Free Republic

..... ...Today, they are all happy that the Caliphate is about to return, as if the days of the Caliphate were good. Who are you kidding? The days of the Caliphate were all dark times, from day one to the Ottoman Caliphate... .....

BAGHDAD - - A year after ISIL fighters captured Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province, the country’s Shiite-led government remains incapable of mounting a major offensive to retake the city or any of the key areas still held by the group. In January last year, Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, became the first major city to fall to ISIL. This was followed by a summer campaign that seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, along with most of northern and western Iraq. Iraq’s slow-moving fight against ISIL has also highlighted the country’s sectarian tensions, given...

Germany's anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement said it has cancelled a planned march on Monday, citing a death threat against organisers from the Islamic State jihadist group. "Cancelled! Dear friends, unfortunately we must cancel our 13th meeting due to security concerns," the group "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident" said on its Facebook page on Sunday. "What in police jargon is called an 'abstract threat' has changed to a 'concrete death threat' against a member of the organising team. IS terrorists have ordered his assassination." "We take these leads very seriously," Spiegel quoted an unnamed high-ranking security official as saying....

Raising doves and pigeons is a deadly pursuit in ISIS-controlled Iraq. The popular hobby is in the sights of extremist Islamist fighters, who this week rounded up 15 boys and young men in the eastern province of Diyala for pursuing a pastime now deemed un-Islamic. Three have already been executed. The recent crackdown on bird breeders stems from ISIS' need for new fighters to battle the Iraqi and Syrian governments, as well as residents' growing desperation, according to the security official. Suspicion of bird-breeders stems from the fact they tend to feed their animals at the same time devout Muslims...

About 500 protesters gathered at an anti-Islam demonstration in Prague on January 16. The demonstrators carried signs and banners with slogans like “Europe, wake up!” “Islam is evil,” and “Moderate Islam does not exist.” The organizers of the rally were from a group that calls itself “We Do Not Want Islam In The Czech Republic.” About 20 people attended a counterdemonstration against racism and xenophobia that was held nearby.

President Obama warned Europeans "not to simply respond with a hammer" in working against radicalization among its Muslim populations, and argued that the United States had an advantage on this front because American Muslims are better integrated into society.. “Our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans. There is, you know, this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength,” Obama said Friday, as he stood next to British Prime Minister David Cameron at a news conference. “There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case, and...

Three people have died in an anti-terror raid in eastern Belgium, according to reports. Federal prosecutors were quoted as saying there had been a police operation near the centre of Verviers. The Belga news agency said there were several casualties and police activity was continuing. Explosions and gunfire were apparently heard near the station, according to Belgium's public broadcaster RTBF "An operation is under way," a source in the mayor's office told AFP without giving further details. Another official said separately it was "jihadist-related".

Qadhafi liked to surround himself with women (whereas Erdogan seems to prefer the opposite, ordering the fairer sex “know their place” and stay at home); and third, Erdogan’s multi-billion dollar embezzlement schemes make the madman of Libya seem, well, a bit modest and unambitious. ... Perhaps no leader was more hypocritical than Erdogan to send a representative, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, to show up in Paris and march in solidarity against the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. Here’s why: 1.No sooner did Davutoglu return home, than Erdogan's Brownshirts raided newspapers planning to reprint the Charlie Hebdo issue and blocked websites...

Anti-Islam protesters gathered Monday in the German city of Dresden, with some carrying banners with the names of those killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. It is the 12th march in Dresden called by the protest group Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, since October. Dresden police say the number of people attending these rallies has increased from an estimated 350 protesters on October 20 to 18,000 on January 5 and 25,000 people on Monday. The PEGIDA movement emerged last year in the eastern German city. About 2% of Dresden's inhabitants are foreigners. On...

The train passengers’ calm consumption of crisps and bored checking of emails on the 11.43am to Birmingham suggested they hadn’t heard the news. Their destination, a city of more than a million people, had shockingly become Britain’s first caliphate and a no-go zone for non-Muslims – at least, according to an “expert” on Rupert Murdoch’s US-based Fox News channel. “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” Steve Emerson, a commentator on terrorism, told millions of viewers on Sunday. Raja Mohammed Ishtiaq, co-owner of the Raja Brothers grocery set up in...

