Free Republic

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has supported forms of immigration reform since he was a House staffer in the 1990s, declared that he would "debate anybody" who calls the current bipartisan effort "amnesty." "Earned legalization is not amnesty," Ryan said during a forum on immigration sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers. "I will debate anybody who tries to suggest that these ideas that are moving through Congress are amnesty. They're not. Amnesty is wiping the slate clean and not paying any penalty for having done something wrong." I think that's a fine position Paul Ryan has...

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Mickey Fearn, the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance, made headlines when he claimed that black people don’t visit national parks because they associate them with slaves being lynched by their masters. Yellowstone, the first national park, was created in 1872 in Wyoming. Slavery was over by then and no one had ever been lynching slaves around Old Faithful anyway. But false claims of racism die very hard. Now Alcee Hastings, an impeached judge, and a coalition of minority groups is demanding increased “inclusiveness” at national parks. High on their list is the claim that, “African-Americans...

In a world where things seem to be falling apart, it may be that things are actually falling into place just as God planned, and just as He warned us in Scripture. In this week's update entitled "Falling Apart / Falling Into Place" John looks at things that seemingly do not make sense. Men in women's bathrooms, a failing global economy in a crude oil glut, increased persecution of the Jewish state and an attempt to take back the Golan Heights and even massive shipping vessels being sold for less than the price of a Starbucks "vente" coffee. And then...

Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. April 14, 2016 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that. The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was...

Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. April 14, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that. The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was shot up...

I’ve been writing about this for a while. It’s good to see it being said openly. Especially now that Obama tried to fake yet another diplomatic crisis because of another manufactured Israeli “insult”. […]As an example of such a crisis, (Michael) Oren cites the infamous diplomatic dustup during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel in March 2010, calling it a “fabricated crisis” intentionally created by the Obama administration regarding a routine approval announcement for construction inside an established neighborhood in Jerusalem.Obama manufactures these crises, these “insults” by Israel to make him seem like the victim so that when he...

The US Didn’t Create ISIS -- Assad and Saddam Did Dictators pay a price for allying with Islamic terrorism November 4, 2015 Daniel Greenfield 314 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russia-Iran-Assad axis and its useful idiots in the West claim that the United States created ISIS. Some of the loonier conspiracy sites that gleefully repost Russian propaganda allege that the Caliph of ISIS is a Jewish Mossad agent named Elliot Shimon or a CIA agent named Simon Elliot.  Elliot doesn’t exist, but ISIS’ Deputy Caliph...

One of the few interesting items in the New York Times' whitewash of Hillary and Obama's illegal Libyan war is the confirmation of weapons shipments. ... The story blames the problem on Qatar aiding Jihadists and Obama's unwillingness to defy the terror oil state. But the claim that we had to arm terrorists to fight Qatar's arming of terrorists doesn't hold up too well. Furthermore we already know that US forces were told to turn a blind eye to Qatar's weapons shipments. We could have blocked them instead. ... Qatar was backing the Muslim Brotherhood. Just like Hillary and Obama.

Will Black Voters Leave Hillary's Plantation? Keeping them on the plantation is the only way she can win. February 22, 2016 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. In her desperate scramble to the top every Hillary victory is accompanied by a setback. The corrupt Democratic machine that has kept her going this far eked out a victory in Nevada, but took down her minority firewall.  In earlier primaries, Hillary had lost women and young voters. In Nevada, she lost Latinos. The last and only element...

Thursday, January 21, 2016 Trolling is the New Politics Posted by Daniel Greenfield Your classic troll was an amoral sociopath or played one on the internet. His only cause was his own amusement. He advocated horrible and contradictory causes because it amused him to infuriate people. If he could get an entire group howling for his blood, he won. If an outraged media reported on his antics, he was a prince among trolls. Chaos and absurdity were his only agendas. But eventually the trolls who did it for the "Lulz" gave way to the "Moralfags" sincere trolls who were sincerely...

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the...

How Putin is Winning and Losing Syria No one is in Syria because of ISIS. October 8, 2015 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. The Russian line is that they’re in Syria to fight ISIS. But the Russians, like the Turks, Iranians and Europeans, don’t care about ISIS. By declaring itself a Caliphate, ISIS made itself non-aligned. The fighting in Syria isn’t about ISIS. It predated the rise of ISIS as a major player. It’s about Syria. ISIS has become a convenient excuse for...

