Free Republic

Three years ago, most observers of the Middle East were sure about one thing: the newly elected coalition government in Israel being put together by Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t last. In particular, the Obama administration, which was only a month old itself, was hopeful Netanyahu would quickly flop and be replaced by the more pliant Tzipi Livni, the leader of the Kadima Party. Thirty-six months later, as the Israeli prime minister prepares to journey to Washington for another crucial summit with President Obama, there is no talk about the post-Netanyahu era. Though the Jewish state remains beset with a host of...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Al-Fareen TV owner Tawfiq Okasha, which aired on Al-Faraeen TV February 28, 2012: Tawfiq Okasha: I implore the viewers: Don't call the phone numbers that appear on your TV screens, guys! They say to you: A call costs only 19 or 54. This is all a Jewish economic policy. I say this loud and clear: Jewish! The goal is to steal the money of the poor in particular. How come? Well, let's take a look at who calls these numbers. Let's assume that they say: "Prize money of 5,000 Egyptian pounds." Someone well-off...

ISIS has claimed to have killed five Russian soldiers during fighting in the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. In a statement, the group also said it killed several members of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah group and fighters belonging to the Syrian armed forces. It claimed: 'The soldiers of the caliphate, by the grace of God, have killed five Russian soldiers and six members of the Syrian army.'

CAIRO — Radar scans of King Tut's tomb have revealed two spaces on the north and east chambers of the pharaonic mausoleum that could contain the "discovery of the century," Egypt's antiquities ministry said Thursday. Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty told a press conference that metal and organic masses were revealed by the scans, signaling that the rooms could possibly contain funerary objects. "It could be the discovery of the century. It's very important for Egyptian history and the history of the world," he said, adding that the chambers may well have belonged to a king or queen. Further tests will...

The Israeli left as a democratic political movement is dead. That piece of bad news was delivered by a recent survey which shows that only 8% of Israeli Jews identify with the left, 55% with the center and 37% with the right. In the last election, the establishment Labor Party had to dress up as a wolf in Zionist centrist clothing by renaming itself the Zionist Camp (it still lost). The left had to create two other fake centrist parties to stop Netanyahu, but just ended up having to roll them into his center-right coalition. The Israeli left still controls...

CAIRO — The Arab League labelled Shiite Muslim Hizbollah a terrorist organisation on Friday, Egyptian state media said, as tensions rise between Sunni and Shiite powers across the Middle East. Sectarian wars are raging in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and the League has become a forum for the mostly Sunni Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia, to air their grievances with Shiite power Iran, the major backer of Hizbollah and other Shiite groups in the region. "The Arab League foreign minister's committee has decided on Friday to consider Hizbollah a terrorist organisation," said a statement from the Arab League carried...

Prince Turki al-Faisal also lashes out at US president for accusing monarchy of fueling sectarian conflicts across Mideast A senior Saudi royal criticized President Barack Obama Monday for comments accusing the longtime US ally of feeding Middle East conflicts. Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, has long been a major ally of the United States but the relationship has deteriorated under Obama. Riyadh has been especially concerned by US support for Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, fearing its regional rival will be emboldened. In an opinion piece published in Saudi newspapers, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom’s former intelligence...

Work started on Thursday for the installation of the world’s largest folding umbrella in the northern courtyard of the Grand Mosque in Makkah. This is the first of the eight high-tech giant umbrellas and 54 small ones to be installed in the Grand Mosque in the coming six months. Being manufactured in Germany, each canopy will consist of a giant clock, screens of guidelines for worshippers, air-conditioners, and surveillance cameras. Each umbrella will have a height of 45 meters and weigh 16 tons. It will give shade to an area of 2,400 square meters when open. Some 25 engineers, specialist...

JNS.org – The World Jewish Congress and the Israel Council on Foreign Relations hosted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in Jerusalem on Sunday. Giuliani praised Israel’s resilience during the 1990s surge of Palestinian terror attacks on buses in a speech to an audience that included Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, Israeli Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel, and the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Eli Groner. Israeli resilience helped him lift the moral of New Yorkers following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Giuliani said. “I came to Israel thinking I would lift morale, but I came back...

Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude -- in Egypt in 232 B.C. !by Rick Sanders Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. On the night of August 6-7, 2001, between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM, this writer, and fellow amateur astronomer Bert Cooper, proved in principle that Captain Rata and Navigator Maui could have known and charted their location, by longitude, most of the time during that voyage. The Maui expedition was under the guidance of Eratosthenes, the...

