Free Republic

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he predicted that the occasion would be remembered as "the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth." Some seven years later, America is weaker, and the world is a far more dangerous place. President Obama did not end the war in Iraq. His precipitous withdrawal of American troops allowed the Islamic State group to take control of major cities and Iran to become the puppet master in Iraq. His decision to announce when the U.S. would...

Hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed refugees from the Middle East have arrived in Europe in recent months. This mass exodus out of especially Syria has been partially fueled by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s promise that her country would take in all the refugees it had to take in. The only problem? She got more than she bargained for. Much more. And the same goes for the rest of Europe. In fact, so many “refugees” have made their way to the Old Continent that West European governments are having a hard time dealing with them. In the Netherlands alone, refugee centers...

The man certainly does know his way around a Hitler hypothetical. Just ask his own campaign manager. “It’s an example [Carson] has been using for years and to be honest with you he needs to find a better example because the problem is as soon as you say Hitler, nobody hears anything else you say,” Campaign Manager Barry Bennett told ABC News. “Its just so evil, so contemptible, that no one can hear anything else.” Believe it or not, that comment was in reference not to what Carson said yesterday on CNN about gun control in the Third Reich...

A German county has declared an emergency ahead of the arrival of some 1,000 refugees on Monday. Officials in Main-Taunus county west of Frankfurt say the unusual action aims to make it easier for authorities to cope with the influx, for example by suspending certain building regulations. In a statement Friday, they said it was the first time since 1945 that a disaster has been declared in the country.

Putin’s air campaign in Syria is not only supporting Assad, it’s giving cover to fighters from the so-called Islamic State. Last June, the U.S. embassy in Damascus accused Bashar al-Assad’s air force of clearing a path for an ISIS advance on Syrian rebels in the Aleppo town of Azaz. “Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS’s] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population,” the embassy account tweeted, following up with a broader accusation: “We have long seen that the regime avoids [ISIS] lines, in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting...

On Oct. 7, Russian warships in the Caspian Sea fired 26 high-tech cruise missiles at rebel targets in Syria—a staggering 1,000 miles away. The missiles in question, which the Pentagon calls SS-N-30s, were mostly unknown to the outside world before the Oct. 7 raid. Even close watchers of the Russian military were surprised to see them. The missile attack was also highly visible. In many ways, it was an announcement to the world, and America in particular, that the once-dilapidated Russian navy is back in action—and that Putin’s missileers are now among the planet’s most advanced. Planning for the missile...

Two men are waiting for their lunch inside a drafty airport hangar -- one is an 80-year-old from Pakistan, the other an 18-year-old Albanian. A throng of people are waiting and the line can take up to an hour, but the young man has run out of patience. He climbs over the barrier and pushes forward, gets his food and then sits down at a table. A short time later, the elderly man addresses him angrily. A dispute that began banally enough on Sunday, Sept. 27, ended in a mass brawl after the young Albanian hit the old man in...

Yesterday’s brutal knife attack on the U.S.-born French train hero Spencer Stone is yet more evidence suggesting that Stone and his fellow heroes are being targeted, possibly by Islamic terrorists. In just the span of a week, this is the second time a world-famous American Christian who overwhelmed a would-be mass-murdering jihadist terrorist on a train in Europe two months ago appears to have been targeted. Stone, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, and civilian Anthony Sadler, devout Christians who have been friends since childhood, all subsequently received France's highest honor, the Légion d'Honneur, from French president François Hollande and were...

A Czech doctor working in Germany has threatened to leave the country over what is happening with the flood of Muslim migrants. The story she relates is horrific, and it’s one that needs to be heard — or read. Since the press is forbidden from reporting on the true situation and social media giants like Facebook are working to stifle stories like this, she relayed the story in an email letter read by an independent Czech television host. An English translation of that letter follows the video below.

Tidjane Thiam, Credit Suisse’s new chief executive, is preparing to launch a substantial capital raising when he unveils his strategic plan for the bank in two weeks’ time, according to people briefed on the plan. While not specifying an amount, they pointed to a poll published last week by analysts at Goldman Sachs concluding that 91 per cent of investors expect the Swiss bank to raise more than SFr5bn in new equity. The move follows a warning by Deutsche Bank that it was set to scrap its dividend for the first time since the second world war after it incurred...

