Free Republic

Before we heard that Al Gore's Current TV had rejected Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV as a buyer for, as Beck put it, "legacy" reasons and selected Al Jazeera as its white knight instead, Fjordman passed along this December 25 Deutche Welle interview with Aktham Suliman, Al Jazeera's former Berlin correspondent. Suliman argues that Al Jazeera's coverage is a policy instrument of its owners the Qataris, who, as he puts it, "tend toward the Muslim Brotherhood." Saudi-investor-funded Al Arabiya TV, on the other hand, is more Salafist. Big difference? Hah -- not when it comes to extending sharia. "Generally speaking,...

Esther Duflo is one of those people who are taken seriously by the sort of people who eat up TED talks with a silver spoon. Her big number is how to help people in the Third World up from poverty, which is a surprisingly profitable branch of economics when you consider the sheer number of NGOs and billionaires interested in getting into the aid business. But there’s one particular billionaire at Duflo’s back. Abdul Latif Jameel. Esther Duflo is one of the co-founders of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, more commonly known as J-PAL for the father of Abdul...

An Egyptian magazine claims that six American Islamist activists who work with the Obama administration are Muslim Brotherhood operatives who enjoy strong influence over U.S. policy. The Dec. 22 story published in Egypt's Rose El-Youssef magazine (read an IPT translation here) suggests the six turned the White House "from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood." The story is largely unsourced, but its publication is considered significant in raising the issue to Egyptian readers. The six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland...

Nothing says bug-eyed clerical fanaticism more than inviting a hate-spewing Saudi cleric to address your religious revival meeting. But this is part of the under-reported history of the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) Convention, a conference that Justin Trudeau, a frontrunner in Canada's Liberal Party leadership race – and son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau – will address this weekend in Toronto. It's also why moderate Muslims and non-Muslims are aghast at the prospect of Trudeau's presence legitimizing the conference and some of its notables. Although organizers pitch the gathering as "A Unique Youth Effort" "to help overcome new...

The Obama administration's efforts to conquer hearts and minds in the Muslim world as part of its broader strategy to battle Islamist terrorism may be a laudable goal. But the administration's continued pandering to radical Islamists both at home and abroad continues to baffle and frustrate opponents of political Islam and Islamist organizations. The administration has been swift to embrace newly-elected Islamist regimes in the Middle-East despite their violent and pro-jihadi rhetoric. Last month for example, it heaped praise on Egypt's new Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi for helping broker a truce between Israel and Hamas after eight days of fighting....

..from ‘evangelical, conservative Jewish bloc’ Far from being the lock-step GOP ground troop some in the media have suggested it is, the tea-party movement includes people of many different ideologies … but this element is most unusual. KleinOnline has discovered a Muslim activist organization that claims to be working from within the tea party to counter the movement’s “Islamophobia.” The group Muslims4Liberty, however, also decries American “greatness,” accuses the U.S. of “war crimes,” espouses seemingly anti-Israel ideology and slams the “evangelical and conservative Jewish bloc” of the Republican party. The radical left Center for American Progress, or CAP, actually promotes...

A law firm that defends and promotes Christian heritage and moral values says it has obtained a document that vindicates an 18-year veteran Army officer who is being disciplined for telling the truth about Islam. The Thomas More Law Center says it has obtained more evidence to prove its contention that the Pentagon is taking its marching orders from Islamic groups in taking extreme disciplinary action against Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, a 1994 graduate of the United States Military Academy. The highly decorated armor officer was excoriated and relieved of a teaching assignment because he discussed negative aspects of Islam...

Is the looming economic destruction of America deliberate? Bill Whittle thinks so. So do I.

Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French intelligence services. Racing along with them are carloads of international diplomats urging their governments to give the Islamist militias more money and more weapons. Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian refugees from Aleppo, Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the...

Transcript follows: Imam of Al-Islam Mosque in Washington believes that the US and its allies’ so-called ‘war on terror’ is in fact a war on Islam and Muslims, not just in the Middle Eastern countries but all around the world. Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the notion that the US may come to terms with Islam and Islamic movements is a mistake. In a meeting with hundreds of scholars, academics, thinkers and researchers participating in the International Conference of Muslim University Professors and Islamic Awakening, Ayatollah Khamenei said that ‘any notion that the global arrogance,...

