Free Republic

..... Australia’s most senior Salafist cleric says if he knew then what he does now, he wouldn’t have come at all. On a Saturday night in Coolaroo, an industrial northern Melbourne suburb where more people consider themselves Muslim than any other religion, the sheik speaks with disappointment, a tinge of bitterness and overwhelmingly a deep sense of dismay. He says he feels like a foreigner in his own country. ..... “If I knew that one day this would happen in Australia, I swear by the almighty God I will never step foot in my — in your — country,” he...

On Al Sharpton's MSNBC show today, former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell dared congressional Republicans to recall Hillary Clinton to testify about Benghazi. Calling her a "tough cookie," Rendell vowed that "Hillary will put them in short pants." Paging Camille Paglia . . . Rendell surely thought he was paying Hillary a compliment. But is this really the Hillary persona that Dems want to project: that of a woman who makes little boys out of grown men? View the video here.

ISLAMIC State (ISIS) are poised to buy its first nuclear bomb "within a year", the terror group claimed tonight.The jihadists are looking to get hold of an atomic weapon or thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate explosive. The merciless organisation says it hopes to purchase a nuclear device “through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials” in Pakistan. But it admits that obtaining the deadly weapon may be a challenge and says it would settle for a “few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive”. The chilling boast was made in the latest edition of its propaganda ‘magazine’ circulated to publicise...

As reported by Robert Costa in The Washington Post, Republicans are blaming the president not only for allowing the Islamic State to develop as a terrorist organization in the first place, but also for failing to effectively combat the group as it has grown. Yet there appears to be some objection to Republicans calling President Obama out on his lack of a foreign policy strategy. Well, yeah. The Islamic State is 100 percent a creation of Obama’s policies. Plain and simple.

Then why is the Obama administration redacting the released emails? It seems to me that this alone is enough to have the court go back and ask for clean emails or determine the information IS classified. End of rant. It is just frustrating me that nobody is asking this question.

Global View Columnist Bret Stephens on President Obama's reaction to the fall of Ramadi and Palmyra. Video 3:28

Not that there was ever much doubt. Three days after the Benghazi attack, the White House admitted it had pressured Google and YouTube to yank “Innocence of Muslims” as some sort of terms-of-use violation. Google refused. A week after that, having failed to twist a major corporation’s arm into censoring a politically unhelpful bit of free speech on its behalf, the State Department started running ads in Pakistan denouncing the movie, in hopes that jihadi savages would be appeased by the show of national contrition and not target any more embassies. Also around this time, YouTube did agree to...

WASHINGTON — THE fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi on Sunday, and of the Syrian city of Palmyra on Wednesday, is a big gain for the Islamic State, but not an utter disaster, as many observers fear. Rather than inducing panic in Western capitals, it should lead to a realistic assessment of the Islamic State’s strengths and weaknesses. One setback in a long war must not trigger hasty strategic shifts that lead to foreign countries’ becoming mired in Iraq once more. Palmyra has economic and cultural significance, as it sits among gas fields and is home to renowned ruins....

Speaking at the United Nations World Education Forum in South Korea this week, UN chief Ban Ki Moon and UNESCO boss Irina Bokova declared that globalized schools around the world need to re-shape children’s values and create "sustainable" “global citizens.” The controversial summit, which outlined what the UN described as a “roadmap for global education” through 2030 in the “Incheon Declaration,” brought together over 100 national education ministers, swarms of UN bureaucrats, globalists, educators, and other “stakeholders” from every corner of the planet. And while the UN education forum passed virtually unnoticed in the U.S. establishment media, the implications of...

Russia’s media watchdog has written to Google, Twitter and Facebook warning them against violating Russian Internet laws and a spokesman said on Thursday they risk being blocked if they do not comply with the rules. Roskomnadzor said it had sent letters this week to the three U.S.-based Internet firms asking them to comply with Internet laws which critics of President Vladimir Putin have decried as censorship. “In our letters, we regularly remind (companies) of the consequences of violating the legislation,” said Roskomnadzor spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky. He added that, because of the encryption technology used by the three firms, Russia had...