28 Shares A Every day seems to bring an escalation of the Russian military involvement in Syria. First it was airstrikes from more than 30 warplanes that Russia has positioned in Syria. Now it’s cruise missile strikes from warships in the Caspian Sea. Soon, if hints from Moscow are to be believed, Russian “volunteers” — a.k.a. “Little Green Men” — will be showing up in Syria to engage in ground combat alongside Iranian and Assad forces. President Obama can pretend that this is no big deal and that Russia is getting sucked into a quagmire, but this is a serious...

<p>Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to "help" monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relative quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 -- and soon abandoned.</p>

Sweden, seen by many American progressives as the model of multiculturalism and tolerance, has erupted into an orgy of violence as gangs of rioting immigrants took to the streets for a fifth consecutive night Tuesday in Stockholm. The latest reports indicate the riots are now spreading to the country’s two other major cities – Gothenburg and Malmo. Sweden, along with Germany, make up Europe’s two most generous welfare states. They are also the most welcoming of Islamic immigrants, more than a million of which have flooded into the continent this year from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and North Africa. The...

A State Department official closely involved in the Obama administration’s Iran push has been promoting publications from anti-Semitic conspiracy sites and other radical websites that demonize American Jewish groups and Israel, according to sources and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.Alan Eyre, the State Department’s Persian-language spokesman and a member of the negotiating delegation that struck a nuclear deal with Iran earlier this year, has in recent months disseminated articles that linked American-Jewish skeptics of the deal to shadowy financial networks, sought to soften the image of Iranian terrorists with American blood on their hands, and linked deal criticism...

<p>NATO said it was prepared to send troops to Turkey to defend its ally after violations of Turkish airspace by Russian jets bombing Syria and Britain scolded Moscow for escalating a civil war that has already killed 250,000 people.</p> <p>Officials at the U.S.-led alliance are still smarting from Russia's weekend incursions into Turkey's airspace near northern Syria and NATO defense ministers are meeting in Brussels with the agenda likely to be dominated by the Syria crisis.</p>

he German state of Bavaria plans "emergency measures" of its own - including sending refugees back to Austria - to stem the flow of migrants, state premier Horst Seehofer told Bild daily, raising pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel over the crisis. With about 10,000 refugees arriving in Germany every day, Bavaria is the main entry point for those fleeing war or poverty in the Middle East and beyond. Seehofer says more than 225,000 refugees have arrived in his southern state in less than five weeks and that authorities are stretched beyond the limit to house and care for them all....

German exports for the month of February have plummeted to their lowest level since 1950, following a similar decline in January. The drop means Europe's largest economy will contract more than expected. According to the latest figures published on Wednesday by the Federal Statistics Office, exports fell 23.1 percent to just under 65 billion euros in February, compared to the same period last year. This follows a similarly precipitous drop of 23.2 percent in January. The two-month decline is the worst since World War II. Imports also dropped 16.4 percent to 56.2 billion euros compared to a year ago. The...

An image of Angela Merkel wearing a traditional Iranian Islamic headscarf has caused controversy in Germany. ARD television was inundated with complaints after it broadcast a mocked-up picture of Mrs Merkel wearing the garment, known as a chador, against a backdrop of the Reichstag surrounded by minarets. The image was shown during a debate on the refugee crisis on Report from Berlin, a Newsnight-style programme, and was intended to be satirical, the broadcaster claimed. ..many viewers complained that the image was similar to posters produced by the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant movement Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of...

European Union governments are set to agree on Thursday to step up deportations of illegal immigrants among the hundreds of thousands who have failed to win asylum as they try to cope with a surge in refugees from war-torn Syria. Diplomats say interior ministers meeting in Luxembourg should agree, among other things, to back the detention of those who may abscond before expulsion and exert more pressure on African and other poor states, including via aid budgets, to make them accept the return of citizens refused entry to Europe. In the evening, they will be joined by EU foreign ministers...

Europe must live up to the challenge of an upheaval that has forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee Syria, where everyone including Iran, Russia and the West must seek a political solution, French President Francois Hollande said on Wednesday. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Hollande said the risk of failure was "total war" and that Europe, if slow to grasp the scale of the refugee exodus, had now made a start. As for Syria, Hollande reiterated the Paris line that any solution for Syria had to be based on...