Free Republic

Qatar's new Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is set to announce a cabinet reshuffle, a day after taking over from his father Sheikh Hamad, officials say. ... Sheikh Hamad seized power from his father Sheikh Khalifa in a bloodless coup in 1995, with the support of the armed forces and cabinet, and also neighbouring states. ... In 2003, he named Sheikh Tamim - his second son by his second wife Sheikha Moza bint Nasser - as his heir apparent. ... In foreign policy, the emirate is expected to maintain its alliance with the West while at the same...

Why Israel? Why now? Though few Americans paid any attention at the time, in November of last year, Secretary of State John Kerry announced to the world that this summer would be defined by violence against the Jewish state. Almost as he had been tipped off, the Secretary of State warned Israel to make a deal with the likes of Hamas and Fatah, Palestinian parties who do not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, Kerry said, “Does Israel want a third intifada? … “I believe that if we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis; if we do not...

President Obama is under siege. Not enough having to put out fires in far flung places he was suddenly faced with a domestic flair in Ferguson, Missouri. The brutal shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year old unarmed African American kid, by a white policeman, brought Ferguson, a quiet rundown St. Louis suburb, to the brink of civil unrest. The rest of the country was put on edge. That was until the even gorier spectacle of the beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, by an Islamic State executioner in Syria, hit the news waves. The beleaguered President first took time...

Egypt on Saturday called for an open-ended cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, urging Israel and Hamas to return to indirect talks after seven weeks of fighting punctuated by a number of failed truce attempts. The call from the foreign ministry came shortly after Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Cairo. Egyptian officials did not say how they expected renewed talks to produce a different outcome after repeated failures. …

It has been a difficult month for the victims of state violence, as well as their families, friends, and those in solidarity. The month-long Israeli assault on Gaza involved a litany of war crimes, including the killing of trapped civilians, multiple bombings of hospitals, and the destruction of Gaza’s only power plant — all with critical U.S. support. And after the U.S. population reeled in shock from the NYPD murder of unarmed black man Eric Garner in broad daylight, Ferguson, Mo., was the site of another police murder — this time of unarmed, black 18-year-old Michael Brown, who, according to...

Iran plans to send aid to Gaza after Egypt said it would allow the shipment to enter the territory, an Iranian diplomatic source said on Friday, according to AFP. The official IRNA news agency said Cairo had agreed to transfer humanitarian aid bound for the coastal enclave, citing a foreign ministry source in Tehran. The source said a first Iranian Red Crescent shipment of 100 tons of medicine and food would be flown "soon" to Cairo. "The package weighs 100 tons and consists of food and medication," IRNA quoted the source as saying. Tehran said at the end of July...

Gaza gunmen killed 18 alleged spies for Israel on Friday, including seven who were lined up behind a mosque with bags over their heads and shot in front of hundreds of people. The killings came in response to Israel’s deadly airstrike against three top Hamas military commanders. Hamas media said Friday’s shootings signaled the start of a crackdown, under the rallying cry of “choking the necks of the collaborators.” It was the largest number of suspected informers killed by Hamas in a single day since it seized Gaza by force in 2007. The Al Majd website, which is close to...

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies. Hamas’s war with Israel is not a stand-alone event. It is happening in the context of the vast changes that are casting asunder old patterns of behavior and strategic understandings as actors in the region begin to reassess the threats they face. Hamas was once funded by Saudi Arabia and enabled by Egypt. Now the regimes of these countries view it as part of a larger axis of Sunni jihad that threatens not only...

The Hamas regime in Gaza continues to execute its own civilians, even while engaged in a terror war against Israel. In a central venue in Gaza City on Friday morning, 11 local Arab residents who were charged with "collaborating with Israel" were publicly executed by Hamas, according to the Arabic-language Al-Rai news agency as cited by Walla!. However, Hamas TV reported that the number of those executed actually consisted of 18 men. Six of those executed were shot dead in front of a mosque by men in Hamas military uniforms, witnesses told AFP. The public killing comes in the midst...

A salvo of rockets landed close to a packed Israeli kindergarten in the south on Friday, breaking the calm after a relatively quiet night. A five-rocket salvo saw the Iron Dome intercept two rockets over Ashkelon. Three rockets struck the western Negev; one of them landed just 12 meters (roughly feet) from a packed kindergarten. Luckily, all children and staff are safe; the building was protected from rocket fire and all of the occupants were in safe areas. Earlier on Friday, a 54 year-old man in Be'er Sheva was moderately wounded by shrapnel from a three-rocket salvo on the southern...

