Free Republic

The Tsarnaev brothers exploded bombs at the Boston Marathon. Tarek Mehanna translated documents for Al Qaeda from his Sudbury home. Ashland’s Rezwan Ferdaus planned to crash model airplanes laden with explosives into the Pentagon and US Capitol. All were homegrown terrorist plots in and around Boston in recent years. And then, last week, a Roslindale man who was being tracked by an antiterrorism task force and who allegedly had vowed to kill police officers was shot to death by investigators as he allegedly brandished a knife. These episodes raise a question: Is Boston more vulnerable to violent extremism than other...

ISIS terrorists are abusing the UK benefits system to fund their holy war in Iraq and Syria, authorities fear. Hundreds of Brits are believed to have travelled abroad to fight with ISIS and many of them are still believed to be claiming taxpayer-funded benefits. Experts believe jihadists have committed a number of high-level frauds to deliberately abuse the welfare system. A government probe has now been launched to establish the extent of the dodgy benefit claims. While a number of countries do have benefits agreements with the UK that allow British citizens to continue claiming state hand-outs, Iraq and Syria...

Sunday’s Turkish elections are not so much about which party will win as they are about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dream to expand his authoritarian powers. In order to do that, his conservative party needs to win an absolute majority.The June 7 ballot will be a key test for Erdogan. For the first time since 2002, opinion polls suggest that the president’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) may not get enough backing to form a single-party government. A coalition would likely spoil Erdogan’s ambitious plan to rewrite the constitution and transform Turkey into a presidential, rather than a parliamentary,...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday stepped up his attacks on foreign media a day ahead of legislative elections, telling the Guardian to “know your limits” and lamenting that “Jewish capital” was behind the New York Times. Erdogan has during the campaign leading up to Sunday’s polls repeatedly criticised foreign media, amid growing concerns over an erosion of freedom of expression in Turkey under his rule. In one of its final pre-election rallies in the eastern province of Ardahan, Erdogan took offence at an article in the Guardian critical of his rule, including an editorial titled “Growing autocracy threatens...

The Islamic State has published a propaganda video that threatens Balkan countries and calls on Muslims to either join it, or launch attacks in the Balkans. The video, titled "Honor is in jihad, a message to the Balkans", has been published by the Alhayat Media Center - a propaganda center established to reach audiences in the West with Islamic messages. The video, that lasts a little over 22 minutes, has an English language narrator talking about the history of the Balkans, while showing historical footage, and about the Muslim communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania "and other countries in the...

The Islamic state militants continued to manifest their animosity when they beheaded a Libyan soldier before a group of young children for educational purposes. And what surprised many in the footage which the militants released is that the youngsters were never shocked. Some looked somewhat amused as they posed for photographs, as others just peered emotionless down at the body. The Islamic State militants said they performed the beheading in front of the children for “educational purposes.” The slain Libyan soldier, Abdulnabi Shurgawi, was charged with apostasy, which amounts to not practicing the Islamic faith in accordance with the extremist...

The run-up to Turkey’s June 7 general elections has been marked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s intensive use of Islamic symbols and rhetoric, including rally appearances with the Quran. On May 29, the Constitutional Court announced a controversial ruling removing restrictions on religious marriages, while Erdogan led an inauguration ceremony of both economic and religious significance. The event in Istanbul, attended by Cabinet ministers and complete with prayers, marked the launch of the first branch of the Ziraat Participation Bank, the Islamic unit of state-owned lender Ziraat, in line with government decisions to expand Islamic banking in the Turkish financial...

Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Barack ObamaPresident Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the conquest of Jerusalem again in an election appeal this week.YNet News reported: Just one week before upcoming parliamentary elections in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and officials in his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) found a unique way to try and secure a victory at the polls by calling for the “liberation” of Jerusalem.“Conquest is Mecca, conquest is Saladin, it’s to hoist the Islamic flag over Jerusalem again; conquest is the heritage of Mehmed II and conquest means forcing Turkey back on its feet,”...

But the important thing from our perspective is it’s like every other political ideology that competes and has animus towards the west. And we have to see ourselves as in competition with it and needing to defeat it, rather than trying to figure out how we can accommodate it under the auspices of our commitment to religious liberty, because overwhelmingly it’s not a religious doctrine. The political element of it is overwhelmingly a totalitarian political doctrine. And we shouldn’t, just because it has a few religious elements to it, lose sight of the bigger picture.

For 13 years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has worked to impose his Islamist vision on Turkey's proud secular democracy, reshaping the country into a neo-Ottoman republic. His success can be credited in no small measure to his manipulation and intimidation of the press, and the occasional censorship of social media and the Internet overall. Now, in a gesture that betrays either Islamist imperialism, sheer ignorance of Western democracy, or both, Turkey's president and former prime minister is expanding his reach, raising his fist – and, he hopes, his influence – at the West, using the New York Times as his target.Infuriated...