The Islamic State released a video on Sunday in which one of the assailants in the Paris terror attacks posthumously claims that he carried out the attack in the name of the group. The video shows Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages at a Paris supermarket on Friday before he was fatally shot by police, pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Speaking in French and occasionally lapsing into broken Arabic, he is shown wearing a flak vest, then a leather jacket and later a traditional African robe while he explains his motives for carrying out...

FULL TITLE: Paris policeman’s brother: ‘Islam is a religion of love. My brother was killed by terrorists, by false Muslims’ Ahmed Merabet, the police officer gunned down in the Charlie Hebdo attack, was killed in an act of barbarity by “false Muslims” his brother said in a moving tribute on Saturday, where he also appealed for unity and tolerance. Speaking for a group of relatives gathered in Paris, Malek Merabet said the terrorists who ignored his brother’s plea for mercy as he lay wounded on the street may have shared his Algerian roots, but had nothing else in common. “My...

The misleading interpretations of Islam as a cruel religion have sparked a fear of Islam in Malaysia, says Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. “Before this, there was no controversy over the teachings of Islam. But now, a lot of things and reactions have surfaced where people do things that may not be agreeable to the Muslims. “They like to portray Islam as a cruel, unreasonable or unjust religion and that makes non-Muslims in Malaysia afraid of Islam, when the reality is, there is nothing to fear,” he added. “For example, the verse that allowed Muslims to kill non-Muslims only touched on...

Western media acts free of any legal and moral constraints to spread bigotry against Muslims, attack Islam, insults Prophet Mohammad, for no reason other than it can do so in the name of “ freedom of press” and with legal and moral sanction from the political establishments there. To attack Islam and Prophet Mohammad in the name of freedom of press is irresponsible and is a form of racism and intolerance. In the minds of millions of decent and law abiding Muslims everywhere in the world, only Islam is treated in such irresponsible and racist manner by the western media....

It would be a big mistake to see the terror attack in Paris as an attack on the freedom of the press. Such a statement puts the massacre in the French capital in line with attacks against journalists by members of a Colombian drug cartel or the Chechen mafia. That's not the case. The goal of the attack on the office of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was not to frighten newspaper editors so that they would not publish one cartoon or another. The goal was to show and prove who controls the streets and consciousness of the French Republic: The...

Where does the story begin? Quite simply with colonialism. It's no mere coincidence that at least two of the Charlie Hebdo attackers are reportedly of Algerian descent and the third from Senegal. France's 1830 invasion of Algeria began a 130-year odyssey of murder, expropriation, racism, exploitation and misrule that only ended after a vicious anti-colonial struggle costing well over one million Algerian lives. It's no more shocking that some Muslims have become psychotic enough to murder, rape and pillage their way across eastern Nigeria and eastern Paris than it is that France, home of "liberty", "equality", and "fraternity", sells billions...

Police are hunting for the girlfriend of one of the three gunmen who brought three days of terror to France, saying she may be "armed and dangerous". Hayat Boumeddiene, a suspect in the murder of a Paris policewoman on Thursday, is on the run after her partner Amedy Coulibaly was killed when armed officers brought his kosher supermarket siege to a violent end. The 26-year-old could hold the key to the ongoing terror investigation, as police admit they may be dealing with a larger extremist cell and authorities brace for more attacks. Details are emerging of the young woman of...

The Head of MI5 has warned of a Paris style atrocity by Islamic terrorist groups taking place in Britain. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, Andrew Parker, the Director General of the Security Services, said extremists were “trying to direct terrorist attacks in the UK and elsewhere from Syria”. And he said that MI5 had “stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone” where deaths would have certainly resulted but warned “Although we and our partners try our utmost we know that we cannot hope to stop everything” and spoke of his concern at the “growing gap” between...

Twisted, self-indulgent, calculating projection is rife among dictators, despots, religious zealots and terrorists and, unfortunately, a growing number of elected and appointed officials here in the United States The New Year unfolded with more terror from Islamists. The Paris gunmen, reportedly an Al Qaeda terror cell with Yemeni connections who murdered 12 people at a leftist French satirical magazine, may give courage to Muslim-based wannabe states like the Palestinian Authority that try to bully authentic nations. The close of 2014 brought a defeat for the Palestinian Authority as it attempted to fast-track statehood, hoping to bypass negotiations with Israel via...

The two brothers named by French authorities as chief suspects in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris were on the U.S. no-fly list, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said Thursday. Another U.S. official said Said Kouachi, 34, has traveled to Yemen. It was unclear whether Kouachi, 34, was there to work with extremist groups like Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based there.