The night a U.S. ambassador was killed in a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton sent a message three senior State Department officials. The recepients were Jake Sullivan, Deputy Chief of Staff to then-Secretary of State Clinton, Cheryl Mills, an adviser to Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and Counselor and Chief of Staff to the Secretary, and Victoria Jane Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

The latest issue of an ISIS propaganda magazine puts a price on the First Lady in the slavery market it says will one day come to the United States. The newest issue of English-language ISIS propaganda mag Dabiq promises to bring slave markets to the West—and claims the first lady won’t fetch a large price. “I swear by Allah, O you who feign to be knowledgeable and shout with falsehood in every gathering, surely the slave markets will be established against the will of the politically ‘correct’!” decries Umm Sumayyah al Muhajirah, an allegedly female columnist for Dabiq who penned...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is ready to supply weapons to Iraq, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday, as the country struggles to halt advances by Islamic State militants. Speaking ahead of talks in Moscow between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, Lavrov told reporters Moscow would make every effort to help the Baghdad government push back the militants. Islamic State insurgents overran the Iraqi city of Ramadi last weekend in the most significant setback for the Baghdad government in a year, exposing the weakness of Iraq's army and the limitations of U.S. air strikes. On...

Republicans in Congress and GOP presidential hopefuls are threatening tens of thousands of small business jobs by seeking to cut a little-known government agency that guarantees loans to help U.S. exporters, Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday. Clinton said during a round-table discussion at Smuttynose Brewery that Congress should renew financing for the Export-Import Bank. She argued the GOP is risking up to 164,000 jobs supported by the bank. The Democratic front-runner said Republicans in the 2016 presidential campaign would rather threaten those jobs rather than “stand up to the tea party and talk radio.” …

President Obama’s assertion in his commencement address to cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the rise of ISIS in Syria and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the brutality of both, is somehow linked to climate change shows just how dangerously detached from reality U.S. foreign policy has become. For those who wondered why upwards of two hundred thousand have died in Syria, Boko Haram abducts Christian schoolgirls, and ISIS beheads and burns people alive in its reign of terror, the president placed a major part of the blame on fossil fuels and your SUV. I understand climate change...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Barack Obama is negotiating with 11 other nations seeks to eliminate both tariff and nontariff trade barriers with these countries, according to the Congressional Research Service. One of those countries is Vietnam, which the State Department says maintains a Communist regime. In 2014, the U.S. ran a $24,858,700,000 trade deficit with Vietnam, according to U.S. government trade data published by the Census Bureau. U.S. producers sold $5,724,900,000 in goods to purchasers in Vietnam. At the same time, producers in Vietnam sold $30,583,600,000 in goods to purchasers in the United States. Documents related to the TPP...

The Islamic State terror group now controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said. Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time. In Damascus, state TV acknowledged that pro-government forces had withdrawn from the town. A Facebook page close to ISIS published a statement Thursday, purportedly from the group, saying "the soldiers of the Islamic State" completed their control...

As the House inches closer to a vote on the long-awaited Trade Promotion Authority bill, conservatives who have traditionally been hard-liners in their opposition to deals with the White House are taking a softer approach. While many on the right are still hedging their position on the TPA, there appears to be some conservative support for the trade process legislation. And with congressional Democrats increasingly taking a firmer line against the TPA, which would give expedited consideration to the Trans-Pacific Partnership under negotiation with 11 other countries, conservatives could be the key to getting the TPA over the finish line....

The Obama administration has never described the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) as a “ragtag” group, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Thursday, after describing the fall of Ramadi to the jihadist group as a “serious setback” but also saying that any conflict will have “ebbs and flows.” During a press briefing days after ISIS seized Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, Harf sparred with an Arab reporter over ISIS’ advances, differing with him over how much territory it now controls, how the administration views the group, and the relative strategies of ISIS and the U.S.

The Islamic State (Isis) group has released a new issue of its slick propaganda magazine Dabiq, featuring articles justifying the enslavement of Yazidi girls and condemning conspiracy theorists, as well as a report by British hostage John Cantlie. The publication also featured an article suggesting that the terror group is losing militants to conspiracy theories. Titled Conspiracy Theory Shirk (Sin) the piece implies that some fighters have grown delusional because of conjectures saying that IS is a puppet in the hands of western intelligence agencies. "If the mujahedeen liberated territory occupied by the kuffar [infidels], they would say that the...