ISTANBUL: Images and video footage allegedly showing trucks belonging to Turkey's state intelligence service carrying weapons en route to jihadist rebels in Syria were published Friday in a Turkish daily. The Turkish government has vehemently denied earlier claims that it is arming rebels fighting in Syria and accused dozens of prosecutors, soldiers and security officers involved in the searching of trucks of attempting to bring it down by suggesting that it is doing so. Earlier this month, Turkey arrested four prosecutors who ordered searches in a similar incident in January 2014 and they are now in prison pending trial. More...

The President of Turkey’s obsession with his critics is getting so out of control that a woman from the opposition MHP party was detained by police and her party headquarters raided by Erdogan’s government for simply making an innocent ‘grey wolf’ party hand gesture at him while he was greeting the public: TODAY’S ZAMAN – A Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) provincial official was briefly detained for making a “wolf” sign, a Turkish nationalist hand gesture associated with her party, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s convoy was passing in front of the party’s building in the western province of Uşak on...

The Islamic State terror group recently released a propaganda article justifying the raping of girls, while boasting that they released some Yazidi women to their "ISIS husbands" after they converted to Islam.In an ISIS propaganda article titled, "Slave-Girls or Prostitutes?, a woman who goes by the name Umm Sumayyah Al-Muhajirah was quoted as saying, "I swear by Allah, O you who feign to be knowledgeable and shout with falsehoods in every gathering, surely the slave markets will be established against the will of the politically correct. "Some slave girls in our State are now pregnant," she added, "and some of...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Tuesday opened a new airport in a restive eastern province dogged by a Kurdish separatist insurgency, naming the facility for a celebrated Muslim medieval leader of Kurdish origin. Erdogan inaugurated the airport in Yuksekova in Hakkari province, close to the border with Iran and Iraq, alongside Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in a joint appearance ahead of June 7 elections. They announced the airport would be named for Selahaddin Eyyubi to remember the 12th century founder of the Ayyubid dynasty who led Muslim resistance against Christian crusaders in the Middle East who sought to control Jerusalem. Of...

By AllahÂ’s will, Jerusalem belongs to the Kurds, the Turks, the Arabs, and to all Muslims. And as our forefathers fought side by side at Gallipoli, and just as our forefathers went together to liberate Jerusalem with Saladin, we will march together on the same path [to liberate Jerusalem]. These are the words just declared by Dovutoglu, the Prime Minister of Turkey. You would think its coming straight from the mouth of the Antichrist. The amazing speeches by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu were given at the inauguration ceremony at the countryÂ’s 55th airport...

Turkey’s President Erdogan is up to his usual Islamist antics. He said yesterday that he will ask the Turkish government to give the head of the country’s religious directorate, the Diyanet, a private jet. The reason? The pope has one, so Turkey’s religious leader deserves one too. After all, he’s just as important as the pope, isn’t he? “[Religious Affairs Directorate President] Mr. Mehmet Görmez is not only the religious leader of Turkey. In fact, he is the respected religious leader of this geographical area in the Islamic world,” Erdoğan said.' 'The president also stressed that Görmez is a respected...

Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong April 27, 2015 Alan Caruba My thoughts regarding the Pope are rooted in my knowledge of the long record of lies, false predictions, and claims by various environmentalists over the years. When the Vatican announced it would hold a conference on April 28 called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development”, I wondered why the Vatican is not holding a conference to organize the protection of Christians—particularly in the Middle East—against the wholesale genocide that is occurring. The Pope is not alone in this. There appears to...

Declassified documents again show what everyone knows deep-down – Obama is on the side of the enemy The crooked, deceitful, and traitorous Obama regime was again revealed on Monday to be lying about what happened in Benghazi, Libya. Documents obtained by Judicial Watch and examined by Fox News prove for all time that the administration was shipping Libyan weapons to Syrian rebels. Note: Those are the same groups of rebels (al Qaeda, ISIS, “moderate rebels,” etc.) who are committing genocide against Christians and destroying humanity’s cultural heritage in ancient Mesopotamia. This is also the reason why Ambassador Christopher Stevens was...

For all the horror of the reports coming out of the ‘Islamic State’, there seems to have been a fairly widespread assumption that ISIS is, if not beaten at least contained, and that in due course it will burn out/be burnt out. Historical parallels are dangerous to draw and they often lead to some wildly incorrect conclusions, but ISIS’s position in Syria and Iraq reminds me more than a little of the situation in which the nascent soviet state found itself during the early years of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks were encircled by hostile forces, who, on paper,...

[snip]I understand what you are saying, but fortunately the corruption of leadership does not go as deep as you fear. It remains something to worry about, but it is not the immediate problem. The immediate objective is not to establish a democratic republic in Iraq, or even to rule Iraq; it is to eradicate the Caliphate. ISIS is a self-proclaimed mortal enemy of the West in general and the United States in particular. If they survive we will have to fight them. They will not choose to fight until they believe they are strong enough to work the Will...