Free Republic

Over the past week a new geopolitical mystery emerged: an "unknown" party was launching airstrikes against Libya, which is already reeling in its latest political crisis where headlines such as this have become the norm: •MILITIA MEN SET HOUSE OF LIBYAN PM THENI ABLAZE: ARABIYA •LIBYA'S NEIGHBOURS AGREE NOT TO INTERVENE IN LIBYAN AFFAIRS, CALL FOR NATIONAL DIALOGUE The strikes puzzled all media outlets, including Reuters which just over the weekend reported that "Unidentified war planes attacked positions of an armed faction in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Saturday, residents and local media said. Local channel al-Nabaa said the planes...

Egyptian armed forces are preparing for the execution of an extensive operation inside Libya in order to fight the revolutionaries and support the militias that are loyal to the UAE in Tripoli and Benghazi including troops commandeered by Brigadier General Khalifa Haftar, high ranking officials revealed. The operation may include a possible ground invasion in East Libya with French aerial cover and funding from the UAE in order to enable Haftar to decisively win the battle, the sources told the Asrar Arabiya website. The site said Libyan Prime Minister Abdullah Al-Thani's visit to the UAE on Tuesday last week came...

An oil and gas group exploring offshore Israel said on Sunday it may have discovered a field that contains an estimated 2.5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas and 255 million barrels of oil. About 30 tcf of gas have been discovered off Israel's Mediterranean coast in recent years, turning the country once dependent on energy imports into a potential exporter. The latest announcement, which was based on 3D seismic data from 2012, covers the Oz license some 50 km (30 miles) from the coastal city of Herzliya in water 1,150 meters (yards) deep.

The Pentagon brass placed in charge of implementing Obama’s war against ISIS are getting fed up with the short leash the White House put them on. Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army. As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained...

After World War II, the Marshall Plan helped rebuild a devastated Europe. The key word in that sentence is "after. Last weekend at a conference of donor nations held in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss rebuilding Gaza, following the latest exchange of rockets between Hamas and Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged an additional $212 million in U.S. aid for the project, nearly doubling the total U.S. commitment (so far). The Palestinian Authority claims rebuilding could cost $4 billion. The aid is promised before the terrorist war against Israel is over and without a promise by Hamas or the Palestinian...

A senior IDF commander on Wednesday acknowledged to Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) that the Iran-proxy terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon has likely dug terror tunnels into Israel. IDF Northern Commander Maj. Gen. Yair Golan equivocated by noting on Hamas’s use of terror tunnels, saying “we have no positive information meaning that there are tunnels. The situation is not similar to what there was around the Gaza Strip,” reports Reuters. “That said, this idea of going below ground is not foreign to Lebanon and is not foreign to Hezbollah and so we have to suppose as a working assumption that there...

Hezbollah is many times more dangerous than the terrorist organizations in Gaza, Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan, the outgoing head of the IDF’s Northern Command, told Army Radio on Wednesday. He warned Israelis not to expect the same level of air defense cover that the South and Center of the country received during the war with Hamas in Gaza City this summer...

On Thursday, Sweden finally solved all the problems in the Middle East by recognizing the State of Palestine. For decades all the instability in the region had been blamed on the lack of a PLO state. Foreign policy experts stood in line to tell us all that the only thing that could end terrorism in the Middle East was a terrorist state. .... It was a plan so crazy that it was bound to either work or kill a lot of people. Mostly it’s done the latter. .... Sweden’s new Palestine not only dispensed with elections, routing the business of...

One day after the Swedish government officially recognized the state of Palestine, members of the Parliament, Riksdagen, disagreed on whether this decision was right or “immature”. The leftist government, which took office only a month ago after winning national elections in September, on Thursday (30 October) became the first European country to recognize the state of Palestine. This prompted Israel to recall its ambassador to Sweden to Jerusalem on the same day. The country also threatened that further cuts to the two countries’ diplomatic relations can be expected. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sweden “needs to understand that relations...

And the schoolbooks are just one small part of the UNRWA/Hamas symbiosis in Gaza. “As usual, the question is – is anyone listening?” Apparently not Malala Yousafzai. “UNRWA-Hamas Symbiosis Detailed in New Film,” Arutz Sheva, October 29, 2014 (thanks to Inexion): In a new documentary video entitled UNRWA Goes to War, journalist David Bedein builds a seemingly incontestable case against UNRWA, showing the close symbiotic relations between it and the terror group Hamas. The video shows that not only did UNRWA schools serve as repositories for rockets in the last Gaza war, and not only were rockets launched from places...