After several brutal Muslim terror attacks in Jerusalem, in contrast to many American mayors, the mayor of Jerusalem is saying that more guns are the answer. Although such an announcement has not been made publicly or explicitly, Walla! News reports, police and local authorities have unofficially given instructions to civilians to carry personal weapons. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has however issued an official statement urging residents of the capital to carry licensed firearms to increase their personal security. "The mayor encourages licensed gun owners to carry their weapons to increase security. He himself serves as a personal example of this,"...

Hygiene isn't Halal Immigration is all about diversity and cultural enrichment. And this Muslim eatery enriched the UK with a new strain of Ecoli that sent customers to the hospital because handwashing was Haram. A teenage girl almost died and more than 140 others were taken severely ill after contracting a E.coli in a filthy takeaway where staff did not wash their hands after going to the toilet. 142 customers who ate at the Khyber Pass in Hyson Green, Nottingham, suffered with nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea after the outbreak last June, and a 13-year-old girl was left so ill that...

The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera America were undone by their own hubris. There’s a lesson there, but Qatar’s arrogant rulers aren’t likely to learn it. When Al Jazeera America was announced, the Qatari propaganda network was riding high. Once known as a dump for Al Qaeda videos, the Arab Spring had allowed the House of Thani to project its power across the region, toppling governments and replacing them with its Muslim Brotherhood allies. Qatar had been notorious for its ties to Al Qaeda, but those connections had done little for the oil-rich oligarchy. The Muslim Brotherhood however handed Egypt...

If insurance is so great at stopping bad things from happening, can we get politician insurance? For a mere $5.95 a month, you too can be insured against the risk of electing morons whose only two functions in life are stealing money and trying to run your life. So now the anti-2nd amendment trolls have a great new idea. Stop shootings with gun insurance. It’s a plan so stupid it can only come from a career Democrat. House Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.) has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to carry liability insurance. The Firearm Risk Protection...

.... LINKED TO LA RAZA The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who previously dismissed terror charges against one of the Garland, Texas shooters has a connection to the controversial activist group, National Council of La Raza. Judge Mary Murguia, appointed by President Clinton and considered a potential nominee to the Supreme Court by President Obama, was the judge who dismissed government charges against Elton Simpson for suspected terrorism in 2011. On Sunday, Simpson attacked a free speech event in Garland, Texas depicting the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons. Daniel Greenfield cites evidence from the 2011 case: The FBI knew...

Glenn Beck to NRA: It’s Norquist or MePosted By Robert Spencer On March 16, 2015 @ 12:21 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments Glenn Beck has declared that he will leave the National Rifle Association (NRA) if Republican Party kingmaker Grover Norquist remains on the Board of Directors.This is long overdue: it has now been over eleven years since FrontPage Magazine first published revelations about what David Horowitz described as Norquist’s “alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities.”...

The quintessential question of Watergate was “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer. Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper. After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies...

Tuesday, September 30, 2014 Science is for Stupid People Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy. The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to...

I have been searching for moderate Islam since September 11 and just like a lost sock in the dryer, it was in the last place I expected it to be. There is no moderate Islam in the mosques or in Mecca. You won’t find it in the Koran or the Hadiths. If you want to find moderate Islam, browse the newspaper editorials after a terrorist attack or take a course on Islamic religion taught by a Unitarian Sociologist wearing fake native jewelry. You can’t find a moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but you can find it in countless...

James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda. And the agenda was obvious from his Twitter feed.Any human life lost is tragic, but a moral individual would have much more empathy for the Syrian Christians who suffered at the hands of Foley’s favorite Jihadists than one of their pet propagandists. Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government.He cheered on the Sunni Muslim terrorists fighting to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Aleppo. In the conflict...

ISIS marching through Iraq has smashed the media’s taboo against criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. Substantive discussions are taking place about why his foreign policy is such a miserable failure. And they mostly miss the point. Liberal journalists still proceed from the fallacy that there was a foreign policy debate between neo-conservative interventionists and liberal non-interventionists. These are a series of digested Bush era talking points that have no relationship to reality since Bush’s foreign policy on Iraq carried over from Bill Clinton. It’s why Hillary gets so uncomfortable when she has to discuss her vote on Iraq. The liberals weren’t...

