Free Republic

It’s Hanukkah and I am in hiding. I don't want to see Facebook posts and news items about weird creative Hanukkah candelabras in which each flame stands for some new-fangled liberal cause. I don't want to see the significance of potato pancakes explained to senators or read that Obama is Jewish in his soul. I want to keep Hanukkah close to my heart, away from those who would tamper with its true meaning which is this: The Jews fought a war against assimilation and won. Those flickering Hanukkah lights have nothing to do with equality, integration, and multiculturalism. They have...

The brother of the San Bernardino gunman is a decorated Navy veteran who has been honored for his role in the war on terror. Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, was named as the suspect who stormed the Inland Regional Center and massacred 14 people during a holiday party for county health employees on Wednesday. But Farook’s older brother Syed Raheel Farook, a married father who goes by his middle name, has a number of ‘awards and decorations’ from his time in the Navy, Buzzfeed reported.

In denouncing Republicans as "scared of widows and orphans," and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the "JV" team, to strike outside the caliphate into the heart of the West, and has egg all over his face. More critically, the liberal world order he has been preaching and predicting is receding before our eyes. Suddenly, his rhetoric is discordantly out of touch with reality. And, for his time on the...

Editor note: As we mentioned here just recently we do publish important comments and guest commentary from time to time. This is a message from one of our regular readers and an energetic researcher and advocate for our cause, Mr. Bob Enos of Willmar, MN. We have all been encouraged by the national media attention to the problem of refugee resettlement which we have known about for a long time. The abrupt turnaround by governors, many of whom hardly had any idea that refugees were being resettled in their states in the first place, is heartening. But, it isn’t time...

There's been a lot of arrant nonsense spoken since the Paris attacks, but Margaret Carlson's might just take the cake . . . On today's Morning Joe, Bloomberg columnist Carlson suggested that because the US is better than Europe at assimilation, potential terrorists sneaking into our country might not carry out their plots. Said Carlson: "maybe they become Americanized, maybe the anger goes away. Maybe what they snuck in to do they're not going to do because we do have an acceptance of these people." Great point, Margaret. If only we'd had a little longer to hug it out with...

Snip....... Dr. Mark Christian, a former child imam born into a prominent Muslim family in Egypt who later broke away from the Islamic faith and became a Christian, said the “key actors” driving the backlash against Muslim immigration are the Muslims themselves. “They are using their Twitter accounts on a daily basis to communicate their agenda of hatred against Jews and Christians, and by their actions in Europe, in Israel and throughout the Middle East where they are killing non-Muslims,” Christian said. “People are afraid when they see what Muslims are doing on a regular basis in their own countries...

Generations of students have been taught that we are a nation of immigrants but inquiring minds beg to differ. Well, actually, they don’t beg. “What we have never been is a nation of immigrants,” veteran journalist Ralph Kinney Bennett said last weekend at the regional meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Indianapolis. “We were put through the process, rough-edged though it may have been, to become Americans.” “We did not suggest that they shed their heritage but make it part of a larger heritage.” Bennett retired as senior editor in the Washington bureau of Reader’s Digest in 2001. William B....

Sorry to break the good news to some of our conservative friends, but it turns out that most immigrants to America are assimilating as their forebears did. That’s the gist of a new 400-page report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which looks at everything from English proficiency, education levels and family structure to health, crime and employment. Here’s the money sentence: “Across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than...

A Bay Area doctor is sharing her painful story in hopes of stopping "Islamophobia." Dr. Suzanne Barakat's story made national headlines earlier this year when her 23-year-old brother and two other people were gunned down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She believes they were killed because they are Muslims. On Monday, Barakat told her fellow doctors she sees signs of hate, even from patients, every day. "My hope is this kind of thing never happens again to anyone and we can realize at the end of the day we're all human with the same ambitions, dreams and goals," Barakat said...

A Duke University professor has reportedly been placed on leave after posting racist comments online that included talk of “the blacks” and “the Asians.” Jerry Hough commented on a New York Times editorial titled “How Racism Doomed Baltimore”...The key question,though,according to Hough, “is whether my comments were largely accurate. In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist.”....full comments in the New York Times:This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem,of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The...