The same Tuesday night that a senior official in US President Barack Obama's administration was quoted calling Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "chickens**t," yet more officials indicated the US is warming up to cooperation with Iran - the Islamic regime seeking nuclear weapons that has repeatedly declared its desire to destroy Israel. Senior US and Arab officials were cited by the Wall Street Journal saying that in recent months, America and Iran have grown closer through cooperation against their "common enemy", the Islamic State (ISIS), as well as over a shared interest in "stability" in Iraq and Afghanistan. American officials revealed...

Egypt responded strongly to a Hamas jihadi terror attack that killed 30 Egyptians soldiers, with helicopter strikes, a curfew of 100,000 people, and the announcement they are going build a security wall.  to control the border with Gaza.  Unlike President Obama, Egyptian President Al-Sisi has no trouble identifying the enemy and didn’t feel the need to assure people that Islamic terrorists are lone wolves, representing nothing and no one.  Instead he asserted the attack was supported by foreign forces.  He vowed to protect the lives of Egyptian military at home and to pursue an “extensive war” against the jihadists,...

Five-and-a-half years after being convicted of providing material support for terrorism, terror lawyer Lynne Stewart finally received a sentence commensurate with her crime. She was resentenced last week to 10 years. But if George Soros had his way, she would be free today. Stewart made a career out of defending street criminals and terrorists, including Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (pleaded guilty), Weather Underground terrorist David J. Gilbert (convicted), and Larry Davis (acquitted of wounding six policemen and killing several others in 1986, only to be convicted of a later murder and killed in prison). It should have come as...

counterrevolutions against Islamist rule in Egypt and Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood fell hard and fast in Egypt. In Tunisia it’s been more of a slow drawn out fight ... now the Arab Spring wellspring has fallen. A few days ago the New York Times was predicting that the Islamist Ennahda party would rebound and portraying them as the victims. So much for that. ... Ennahda isn’t as done as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, it could still climb back, but this is a severe blow to the political Islamists and their Western backers who hoped to propel them to power through...

After a terror attack on Friday killed at least 30 Egyptian soldiers in the northern Sinai, Cairo has declared a state of emergency in the area, closed down the Rafah crossing from Gaza, canceled indirect cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, and now says it will build a wall to block smuggling with the coastal enclave, Israel’s NRG News reported. Egyptian air force helicopter forces said they had killed five militants in strikes in the vicinity on Sunday, Israel Radio reported. Additionally, there in a sunset to sunrise curfew in the area affecting over 100,000 residents, according to Army radio....

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visits southern Israel, Gaza Strip • Ban: The build-destroy, build-destroy cycle in Gaza must be broken • Ban tours terror tunnel near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, calls threats posed by rockets and tunnels "not acceptable." The U.N. Human Rights Council's investigation of Operation Protective Edge will go ahead as planned, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two met in Jerusalem earlier this week. Israel tried to convince Ban that an internal Israeli probe of the recent Gaza operation would be sufficient, but Ban made clear he would await the results of the...

Last August 14 the Wall Street Journal reported that, in July, after Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, Washington had surprised Israel by turning down an Israeli request for “a large number of Hellfire missiles.” Hellfires are an important air-to-surface precision weapon, suited to the kind of warfare Israel was waging against Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza. But as Amir Rapaport, a veteran Israeli military-affairs writer and editor of the Israel Defense site, now reports: The full truth…is much more severe: apparently, during Operation Protective Edge, the USA had completely stopped all connections with Israel’s defense...

The European Union is asking Jerusalem to weave the rope with which they will come to hang Israel, a senior diplomatic official said Wednesday in response to reports that the EU is interested in negotiating with Israel over its redlines in the West Bank. Haaretz on Wednesday published an internal document drawn up by EU officials in Brussels that outlined the content of a sharp message regarding Israel’s construction beyond the Green Line and its policies in the West Bank that the EU’s Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen has been instructed to deliver at the “highest possible level” in the...

EL-ARISH, Egypt (AP) -- A coordinated assault on an army checkpoint in the Sinai Peninsula killed 30 Egyptian troops on Friday, making it the deadliest single attack in decades on the military, which has been struggling to stem a wave of violence by Islamic extremists since the overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. Officials described it as "well-planned" attack that began with a car bomb which may have been set off by a suicide attacker. Other militants then fired rocket-propelled grenades, striking a tank carrying ammunition and igniting a secondary explosion. Roadside bombs intended to target rescuers struck two army...

Egypt has declared a state of emergency in the north and centre of the Sinai Peninsula after a suicide car bombing killed at least 30 soldiers. The measures will begin on Saturday at 03:00 GMT "for [a] duration of three months," Presidency Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a statement, in the wake of the deadliest attack on the security forces since the army deposed President Mohamed Morsi last year. A three-day mourning period has been declared across the country, ...