Bill Bratton has destroyed his reputation in a short amount of time by becoming a mouthpiece for Bill de Blasio. Taking the job was a poor idea since crime rates had dropped so low that they were bound to rebound, especially under a pro-criminal mayor like De Blasio. All that Bratton had done is set himself up to take the blame and join the ranks of failed NYPD commissioners like Lee Brown who did what a liberal mayor wanted instead of fighting crime. So now it’s time to pander to Islam.

There’s absolutely incomprehensible black-hearted rotten-souled evil. And then a step beneath that, there’s SEIU. Melissa and Kevin Haynes were born with hypertonic cerebral palsy, a severe disability that impaired their cognitive development, leaving them functioning as infants. For more than 30 years, their devoted parents, Robert and Patricia, have cared for them in their home in Macomb Township, Mich. The two disabled adults received Medicaid checks each month, money that went toward their care. But in 2006, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began collecting 2.75 percent from each of these checks, claiming that Robert and Patricia were employees — not only...

Dear John, Every few years a messiah arrives in Jerusalem, shakes hands, makes demands and promises to make peace in our time. Then when the whole thing blows up in his face, he throws up his hands and flies back blaming the ungrateful Jews for not embracing his vision. So many false messiahs have come before you, squinting against the bright sunshine, pounding the table at meetings, downing martinis and fantasizing about the Nobel Peace Prize that they were sure was waiting for them at the end. And they left with nothing except sunburn and simmering rage. Did you really...

The views in the video aren’t surprising. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO They’re the views of Ron and Rand Paul and their intellectual milieu which believes that most wars are set up by banks. According to them, the US need not have gotten involved in WW2. “There are times when sanctions have made it worse. I mean, there are times .. leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them … some...

Muslims say that Mohammed was the original feminist. And by feminist, they mean he told his followers to beat and rape women. An Arizona Muhammad has followed in his prophet’s footsteps, as so many Mohammeds, Muhammads and Mahmouds have before him. Police say a valley man threatened to kill his wife, telling his victim “Islamic Law” gave him the right to kill her. Ansar Muhammad sexually assaulted the victim, held her against her will while threatening to kill her, punched and strangulated her, causing physical injuries at their home. His wife told police the incidents were sparked after Muhammad had...

Big lies don’t always start out big. They don’t even always start out as lies. They only grow big in the cover-up when the truth has to be beaten off with a stick made out of even bigger lies. A brief read of the daily newspapers, a quick flick through the cable news networks and an ear cocked to the drive time news minute might give you the idea that Israel is isolated and besieged. Israel is indeed a small country. It’s always been isolated in a Muslim region that is willing to kill even fellow Arab Christians and fellow...

Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives have expressed bewilderment over CBS’s abandonment of the “American Heartland” by choosing Colbert to replace Letterman. Ed Driscoll has contrasted the pick with the Letterman and Leno succession battle. But the real lesson of that battle is that while Leno won on performance, beating Letterman in the ratings, Letterman won on image, retiring as an honored figure, despite his abusive behavior, while Leno was booed out the door Leno is no conservative, but he left with the baffled bewilderment familiar to many on the right of being the better man who is despised for his...

For only ten dollars a day or a month you can feed all the starving children in Africa. For only the price of a cup of coffee a year, you can make sure that no one in Kansas City ever goes hungry again. For just a third of your paycheck, you can subsidize a vast bureaucracy that will conduct studies on the best way to save the world and then come up with proposals that will only cost you half your paycheck. This misplaced philanthropic confidence is the idiot stepchild of a free enterprise society where anything can be accomplished...

Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941 ------------------- A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces. "I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop." In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not...

October 29, 2013 Obama Didn’t Lie About ObamaCare, If You Exclude All His Lies Daniel Greenfield “I did not have sex with that health plan.�The hot new liberal talking point about Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan� lie is that it’s actually true of the plans you can keep, but not of the plans you can’t keep.When Obama repeatedly said that, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan�… he apparently meant only the “good� health care plans that he approves of, but not the bad ones.Somehow this is...

Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance. These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or...

It’s not amnesty. It’s just a bill that legalizes illegal aliens and puts them on a path to citizenship. No amnesty to see here. Issa’s forthcoming legislation takes elements from similar legislation he introduced in December 2003, the Alien Accountability Act. The six-year period is intended to whittle down the undocumented immigrant population into several categories, such as immigrants with family ties to U.S. citizens or immigrants who want to participate in a guest-worker program. -snip- “If somebody has a nexus that would reasonably allow them to become permanent residents and American citizen, we should allow them to do that,”...

