cathedral in Washington, America's clown of Christianity, Billy Graham told the audience that all the murder victims of September 11 were now in "paradise" and "happy to be there". This same stupidity was said of the pilots of the planes by bin Laden. Billy Graham's son, Franklin, equally illiterate, said at a press conference that "the Christian God is a "good" God...but the Islamic God is an "evil" God". So according to Billy Graham and bin Laden, it makes no difference whether you believe in a "good" God or an "evil" God, paradise awaits us all, murderer and victim alike. The stupidity of all this nonsense just boggles the mind. The God everyone wants to "bless America" must be the "good" God"
Prayers to the "God of Israel" have flooded the Ozone layer from the Jewish community as they went berserk in the massacre of Jenin. It was impossible not to remember the genocide orders from Moses in the Old Testament, Book of Numbers,Chapter 31 verse 17. The massacre of Jenin was such that the United Nations Security Council, by a unanimous vote have ordered a fact finding mission. Observers on the scene described the slaughter as "beyond human imagination."
Prayers to the "God of Islam"..."God is Great"...bombard the heavens on behalf of the Islamic world in
their confrontation with the "infidels" of the world.
To my knowledge, only one very brilliant and sensitive writer, met this obscene and tragic hypocrisy head on, in language so forceful that even the most calloused and ignorant could understand.
Mark Twain wrote his classic "THE WAR PRAYER" that is so timely, so relevant and so contemporary that it should be read daily by every chaplain and every minister in every pulpit and every rabbi in every temple and in every Mosque.
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle. Be Thou with them in spirit. O Lord our God...Thou who art love and compassion, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;...O Thou who art love...help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of the wounded, writhing in pain;...help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire...O Thou who art love...help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief:...help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of the summer and icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave...
For our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord of love, blast their hopes...blight their lives...protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps...water their way with tears...stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet.
O God...we ask these things in the spirit of love...of Him who it is said is the Source of Love...O God of love...we ask these things with humble hearts.
Amen..."
Prophetic and timeless words from Mark Twain, for the phantasies of nationalistic "blessings of God".
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