Conservative activist Richard Viguerie says divisions over immigration could spark a “civil war” within the Republican Party, leading frustrated conservatives to abandon the party if the 2016 Presidential nominee is too liberal on this crucial issue. Viguerie began the exclusive interview with Breitbart News by citing one of his main concerns — and pet peeves — regarding immigration. The “root cause of the problem,” he says, is the desperate situations immigrants face in the countries they are leaving. “Has anyone looked beyond our border?” he asked. “At some point you have to do that, but no one seems to be...

<p>Is immigrating from less-developed countries to the West a good or a bad thing, for host and guest? Is the immigrant angry at, or nostalgic for, the country he left? Is he thankful to or resentful of the country he has come to? Does the Westerner know why the other seeks him out or why he himself chooses not to emigrate to the non-West? These questions and dozens like them are not so much never answered as never even asked. The result is chaos.</p>

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA) doubled down on his controversial comments about so-called “no-go zones” for non-Muslims in a big way during a Fox News interview Wednesday afternoon. He even suggested that if the U.S. doesn’t take the threat of radical Islam seriously, we could have our own “no-go zones” in the near future. Jindal began by addressing comments made on MSNBC by human rights attorney Arsalan Iftikhar, who was banned from appearing on the network after suggesting the governor was trying to “scrub some of the brown off his skin” with his “no-go zone” talk. “It’s foolish that MSNBC even...

Potential 2016 presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal caused a stir across the pond with a Monday speech in London about the rise of radical Islam and “no-go” zones for non-Muslims in Birmingham. “How many Muslims in this world agree with these radicals? I have no idea, I hope it is a small minority,” the Louisiana governor told the Henry Jackson Society, according to prepared remarks. “But it is clear that far too many do, and it is clear that they must be stopped.” “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can...

Two stories currently in the news are, I think, illuminating. The first comes from Paris: The incident took place when a veiled woman was spotted on the front row of a performance of La Traviata at the Opera Bastille…. France brought in a law in 2011 banning anyone from wearing clothing that conceals the face in a public space, or face a 150 euro ($190) fine. The woman was sitting just behind the conductor, visible to monitors, wearing a scarf covering her hair and a veil over her mouth and nose during the performance on October 3. “I was alerted...

One-fifth of people in the U.S. speak a foreign language at home, according to a report being released Monday by the Center for Immigration Studies, which found Arabic and Urdu — the national language of Pakistan — among the fastest-growing. The report found that nearly half of all California school-age children speak a language other than English at home, as do a third of Texans and Nevadans, according to the report, which is based on Census Bureau numbers.

We’ve got a problem in the Twin Cities that is based in our large and still growing population of Somali immigrants. Somalis have been immigrating to Minnesota for more than twenty years now. They have taken advantage of all the services that our state and local institutions offer. They have been welcomed with open arms, in Minnesota’s characteristic style. Yet Minnesota’s Somali community — a/k/a “Minnesotans” — is the most fertile ground in the United States for the recruitment of terrorists by foreign terrorist organizations in Africa and the Middle East. We are concerned that they may choose to return...

According to the latest findings of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute, nearly 10 percent of working-age adults in Americans have limited or no understanding of the English language. Their findings rebuke decades of rhetoric from the Progressive left insisting that multiculturalism and language diversity is of benefit to the nation as a whole and a more "compassionate" way to look at American assimilation. Brookings provided the data to justify what conservatives have known all along, the mastery of English proficiency matters greatly. It is the first key step to upward mobility and vital to becoming a "true" American. The concept of true...

"..........The incoherent message of far too many open-borders advocates distills down to little more than this: “Millions have fled Mexico to America — historically an insensitive, racist and unfair place. Yet it nonetheless must extend amnesty to millions of Mexican nationals who prefer the morally suspect United States over their native Latino culture in Mexico.” What the immigration debate is not about is ensuring that illegal immigration ends and that legal immigration becomes liberal, meritocratic, and ethnically blind. Remember that, and all the absurd rhetoric of the upcoming 2014 debate will make sense.