Free Republic

An initial batch of Advanced Fulcrum lightweight multirole fighters for Egypt is in production at the Russian Aircraft Corporation “MiG” (RAC MiG), according to industry sources. The number on order and the exact type of aircraft is not yet known. A couple of aircraft are to be ready for flight tests by the year-end. Russian media reports have given a contract value of $2 billion. Neither Moscow nor Cairo have revealed the status of the deal. This is mainly due to its complex nature, arranged by Egypt and Saudi Arabia with the latter granting funds under government-to-government agreements of a...

As of June 1st, Ghost Squad Hackers – the same group leading #OpIcarus – have launched a series of coordinated attacks against leading members of the corporate mainstream media. Giving credit where credit is due, Tec.mic and Softpedia were the first to report the operation. But their reports only tell a portion of the whole story, we will explain why in a moment. Broadly speaking, the goal of the #OpSilence is to attack all the corrupt major news networks that mislead and censor information from the general public. More specifically, the news agencies who conceal the crimes of Israel, while...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that he sees Israel as the victim in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he would “100%” come to its defense if it was attacked in an interview broadcast on Monday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

A Palestinian-American activist asserted earlier this month that the United States and Israel share a common legacy of ethnic cleansing as the foundational basis of the two nations in a video posted to the online news outlet The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). In the clip Osama Abu Irshaid, the National Director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), claims that the "Zionists" have co-opted the "racist" narrative of the founding of America to mirror that of the establishment of the State of Israel in order to convince Americans that the two peoples have a similar history. "We came to...

A smuggling network has managed to sneak illegal immigrants from Middle East terrorism hotbeds straight to the doorstep of the U.S., including helping one Afghan man authorities say was part of an attack plot in North America. Immigration officials have identified at least a dozen Middle Eastern men smuggled into the Western Hemisphere by a Brazilian-based network that connected them with Mexicans who guided them up to the U.S. border, according to internal government documents reviewed by The Washington Times. Those smuggled included Palestinians, Pakistanis and the Afghan man who Homeland Security officials said had family ties to the Taliban...

After their abysmal failure to stop ultra-Orthodox murderer Yishai Schlissel, who in 2015 stabbed to death an Israeli teenage girl at the Jerusalem gay pride parade, police have gone several shades of crazy on the eve of the Tel Aviv Friday parade. According to the legal aid society Honenu, police have been raiding the homes of rightwing activists, warning them against attending and protesting the parade. According to attorney Itamar Ben Gvir, despite the fact that an Israeli court refused to sign restraining orders without the shred of a proof against individuals, police nevertheless showed up in their homes and...

France has delivered the first of a series of Mistral warships to Egypt, the Egyptian news website Al Ahram reported Thursday. The helicopter carriers were initially constructed for the Russian Navy, but France pulled out of the deal following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. France paid to Russia 950 million euro ($1 billion) as compensation for breaching the deal. The official ceremony was attended Egyptian Minister of Defence Sedki Sobhi, the commander of the French naval forces and other top military officials from France and Egypt. The warship was named after the former president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser. A...

Laplace's equipment picked up the "signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders," the Egyptian statement read. It added that a second ship, the John Lethbridge, affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week. Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders can be picked up from deep underwater. The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about...

Missing EgyptAir flight MS804 had reportedly been forced to make three emergency landings in the 24 hours leading up to crash. The Airbus 320 is said to have been forced to turn around shortly after takeoff on three separate occasions after it's warning systems signalled an anomaly onboard. The claims, made in French media, have since been denied by the Egyptian lead crash investigation committee.

The international movement calling for a boycott against Israel on Thursday said its website was repeatedly attacked earlier this year and raised suspicions that Israel was behind the attacks. The BDS movement released a report Thursday showing that its main website suffered six attacks in February and March. The denial of service attacks, which work by flooding a target website with bogus traffic, knocked out the BDS website for several hours at a time. The report, compiled by nonprofit online security service eQualit.ie, said the attacks had a level of “sophistication and commitment” it normally does not see. It also...

With its impressive pyramids and complex rules, Ancient Egypt may seem to many the epitome of an advanced early civilisation. But new evidence suggests the Indus Valley Civilisation in India and Pakistan, famed for its well-planned cities and impressive crafts, predates Egypt and Mesopotamia. Already considered one of the oldest civilisations in the world, experts now believe it is 8,000 years old - 2,500 years older than previously thought.

At some point in the second term of any presidency, the soaring eagle becomes a lame-duck with more quack than quake in its steps. With his place in history assured, President Obama has forged a new healthcare regime, restored relations with Cuba, made unprecedented visits and negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran. The latter of these strains U.S. relations with America's staunchest Middle East allies — Israel and Saudi Arabia — beyond credulity, and suggests the president may be too absorbed in creating his own legacy to think clearly. Obama called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) "the most...

Italian and Egyptian researchers analyzed the metal with an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine its chemical composition, and found its high nickel content, along with its levels of cobalt, “strongly suggests an extraterrestrial origin”. They compared the composition to known meteorites within 2,000km around the Red Sea coast of Egypt, and found similar levels in one meteorite.

King Tut was buried with a dagger made of an iron that literally came from space, says a new study into the composition of the iron blade from the sarcophagus of the boy king. Using non-invasive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, a team of Italian and Egyptian researchers confirmed that the iron of the dagger placed on the right thigh of King Tut's mummified body a has meteoric origin. ...

Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world. Egypt was a...

Click to watch 3 minute video discussing the root causes of terrorism in the Arab world.

The mammoth, multi-million-dollar mansion where resident Barack Obama and his family will reportedly live after the first family exits the White House is located 1,096 feet from the Islamic Center of Washington — one of the largest mosques in the Western Hemisphere. ... The exterior of the Islamic Center features horseshoe arches, Arabic script and tall, ornate minaret. The building is surrounded by an array of flags representing the countries of the world where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion. ... In addition to the Islamic Center of Washington, the embassy of Oman and the former embassy of Iran are very...

Iran said on Sunday its pilgrims would not attend the annual Muslim haj pilgrimage, blaming regional rival Saudi Arabia for "sabotage" and failing to guarantee the safety of pilgrims. Saudi Arabia, which oversees the pilgrimage to Mecca by more than two million Muslims from around the world, accused Iran of effectively depriving its citizens from the religious duty by refusing to sign a memorandum reached after talks with Iran's Haj and Pilgrimage Organization. Relations between the two Gulf powers plummeted after hundreds of Iranians died in a crush in last year's haj and after Riyadh broke diplomatic ties when its...

On May 15, Al-Alam TV broadcast a report on the opening of the third International Holocaust Cartoon Contest in Tehran. The exhibition features caricatures of Israeli PM Netanyahu, comparing him to Hitler and to ISIS terrorists. The organizer, Shojai Tabtabai, said that the exhibition was "a response to the publication of cartoons by the French Charlie Hebdo magazine, which affronted the Prophet Muhammad, as well as an expression of [our opposition] to the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people." Reporter: "As a form of expression of the Palestinian cause, and in the context of the massacres, perpetrated by the Zionists...

An engineer stands next to a Hellenic Air Force C-130 HAUP aircraft at the 133rd Hellenic Air Force Base in Kasteli on the island of Crete, Greece, May 20, 2016. The plane is participating in a search operation for the missing EgyptAir flight 804 Airbus A320. Credit: Stefanos Rapanis/REUTERS