Free Republic

Muslims Attack Hindu Festival in India, Throw Hot Water on Hindus in Bangladesh Hindus have a tradition of building makeshift pavilions, holding prayers, and participating in processions during their religious celebrations such as Ram Navami, Durga Puja, etc. As witnessed many times over the past decade, Muslims have also come up with an interesting tradition during the Hindu festivities. This tradition involves throwing stones at Hindu processions and launching attacks on Hindus engaged in their religious festivities. No Hindu religious occasion is now complete without Muslim mobs launching violent attacks on the Hindus. We have repeatedly and exhaustively reported on...

“These are necessary sacrifices.” As is well known, Hamas embeds its fighters, its weapons, and its rocket launchers in civilian structures — apartment buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals. It uses the Gazans as human shields, hoping that their presence will discourage IDF attacks. And if civilians are killed, despite the IDF’s colossal efforts to minimize civilian casualties, then their deaths are useful to Hamas, part of the terror group’s propaganda war against the IDF, which stands accused of committing “genocide.”Our troops found drawings, stuffed animals and the tunnel entrance to where 6 Israeli hostages were held for over 300 days in...

Working in migrant centers . . . and risking your life. Those kindly and naïve souls who attend to the needs of Muslim migrants in Europe, preside over asylum centers and shelters, arranging not just lodging but also the feeding of migrants, and also instructing them in how to take advantage of all the benefits the generous welfare states of Western Europe offer these economic migrants who claim to be “asylum seekers.” These people running the asylum centers offer sympathy and support to these “strangers in a strange land.” But too many have found that their work to aid these...

It is an old and venerable tradition Five weeks after officially becoming the Democrat party’s candidate for president, Kamala Harris still hasn’t held a press conference. In that span, she has only given one interview, a truncated, heavily scripted affair in which she leaned heavily upon her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz. Only on Sunday did her campaign get around to posting some of her policy positions on her website.Democrat power brokers are clearly hoping that they can keep doing this all the way to the Oval Office, and why not? It is an old and venerable American political trick...

Transcendence in the face of death. We just marked, of course, the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Everyone personally affected that day, whether victim or survivor, has a story to tell; some horrific and sorrowful, of course, but there are also many tales of kindness and courage, selflessness and generosity. Every one of those stories matters and must never be allowed to fade from our collective memory.Amid all the musings and reminiscences posted yesterday and every anniversary about the world-changing impact of the 9/11 attacks, I considered adding my own observations....

When everything is free, you are the price. Courageous dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn once stated, “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” This is truer today than when he wrote it in 1975.Enter a timely new book calledThe Red New Deal, by Dmitri Dubograev, an American information technology and corporate attorney who grew up in the socialist environment of the USSR. The book is a comparison of current U.S. and world trends toward reconsidering socialism, and the realities of everyday life under socialism. It shares real-life...

Some harsh words for the West's Jew-haters. As the six murdered hostages are being buried in Israel, Brendan O’Neill has some furious words for Western antisemites who have been cheerleading their murderers in Hamas. He rounds on them here: “The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, September 1, 2024:…Now this is resistance. Unprepared, unarmed, these six young people did what they could to resist the anti-Semitic savagery of the invading army from Gaza. They repelled its grenades, rescued some of its intended targets, tended to the victims of its racist sadism. They didn’t ask...

Can you guess the source? A prestigious Jesuit university, which receives millions in funding from the hardline Islamic regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is facing accusations of promoting pro-Hamas propaganda and fomenting antisemitism through its Gaza Lecture Series.Georgetown University, which has thus far received $934 million from Arab-Muslim sources, is being slammed by Israel for inviting UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to deliver the October 28 presentation in the series titled “Anatomy of Genocide in Gaza.”In an August 30 tweet, Israel blasted Georgetown, noting that the UN representative “justified the October 7 massacre and has spread countless antisemitic blood...

Yarmouk was a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria totally destroyed by the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. The death and destruction were far more extensive than what has happened in Gaza, but for reasons which deserve to be pondered, Yarmouk’s fate never received anything like the attention that has been given to the war in Gaza, where the IDF has been falsely accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” More on how Yarmouk was reported on, and why its destruction received so little attention, can be found here: “The Yarmouk double standard: Why is there no outcry for Syria’s...

Publicizing family squabbles - and why leftists aren’t normal people. So, Tim Walz’s family thinks he’s a schmuck, just like the troops he sort of served with until he abandoned them. We should encourage his family members to dish the dirt on him. Who knows what it is? Is he a liar and a scumbag around the Thanksgiving table, just like he is during this campaign on the rare occasions he speaks to somebody? The last time he ran as fast as he did when he got a question about how his Hamas friends murdered an American was when he...

