Collateral Damage Poem by gershon hepner

Whether frontal, rear, or lateral,
damage will occur, collateral,
whenever just men fight their foes.
Today, they focus on the woes
of victims who are forced to suffer,
facing situations tougher
than any liberal journalist
admits when truth receives his twist,
condoning all the acts of terror,
ascribed by him to human error,
apportioning the horror blame
with bias lacking any shame,
to people who their lot have cast
with values of the hallowed past.
Considering the old ones dated
all underdogs are exculpated,
despite the clear insanity
of crimes against humanity
committed. Liberals love their barks
and bites as naturalists do sharks.

When God decided destroy
all Nineveh, it was his ploy
to send the prophet Jonah who
agreed such punishment was due
to all the people in the city,
quite undeserving of God’s pity.
It didn’t happen, and I’ll try
to tell you here the reason why.
Repentance for the broken laws
was never, I believe, the cause
why Nineveh was saved—it seems
the prophet hated all regimes
except his own, quite out of sort
with strange ones, leaving Jaffa’s port—
but God’s fear that his reputation
would suffer with the fascination
caused by the death of every sinner.
“Each one of us is now Berliner, ”
the liberal media would have written
if Hitler had been hanged by Britain,
or, once by courts he’d been indicted,
by Russia, France or States United,
they way that they in Baghdad hanged
a tyrant who had once harangued
the world and threatened mass destruction.
Such fear created the obstruction
that was the motive that prevented
God doing what he had intended.
It’s stated in the book’s last line,
that God said he must draw the line
not only to save all the lives
of mothers, fathers, husbands, wives,
and children, but, of course, the chattel,
and most importantly, great cattle.
We must care about cattle when
we punish men who murder men.
Collateral damage to a cow
a God who’s good may not allow.
Though Jonah clearly never cared,
that is why Nineveh was spared.
The papers of such tales are full,
their focus not on cows but bull.

Today, January 9,2007, I heard a reporter from the BBC report on ‘The World’ that the US had killed about ten major El Qaeda ringleaders in southern Somalia. The BBC anchorwoman asked the reporter: ‘Can you tell us about the collateral damage.” “Well, ” the reporter said, “it’s a sparsely populated part of the world, but I believe that there are a lot of cattle there.” That helped me understand the last verse of the book of Jonah. God is explaining to the prophet that if He had gone forward with His plan to annihilate Nineveh the loss of human life would have been unacceptable to the BBC, andHe might have been called to some ancient Near-Eastern Hague to explain the collateral damage to cattle. Yom Kippur, when the book of Jonah is read by Jews, would not have been enough to expiate that crime.

1/9/07