Voyage to prove pharaohs traded cocaine By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 An adventurer who believes that ancient man regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean 14,000 years ago plans to recreate such a voyage in a 41ft raft made of reeds and eucalyptus tree branches. Basing his theory on the thinnest of historical evidence, Dominique Gorlitz believes that the discovery of traces of tobacco and cocaine in the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II proves that there was trade between the Old and New Worlds. He also claims that 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain show that,...

American Drugs in Egyptian MummiesS. A. Wells www.colostate.edu Abstract: The recent findings of cocaine, nicotine, and hashishin Egyptian mummies by Balabanova et. al. have been criticized on grounds that: contamination of the mummies may have occurred, improper techniques may have been used, chemical decomposition may have produced the compounds in question, recent mummies of drug users were mistakenly evaluated, that no similar cases are known of such compounds in long-dead bodies, and especially that pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages are highly speculative. These criticisms are each discussed in turn. Balabanova et. al. are shown to have used and confirmed their findings with...

For in Manchester, the mummies under the care of Rosalie David, the Egyptologist [Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum] once so sure that Balabanova had made a mistake, produced some odd results of their own... "We've received results back from the tests on our mummy tissue samples and two of the samples and the one hair sample both have evidence of nicotine in them. I'm really very surprised at this."

Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Sept. 23, 2004 Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. “ In modern human hair the levels would generally be in the ranges of social drinking, but we...

Tunnels big enough to fit a truck have been discovered by the Egyptian military on the Sinai-Gaza border. These tunnels are allegedly the source of weapons being used by ISIS and Islamic Jihad in the peninsula, and point to a thriving weapons industry in the Strip. Hamas tunnel during Operation Protective Edge (Photo: Reuters) Hamas has been digging tunnels on the border of Egypt that are big enough to permit vehicles the size of trucks to go through, according to Egyptian security officials. Hamas tunnel exposed from the Egyptian side The tunnels connect the Gaza Strip with the Sinai Peninsula,...

Obama became annoyed... President Obama’s favorite journalist Jeffrey Goldberg made headlines in Israel when The Atlantic published his latest article about the President. In his lengthy piece titled “The Obama Doctrine,” Goldberg gave an overview of Obama’s foreign policy and discussed the President’s disillusionment with the attempts to change the Middle East for the better. Yes, Obama really thought that his policies in this problematic region would bring a positive change when he entered the White House at the beginning of 2008. “This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East,”...

If Israel does not take steps to separate from the Palestinians, Jews will continue to be killed in terror attacks and the two-state solution will be in danger, opposition leader Isaac Herzog told US Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. Biden met with Herzog before concluding his three-day trip to Israel in a conversation that focused on the current wave of terror and on Biden's impressions on the Palestinian issue based on his talks with leaders during his visit. The US vice president's trip saw him meet both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas separately. Biden...

Excavations of a tomb in northern Lazio dating to around the 8th century BC have uncovered treasures including an amber necklace, a golden Egyptian scarab amulet and rare pottery that archaeologists say likely belonged to an Etruscan princess. The excavation of the Tomb of the Golden Scarab follows its discovery earlier this year in the archaeological site of Vulci, a former Etruscan city. Anthropological research helped back the theory that the tomb belonged to a princess within the ranks of the nascent Etruscan aristocracy. A few bones wrapped in precious cloth are all that remains of her. The excavation of...

Seven Arab tunnel diggers were rescued by a search operation in Rafah city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip Thursday, after Egyptian authorities had flooded a tunnel where they were working, Ma’an reported, citing Hamas security sources. Gazan authorities are searching for one worker who is believed to be still stuck inside the tunnel. The tunnel was flooded by Egyptian authorities who pumped seawater into it. Last month, according to Ma’an, the Egyptians destroyed another tunnel in the same manner, but no injuries were reported. Gaza Arabs have always relied on underground smuggling tunnels across the Egyptian border,...

Egypt said Sunday that the bombing which killed the country's chief prosecutor last year was carried out by members of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood who had been trained in the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Egyptian Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar said dozens of people have been detained in connection to the killing of 65-year-old Hisham Barakat last June, the first assassination of a senior Egyptian official in 25 years. "Hamas trained, prepared, and oversaw the implementation" of the attack, he said in an address broadcast by state and private media, which also aired confessions by some of...