Hamas militants killed seven Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel in a public execution in a central Gaza square on Friday, witnesses and a Hamas website said. The victims, their heads covered and hands tied, were shot dead by masked gunmen dressed in black in front of a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque after prayers, witnesses and al-Majd, a pro-Hamas website, said.

James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn’t travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda. And the agenda was obvious from his Twitter feed.Any human life lost is tragic, but a moral individual would have much more empathy for the Syrian Christians who suffered at the hands of Foley’s favorite Jihadists than one of their pet propagandists. Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government.He cheered on the Sunni Muslim terrorists fighting to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Aleppo. In the conflict...

4 minute interview here This is stunning! I'm listening to an interview with Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, the author of "The Harbinger". He's describing how the Hebrew word for Violence and destruction, "חָמָס" phonetically chmac, and the Strong's concordance H2555. He pointed out about a dozen examples where this word is used in the Hebrew Scriptures. The link below will take you to Isaiah 53 Verse 9, which reads, And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Here is the passage...

Lots of folks are wondering (hoping?) Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016. Frankly, I don’t believe she will, as her missteps continue to get worse – oh, have you heard about her diva-ish speaking contract riders? But don’t worry too much about Hillary, because if does ditch the presidential race, she has a great future in the construction industry — and in particular cement. According to Algemeiner, “Much has been said and written about the terror tunnels that Hamas built in Gaza. But too little has been said about who it was that put the cement into Hamas’...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu hosted visiting Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) Thursday and told him that it is time for Israel and the US to unite in their fight against Islamist terrorism. “We face the same Islamist network and we have to fight it together,” said Netanyahu during a photo opportunity. “Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas. You saw the gruesome beheading of James Foley. We see the gruesome murder and execution of three teenagers which Hamas has just admitted that they did. These are both branches of the same poisonous tree. The free world, the democracies have to stand together...

In an exclusive Arutz Sheva interview on Thursday, Hof Ashkelon Regional Council chairman Yair Farjoun said that his region, which has been battered by rockets from the terror enclave of Gaza, cannot continue under the current status quo. "Out of 160 rockets, 60 fell in our territory - that's a serious blitz," Farjoun commented about the renewed rocket barrage, which began with a breach of the ceasefire on Tuesday around 4 p.m. The chairman continued "it's incredible to see how people live here by sheer miracles; beside a direct hit on a synagogue, rockets have landed just 200 meters (650...

The armed wing of Hamas has executed three Palestinian Arabs and arrested seven others for allegedly collaborating with Israel during the Gaza war, a website close to the movement reported Thursday. The Majd website quoted a senior security official in the enclave as saying seven people had been arrested on suspicion of scoping out targets for Israel and that three others had been shot dead. The official said that the three were killed after "revolutionary procedures" were completed against them. No date was given for the executions or the arrests. The site added that zero tolerance would be shown to...

“I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.” (Zechariah 12:10 NASB)One of the climactic scenes in the book of Genesis was when Joseph, as Pharoah’s regent, revealed himself to his brothers. They had thought that he, Joseph, was an Egyptian prince. When they realized that this was the...

A third of the houses on the main street of this Bedouin town near Egypt's border with Gaza look derelict, but inside they buzz with the activity of tunnel smugglers scrambling to survive a security crackdown by the Egyptian army. Smugglers and tunnel owners, who once publicly advertised their services, have taken over the nearly two dozen single-storey concrete structures and boarded up their doors and windows to avoid the attention of the authorities. While tunnels used by Gaza's dominant Hamas militants to infiltrate Israel were a priority target of an Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave this summer, many...

"criminally-biased selective moralizing  -from a suitably safe distance" It's easy to criticize at-a-distance... but none of the people currently protesting against Israel would behave any differently in the same circumstances -and many of them would behave a helluva lot worse. This is why the selective outrage we're seeing is SO truly nauseating. Where were all you 'progressive humanitarians' when Assad was butchering 1000s in Syria, or Bashir in Sudan? Where were the angry mass demonstrations for those people? Or for the victims of the (Muslim) butchery in Nigeria? Or for the 1000s murdered in Iraq just recently... in cold blood. But the...