Pershing is one of my greatest heroes! So is Patton.
I question the 42 years no muslim extremist attacks though. The 1930's were rife with terrorism in the muslim world/French colonies. Guess I have 40 years of history to read through to back that up.
Sy Hersh on the otherhand is a useless idiot.
Try the same place the first one was once found. The Pershing Military and Naval Science building, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Home of AFROTC det. 465, NROTC Battalion "Blackshirts of National Defense", and of course The Army ROTC "Big Red Battalion" and IIRC, national HQ of the Pershing Rifles, founded by Black Jack himself.
(Lincoln also has their civic Auditorium and an elementary school (which many of my friends attended, my wife also attended very briefly) named after Pershing.
UNL can also supply the pigs, from the Ag department. How many you think we'll need?
There is no substantial evidence that this was actually carried out by Black Jack Pershing (how he came to have that name is also interesting). However there are accounts written in biographies of Pershing that refer to threats he made to the local muslims, indicating that if they would not submit to his authority (as governor of Moros), he would kill them and bury them in pig’s skin, or bury them in common grave with the carcasses of pigs. Other accounts indicate that one or more of his subordinate may have actually carried out the threat.
If you read letters written by Gen. Pershing, it would actually seem very out of character for him to personally carry out an action such as this. He refers to the Moros people as “like his own children”, whom he loves. And it saddened him to have to take such measures.
Also, muslim clerics have now claimed that the body of a martyr is pure, and does not require washing before burial (a muslim custom), and anything done to the remains of a martyr will not prevent the soul from receiving the gift of martyrdom (72 virging in paradise) since the soul was immediately present in paradise at the time of his martyrdom. This was changed when Israeli settlers in the Gaza strip, soon after Israel became a nation again, threatened to sew the dead bodies of 'martyrs' in pigskin and bury them facedown.
I believe this tactic may have worked during the time of Pershing, and may work today with fundamental Islamists, however the clerics will change the standards and requirements of their religion in order to get new recruits. Nothing less than the total anihalation, or that threat breaking their will will win this religious war.
There is a statute of Gen. Pershing in Washington, DC, and I often passed by it and marveled at those birth and death dates. Here was a man born during the year of Lincoln's election and who died after World War II.
Imagine all the technological and political events he got to see, from the use of black-powder muskets to the news about the explosion of the first nuclear bomb. Amazing.