Today, Robert J. Muise, Co-Founder and Senior Counsel of the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC), is presenting oral argument at a hearing in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma on behalf of Captain Paul Fields, a Tulsa police officer who was summarily punished for refusing to attend a mandated Islamic proselytizing event held at a local mosque. The hearing will be held before Chief Judge Gregory K. Frizzell at 1:30 p.m. CT in Room 411 at the federal courthouse located at 333 West Fourth Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The media and public are welcome to...

You can almost hear the Obama administration call out, as one voice, "Aha! We'll designate the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra a terrorist organization, thus barring the group from receiving Western money and arms, and be done with it!" And so they did. But they weren't. From the NYT story, picking up with paragraph 9: But a growing number of anti-government groups — including fighters in the loose-knit Free Syrian Army that the United States is trying to bolster — have signed petitions or posted statements online in recent days expressing support for the Nusra Front. In keeping...

The problem is that it’s also the 9 percent that has the best equipment and the best fighters. But this should be interesting. The U.S. State Department is planning to designate the al-Nusra Front, a radical Islamist group in Syria, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to CNN on background. The goal of the designation is to isolate extremists groups in Syria while giving a boost to the new political opposition group unveiled at a summit in Doha, Qatar, last month. The latest U.S. data estimates al-Nusra makes up roughly 9% of the rebel...

One empire falls and another rises in its place. It’s an old story and it is what we are seeing in the Middle East. The Islamist resurgence was fed by the collapse of two world powers, the USSR and the US. The fall of the Soviet Union robbed the Arab Socialist dictatorships of their support. The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias. Egypt’s Sadat had made the move to the American camp early enough to avoid the fate of Syria or Iraq, but instead his successor, Mubarak, encountered the fate of the Shah of...

The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre has released this year’s list of the 500 “world’s most influential Muslims” and of the top 10, seven are Islamists. The unfortunate reality is that Islamism is indeed mainstream thought in the Muslim world and non-Muslims have a lot of ground to make up in the struggle over the direction of the Muslim world. The most influential Muslim is Saudi King Abdullah. He is hailed as a reformer but that is by Saudi standards. Under his rule, Sharia is still the law of the land in an especially puritanical form. By setting this example...

America’s involvement in the global jihad against Western civilization—on the side of the jihadis—is accelerating. Instead of standing firm as leader of the free world and defender of inalienable human rights, U.S. policy is shifting demonstrably to the defense of those who systematically deny such rights to their own people and seek to suppress them everywhere. Since 2009, U.S. foreign policy has backed Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood power plays in Libya, Egypt and now Syria, too. The U.S. Department of State is working closely with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whose top objective is the criminalization of the criticism...

The Justice Department's Inspector General is investigating contact between FBI field offices and representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a report to Congress first flagged by reporter Ryan Reilly shows. The FBI cut off contact with CAIR in 2008, citing evidence in a Hamas-financing trial that tied the organization to both the Palestinian terrorist group and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Internal records of a U.S.-based Hamas support network listed CAIR among the group's member organizations. "[U]ntil we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS," a senior FBI official wrote in...

The most important goal of dialogue is "to introduce Islam" and "to correct the erroneous slanders raised against Islam." — Saudi Press Agency Saudi Arabia has officially opened the doors of a controversial new "interreligious and intercultural dialogue center" in the Austrian capital, Vienna. The King Abdullah International Center for Inter-Religious and Inter-Cultural Dialogue was inaugurated during an elaborate ceremony at the Hofburg Palace in downtown Vienna on November 26. More than 650 high-profile guests from around the world attended the event, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the foreign ministers of the center's three founding states, Austria,...

Soeren Kern, writing for the Gatestone Institute in his November 16th article, "IslamNeeds a Fair Chance in Germany," reported a significant development in Germany that portends dire consequences for that benighted nation and for all of Europe: the city of Hamburg signed a "treaty" with organizations representing its Islamic population. The "treaty" features a series of concessions, not by the Muslims to secular authority, but by the secular government of Hamburg to the Muslims. The "treaty," which requires ratification by the city's Parliament, grants Muslims "rights" and "privileges" enjoyed by no other religious group there. The November 13 agreement, signed...

Hamas’ brutal execution of a number of men who it claimed were Israeli collaborators led to a lot of headlines complete with photos of bodies being dragged around behind motorcycles. But in the Muslim world, it’s important to understand context, not just content, and everyone lies all the time. Collaborators are often executed in the West Bank and Gaza, however these people are rarely agents of Israel. Israeli intelligence is pretty good and not that easy to penetrate. Israel doesn’t rely as much on local informants anymore and more on intercepted communications. So who are the