Free Republic

President Obama and his administration continue to support the global Islamist militant group known the Muslim Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The policy of backing the Muslim Brotherhood is outlined in a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive-11, or PSD-11. The directive was produced in 2011 and outlines administration support for political reform in the Middle East and North Africa, according to officials familiar with the classified study. Efforts to force the administration to release the directive or portions of...

Shooting at LAX, several injured....

LOS ANGELES - An Egyptian immigrant's deadly attack on an Israeli airline ticket counter last year has been ruled a terrorist attack related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an FBI spokesman said Friday. "Given his political views and the fact that El Al is an Israeli government-owned airline, that met the criteria for a terrorist attack," said Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, 41, opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport's El Al ticket counter on July 4 last year, killing two people before being shot dead by an airline security...

Of the 31 states that have declared their opposition to taking in Syrian refugees, one state, Kentucky, has a specific reason to be wary of the background check process: previously two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green turned out to be al Qaeda-linked terrorists with the blood of American soldiers on their hands, an ABC News investigation found. In the wake of the Kentucky case, the U.S. halted the refugee program for Iraqis for six months, a fact the Obama administration did not disclose to Congress at the time, officials told ABC News in the 2013 investigation.

Many questioned Barack Obama’s judgment when he backed away from his own “red line” in Syria, but Chuck Hagel tells Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview that it was actually worse than that. Obama lost his nerve, Hagel alleges, calling off promised strikes on Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Hagel also says that Obama’s team then stabbed him in the back as he was heading for the exits, and tried to “destroy me”: Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an...

ROME, Ga. - The imam of a Georgia mosque who pleaded guilty to providing support to the militant group Hamas was sentenced Tuesday to more than seven years in prison. Mohamed Shorbagi, 42, could have faced up to 15 years in prison. Shorbagi pleaded guilty in August to providing material support to the militant group Hamas in a case in which the agreement, charges and even the plea hearing were handled in secret. U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy sentenced him Tuesday to seven years and eight months in prison. At the sentencing, Shorbagi said he realized that some of his...

Like a good politician, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) repeatedly proves adept at inserting itself into national debates. When presidential candidate Ben Carson said he could not support a Muslim president, CAIR gathered reporters to express outrage and call on Carson to drop out of the race. When a 14-year-old Texas boy was detained for bringing what he said was a homemade clock to school that a teacher feared might be a bomb, a CAIR official expressed outrage and sat by the boy's side during news conferences and interviews. And in the immediate aftermath of the December 2 mass...

Reflections on the immigration of Tashfeen Malik, and the search for balance in a war-torn world… By the morning of September 23, John Anderson (not his real name) had had a very rough 24 hours. In his line of work, that might not have been unusual, but it was rather new for him. He’d been in this job for a year and a half, and had just closed a pretty substantial deal the day before. The discussions began on the night of the 21st, and went on well into the night, but by morning, an impressive operation was as good...

Geneva (AFP) - Many of the young girls Boko Haram sends out as suicide bombers in Nigeria and neighbouring countries are probably unaware that they will be blown up, a UN expert said Tuesday. Boko Haram jihadists have in recent months increasingly used young women and girls as suicide bombers in northeast Nigeria, northern Cameroon, Chad and Niger, leaving death and destruction in their wake. Leila Zerrougui, the UN secretary-general's special representative on children and armed conflict, suggested Tuesday that especially the children used in this way were in many cases not aware of what they were about to do....

Hasakeh (Syria) (AFP) - Babylonia has no regrets about leaving behind her two children and her job as a hairdresser to join a Christian female militia battling against the Islamic State group in Syria. The fierce-looking 36-year-old in fatigues from the Syriac Christian minority in the northeast believes she is making the future safe for her children. "I miss Limar and Gabriella and worry that they must be hungry, thirsty and cold. But I try to tell them I'm fighting to protect their future," she told AFP. Babylonia belongs to a small, recently created battalion of Syriac Christian women in...

Taliban fighters aren't just making gains on the battlefield: They're also bleeding away a revenue source that is crucial for Afghanistan to pay for its military without US help. The Afghan government will earn about $30 million in 2015 from its mineral sector for the third straight year, far short of a previous projection of $1.5 billion, according to Mines and Petroleum Minister Daud Shah Saba. That's also a quarter of what smugglers -mostly linked to the Taliban and local warlords -earn annually selling rubies and emeralds, he said.

A gunman who witnesses say was wearing camouflage and a white plastic mask opened fire in a shopping mall near Portland, Ore., in a rampage that left three dead, including the shooter, and multiple wounded, police said. Authorities say police "neutralized" the gunman but have yet to elaborate on how he died. Witnesses described a harrowing scene, as the gunman appeared to be dressed in body armor while firing off an estimated 60 shots from a semi-automatic rifle. One witness told KPTV that the gunman ran past her and her boyfriend and "had the look of death in his eyes."

SNIPPET: "The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) name has come up before in connection with terrorism plots, including the October 2002 Portland Seven and the September 2002 Lackawanna Six cases in the United States, as well as the August 2006 plot to bomb airliners en route from London to the United States, the July 7, 2005, London Underground bombings and the July 2007 attempted bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland. Over the past several years we also have received several queries about TJ from U.S. law enforcement officials who are concerned about the group’s presence and activities in the United States. U.S....

Three days after a heavily armed Muslim couple who lived in a home investigators described as "an IED factory" burst into a Southern California office building and gunned down 14 people, the FBI acknowledged Friday that it is treating the case as an act of terrorism. "We are investigating it as an act of terrorism, for good reason," David Bowdich, the assistant FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles office, told reporters in an afternoon news conference.

When the Redlands Tea Party Patriots objected to the resettling of Syrian Muslim migrants in their community, CAIR accused them of "paranoia and phobia is rooted in a combination of ignorance and bigotry." But "paranoia and phobia" are the modern condition that the free world has found itself living in. Islamic terrorism can strike anytime and anywhere from a Paris concert hall to a San Bernardino County facility where disabled children were being helped. It's ignorance to ignore that and bigotry to defend it. "What will be done to ensure the safety of our community? Our biggest concern is the...

The United Arab Emirates has secretly dispatched hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to fight in that country’s raging conflict, adding a volatile new element in a complex proxy war that has drawn in the United States and Iran. It is the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has quietly built in the desert over the past five years, according to several people currently or formerly involved with the project. The program was once managed by a private company connected to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, but the people involved in the effort said...

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu today revealed that he personally gave the order to down the Russian Su-24 fighter jet that lead to the death of one pilot. “Despite all the warnings, we had had to destroy the aircraft” Davutoğlu told a meeting of his AK party. “The Turkish Armed Forces carried out orders given by me personally”

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. Since the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November 13, we have seen the development of a new, and strange justification for the Obama administration’s insistent refusal to jettison its manifestly failed strategy of contending with IS specifically and with Islamic terrorism generally.

The packages found on U.S.-bound airplanes contained explosives and were intended to hit “two places of Jewish worship in Chicago,” President Obama announced Friday. The packages originated in Yemen and were identified in Dubai and London, he said, calling it a “credible terrorist threat against our country.”

The threat level for the Belgian capital of Brussels has been raised to the highest possible level, the interior ministry reports, citing a “severe and imminent threat” in connection with last week’s terror attacks in Paris. (more)