Thursday, October 10, 2013 The Obama Blockade Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog In the spring of ’48, the collision of wills between the free world and the red slave empire of the east came to a head in Berlin. The Communist strategy had been to push forward, to violate the spirit of the agreements and then the letter of the agreements while always claiming to be the aggrieved party. The Allies had treated the Soviet Union as if it were a credible partner that wanted to work together with them on rebuilding Europe. The Soviet Union...

China doesn’t have the same record of killing foreign enemies overseas that Russia does. But it has a large enough overseas network and piles of cash that it could get the job done if it needed to. Just ask Naw Kham what happened after the Mekong River Massacre. The bodies of the Chinese, the crew of two cargo boats, were found badly mutilated on the Thai side of the river in early October 2011. The killings, the worst slaughter of Chinese citizens abroad in recent memory, angered the Chinese public. Chinese investigators insist that Mr. Naw Kham was the mastermind...

Suffice it to say that apparently Netanyahu and the Israeli military have a plan to take out Iran’s nuclear program. And the man blocking the exit is Barack Hussein Obama, who wants to bomb Syria over WMDs, but doesn’t want to let Israel do what it has to in Iran.

Ronald Ernest Paul, the nation's last best hope for internet gambling and the gold standard, responded to the murder of a Navy SEAL by saying, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword." But the question is whose sword is it? To the anti-war movement, all conflicts between the free world and the world of slaves are reduced to a pithy formula of moral equivalence. America lifted the sword and has gone on swinging it. It never puts the sword down and therefore it dies by it. Chris Kyle becomes a metaphor for the great beast of war,...

The Ecotality case wasn’t the biggest payoff, but it was particularly outrageous because it got stimulus money when it was already under SEC investigation.The company received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2010.The president of Ecotality North America Don Karner was sent an additional subpoena in December of 2011, which specifically asks for any and all documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company for $99.8 million on August 5, 2009.Ecotality was awarded $99 million in 2009 and an additional $26 million in October 2011. Since the beginning...

We spend a great deal of time talking about the Muslim Brotherhood’s networks, its agents of influence and the structural elements of its infrastructure. But it may be worth exploring a more basic question. What is its appeal? This isn’t an inquiry about the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and its varied front groups to the educated and wealthy Muslims who make up its key demographic. The Brotherhood promises the Sunni Arab elites that they can stay on top while beating the West by making Islam into as compelling a method of national and international governance as the freedom and...

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...

Friday, May 24, 2013 Friday Afternoon Roundup - Orwell Lives Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments ORWELL LIVES Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case. “An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers." Note...

The United States has become a tool of Muslim Brotherhood expansionism. Obama helped the Brotherhood overthrow governments by political means, but now the Brotherhood is demanding military intervention to help a Brotherhood/Al Qaeda coalition take over Syria. And if Obama goes along with it, he will have turned the United States military into the mercenaries of the Muslim Brotherhood. Americans have died because of Obama’s dirty deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question now is whether Obama will send American soldiers and pilots to die for the Brotherhood. In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. Obama had...

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 #FreeJahar and the Media's #FreeJihad Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Even if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would...

Sunday, May 12, 2013 Put Not Your Trust in Politicians Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 4 Comments The most obvious lessons of the defeat of gun control and the push for illegal alien amnesty is that politicians don't matter. People do. The Tea Party invested its energy into electing the right people, but as Rick Scott and Marco Rubio showed us, there may be no such thing as the right people. Politicians are in the business of selling out. The difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist was that Rubio hadn't really been tested. But that...

Thursday, May 09, 2013 The Playgrounds of War Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating. Tolerance does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to so many places. While a society changes, human...

Tuesday, May 07, 2013 The Road to Nowhere Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog The Heritage Institute report estimates that under amnesty the average legalized illegal household will take in $43,900 in benefits while paying a little over a third of that in taxes. Those numbers are grim from the standpoint of a tottering economy being asked to take on an even bigger pile of debt and they reveal an even grimmer view of the future. Set aside the political debates, the tensions over multiculturalism, entitlements and the great political divide, and those numbers reek of a...

Saturday, May 11, 2013 With Blood on Their Hands Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late. via American Digest It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign. If she does make it into the White...