Just what the keffiyeh sanctions and inspires. The new academic year has scarcely begun, and Hamas supporters on campus are already signaling that they haven’t lost a bit of their fanaticism. If anything, they’re even more menacing. An incident at the University of Pittsburgh Friday evening shows that American college and university campuses are becoming increasingly dangerous places for Jewish students and other supporters of Israel, who are being threatened and brutalized all in the name of the “liberation” of “Palestine.”The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported recently that a man named Jarrett Buba, who at 52 years old is unlikely to be...

What does USAID and its overbearing director Samantha Power have to hide? The Biden administration has been pumping huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This aid is being sent behind the scenes; the amounts are not made public. Congress did not give its approval for such amounts of aid, so much of which — as everyone now knows — ends up with Hamas, that routinely steals aid meant for all the people in Gaza. Now the USAID Agency is being investigated for its role in delivering such aid, but instead of handing over records requested by a government watchdog...

And the solution The Palestinian Authority (PA) is having money troubles. Very big money troubles, and of course it blames Israel for all of its financial woes. But those woes are entirely the fault of the PA itself. More on where its money goes, and why that leads Israel, for justifiable reasons, to withhold some of the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the PA, can be found here: “Palestinian Authority losses due to terror payments has reached 6.96 billion shekel – in last five years alone,” by Itamar Marcus and Ephraim D. Tepler, Palestinian Media Watch, August 27,...

What’s the deal with converts to Islam? Last April, a teenager in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, named Alexander Scott Mercurio was caught plotting jihad massacres in local churches, “using weapons, including knives, firearms, and fire.” On New Year’s Eve in 2022, a 19-year-old named Trevor Bickford traveled from his home in Wells, Maine, to Times Square, where he attacked three NYPD officers with a machete. In April 2021, a Zion, Illinois, man named Edward Schimenti got thirteen and a half years in prison for aiding the Islamic State (ISIS).These are just three men who are on a long and ever-lengthening list...

The Secret Service, with its abject incompetence (at best) thoroughly exposed in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, is now going to get some help. The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, has announced that his department will be providing those charged with guarding the presidential and vice presidential candidates with “additional military support capabilities.” Hey, that’s a relief. We can all rest easy knowing that the people responsible for the Biden regime’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in Aug. 2021 will now be making sure that some young ideologue doesn’t try again to make the left’s Trump problem...

No more tit-for-tat responses to Hezbollah. After the Israelis learned that Hezbollah was intending to strike their country with a massive rocket attack — some 6,000 rockets — at 5 a.m. on August 25, the IDF “rose up first” and launched its own preemptive attack, sending more than 100 planes into Lebanon to destroy thousands of rockets in their launches. Hezbollah managed, in the end, to send not 6,000, but 320 missiles into Israel. They were aimed at the Mossad headquarters in Glilot, the Defense Headquarters known as Kirya, and several military bases. Not one of those military targets was...

Israel took to heart the wisdom of a passage in the Talmud. Hezbollah claims that its attack on Israel on the morning of August 25 was a “success.” Hezbollah released a statement insisting that “by God’s grace, the first stage has been fully completed with complete success. This stage involved targeting Israeli barracks and sites to facilitate the passage of attack drones towards their intended destination deep within the entity [Israel]. The drones passed, praise be to God, as planned. The number of Katyusha rockets fired so far has exceeded 320 rockets directed at the enemy’s positions.”We all know better....

Marxist ideology and practices have come to Minnesota schools disguised as new teacher licensing rules that take effect July 1, 2025. The Minnesota teacher licensing board is called the Professional Educators Licensing and Standards Board or PELSB. Each board member was appointed by Governor Walz. The state adopted the new PELSB teacher licensing requirements on April 10, 2023. The new standards embed basic Marxist principles and practices such as Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI), fluid sexual identity, and gender politics as required instruction into all Minnesota public schools (this includes charter schools) and adoption for public school students. Standard Marxist...

While top man Yahya Sinwar slithers from tunnel to tunnel to stay alive. The IDF has been relentlessly killing Hamas’ top leaders and commanders with surgical strikes. On July 13, the long-sought military commander of Hamas in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, was assassinated. On July 31, the head of Hamas’ political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed when a bomb exploded in his room at a heavily-guarded guesthouse in Tehran. Another dozen Hamas commanders, just below the top level, have been killed during the Gaza campaign. Only Yahya Sinwar, the man mainly responsible for the October 7 attacks, has still managed to...

Will we take it lying down? Last summer a Missouri judge ruled in a case brought by the state that the Biden administration had to cease contact with social media companies. This was addressing the charge that the president and/or his staff were engaged in the muzzling of expression on social platforms, regarding the pandemic as well as other topics. (The ruling was recently overturned by the Supreme Court, this June.)The case followed revelations from the Twitter Files, the document release overseen by Elon Musk after taking over that company. In those documents it was established how the federal government...