American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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But I also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle
Ages. We don’t kill people because they’re a different religion.
The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s army fled or
was defeated, were fanatics. They hated us because we weren’t
Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out their
dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.
Isn’t religion supposed to teach tolerance
People say you have to distance yourself from your enemy to kill him.
If that’s true, in Iraq, the insurgents made it really easy.
The fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation
of religion. And half the time they just claimed they valued their
religion—most didn’t even pray. Quite a number were drugged up so
they could fight us.
Many of the insurgents were cowards. They routinely used drugs
to stoke their courage. Without them, alone, they were nothing. I have
a tape somewhere showing a father and a girl in a house that was being
searched. They were downstairs; for some reason, a flash-bang
went off upstairs.
On the video, the father hides behind the girl, afraid that he’s going
to be killed and ready to sacrifice his daughter.
HIDDEN BODIES
They may have been cowards, but they could certainly kill people. The
insurgents didn’t worry about ROEs or court-martials. If they had the
advantage, they would kill any Westerner they could find, whether
they were soldiers or not.