Let's bring the boys home now ~ By Pat Boone

From WorldNetDaily

By Pat Boone Posted: November 14, 2009 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 As I try to do every Veterans and Memorial Day, I spent some time Wednesday walking among the grave markers in the vast, beautiful but somber Veteran's Cemetery in Westwood. I read the names and thanked them out loud, as always. My doctor friend Bob Karns and his dear wife, Stevie, joined me, and it was deeply moving. As I looked tearfully over the rolling acres, studded with tens of thousands of stones and crosses and flat markers, I pondered as always the dreams and aspirations and relationships and family traditions that had all been stunted and blotted out. I'm sure that each of these all but forgotten heroes trained and fought willingly and proudly for the country we all love. They stood against enemies we understood, against national militaries we had identified and that had attacked us and our allies. And as I walked slowly among their graves, I asked out loud: "Would you make the same sacrifices in the conflict we're grappling with now? Would you enlist to ship out to Middle Eastern countries that have fought and killed each other for centuries, in an effort to address their problems and ancient animosities, in some vague hope that we might help them form some kind of Judeo-Christian democracy like ours?" It won't surprise you that I was met with silence. But in that silence, I saw some things more clearly than I have for years. This poor deluded fiend, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 of his fellow American soldiers and wounded 31 more at Fort Hood, inadvertently rendered his country a vital service. He made it starkly clear, to anyone with a brain, that we're at war, not with a country or a people – but with an ideology. This demonic, lethal and inhuman ideology knows no boundaries, no ethnic or racial definitions. It's not perpetrated by one government, one tribal heritage or even one geographic base. It incubated deep in the Middle East, but has spread to many parts of the world. It has found its home in a huge world religion, Islam, but millions of devout Muslims disavow the violence and depravity associated with this jihadist ideology and even discount the specific calls for death and domination found in the pages of the Quran. (See Surah 9:5, the "verse of the sword," as an example.) But the ideology itself has a virulent life of its own, far, far worse and deadlier than any "swine flu." Once it takes root in a human mentality, it can permeate the soul, change all perspectives of humanity and morality, and become highly contagious. It has been festering and growing in Saudi Arabia, in all neighboring countries, has been taught to children from kindergarten through university and has found especially fertile ground in Islam. Maj. Hasan, born in an Arab-American family, a trained psychiatrist and military man, sought spiritual and religious counseling from a jihadist activist, Anwar al-Awlaki, who is known to have been counselor and confidant to several of the perpetrators of the 9/11 massacre. The virus spread from this adviser into the brain and soul of Hasan – who then took two loaded guns into Fort Hood and began killing everybody he could, screaming "Allah is greatest!" in Arabic. [CLICK HERE TO READ MORE]