Free Republic

A senior Russian official says Moscow has started delivering S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who spoke on Monday on Ekho Moskvy radio, wouldn’t say how many systems have been delivered or provide any other specifics. […] The S-300 deal has long worried the U.S. and Israel, which see it as destabilizing. …

A majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza approve of attacks against Israeli civilians and believe that an armed intifada would help them on the path to statehood, a recent poll has found. The survey, carried out by the the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and published on April 4, found that 60 percent of Palestinians support “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel,” while 65 percent think that escalating the current wave of violence into an armed intifada would help Palestinian national aspirations in a way that negotiations could not. A plurality also believes...

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=kfZ0C6aFkf4 Hamas has a new tactic for ensuring fidelity to its radical form of Islam and encouraging young Arabs to volunteer for terrorist actions against Israel – ritual exorcism. According to the Gatestone Institute, schools in Gaza have welcomed Islamic preachers from The Ship of Missionary Salvation, an organization supported by the Hamas-dominated Waqf Ministry. The preachers, who visit schools across Gaza, single out children for ritual exorcism, claiming they have been possessed by demon spirits. Students who are subjected to the ritual are “cleansed," but also find themselves pressured to continue to show signs of their “devotion” to...

As we have seen from recent events in Paris, Brussels and all across the world, terrorism is not an obscure phenomenon that only impacts the Middle East. And no longer can Americans ignore the threat of terrorism as primarily a European problem. Although attacks in the United States are less frequent due, in part, to our distance from the region, increasingly, leaders associated with terrorist groups are now finding their way onto American soil. Not only must we be concerned about terrorist cells hiding in communities around the United States, but we now also have to worry about domestic Muslim...

You've heard of the water pollution crisis in Flint, Michigan infecting residents and seeping into US politics, but the toxicity emanating from Vermont and trickling down throughout American politics is less known but no less serious. Last month, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy and 10 House members asked Secretary of State Kerry to investigate alleged Israeli human rights abuses and to determine whether they are reason enough to cut military aid. Leahy asked to look into “gross violations of human rights” by Israel (and Egypt), citing examples of alleged extrajudicial killings by both countries. The anti-Israel source of these allegations should...

Cowardice in the Face of Leftist Jew-Hate How Bernie Sanders and other leftists help whitewash anti-Semitism on the Left. April 11, 2016 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. At a Bernie Sanders event in New York City, a black “community activist” began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At previous events, Sanders had been quick to condemn what he claimed was bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric by Republicans. But when confronted with the real thing by a left-wing activist...

UN-Funded NGO Honors Murderers with Tree Planting Celebrating the killers of Jews with funding from European governments. April 11, 2016 Nan Jacques Zilberdik    Reprinted from Palestinian Media Watch.  On Friday, a Palestinian NGO, Union of Agricultural Work Committees, held a tree planting ceremony honoring 209 "Martyrs of the popular uprising." Among these "Martyrs" are numerous Palestinian terrorists and murderers, who have murdered and attempted to murder Israelis during the wave of terror attacks that since September 2015 has included numerous stabbings, shootings, and car ramming attacks, killing 34 and wounding over 400 Israelis. Several foreign governments and international...

Only days after falsely claiming that Israel killed more than 10,000 innocent Palestinians during Operation Protective Edge, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders found himself on Friday again facing questions about his knowledge, or lack thereof, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an MSNBC interview on Friday, Sanders was asked whether he had an opinion on whether Israel should withdraw to the 1967 borders. "Not at this point," Sanders replied. In the same MSNBC interview, Sanders said, "What I believe, first of all, is there are good people on both sides and there are political opportunists on both sides....

With President Barack Obama in his last months in office, the Palestinians are hoping he will follow up his historic breakthroughs with Iran and Cuba with a push for their cause as well. The first step is reintroducing a United Nations Security Council resolution the United States vetoed back in 2011 seeking “accountability” for Israeli West Bank settlement building. In an interview, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said the hope is that Obama, freed of re-election concerns, will break with American protocol and refrain from vetoing it this time around. …

MK Zouheir Bahloul tells MK Avi Dichter: 'This is the Jews' country and not the Arabs' country.' Claims attacks on soldiers are justified. MK Avi Dichter (Likud) and MK Zouheir Bahloul (Zionist Union) shared a stage in Acre to discuss the ongoing issue of the IDF soldier who shot a neutralized terrorist. During their talk, Dichter criticized Bahloul for declaring that the would-be stabber was not a terrorist. "Over the past few months I have become concerned with the statements by Arab MKs, and I ask myself what is going on here?" Dichter said. "I would not dare make these...

Muslim rioters attacked a group of dozens of Jewish worshipers at the tomb of the Biblical Jewish patriarch Joseph in Shechem, during a pilgrimage to the site. Israeli Border Police forces and IDF Kfir Brigade soldiers accompanied 20 busloads of Jewish worshipers to the holy site last night. Under the Oslo Accords and other agreements with the PA Israeli Jews should be granted free access to all Jewish religious sites under PA control; in practice however, they are only able to do so under heavy armed guard as PA security forces make no effort to stop local Arab Muslims from...

Bernie presents a clear and present danger. The joke is over. Done. Finished. Time to quit laughing. What a creepy character this man has turned out to be. He speaks. People listen. Millions pay attention. He tells socialist fairytales, people swoon. So now he's into full-blown "Jews poisoned the wells" territory. Now, as Jewish students are being tormented on campus by BDS and SJP bullies, and as BDS piles up boycott-Israel wins throughout the United States and around the world -- Bernie piles it on with stereotypes borrowed from the darkest of the Dark Ages. Bernie presents a clear and...

Beware hate-filled Arab propagandists who want to conceal the truth at any cost Internet manipulation of readers’ comments in response to articles published on overtly anti-Israel and anti-Jewish web sites is allowing those web sites to spew out their venom unchecked and uncontrolled. Freedom of speech on these web sites is non-existent - and its absence is playing a large part in influencing the opinions of those who visit these sites and see no readers’ comments that act as a counterbalance or rebuttal to the article published or readers’ comments supporting such articles.

Global military spending reached almost $1.7 trillion in 2015, marking a year-on-year increase for the first time since 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms expenditure around the world. The United States remained far and away the top spender, which despite a dip from 2014, accounted for more than a third of total global spending. It was followed by China and then, perhaps surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, which supplanted Russia in third place.

Grossly inflating casualty figures, Jewish Democratic presidential candidate condemns Israel's defensive actions in Gaza. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has accused Israel of killing over 10,000 innocent civilians during 2014's war with Gazan terrorists - in a gross inflation of the casualty statistics enough to make even Hamas's own propaganda chiefs blush. Sanders, who trails Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton by a significant margin, made the comments in a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board, a transcript of which was published Tuesday. Despite being the only Jewish candidate in either party (and despite a stint as a youngster...

Raphael Ahren, writing in the Times of Israel, tells us: Without the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there would be no Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the European Union's envoy to Israel said Monday, arguing that the best way to fight BDS is to take steps to advance a two-state solution. "The most effective antidote against the BDS movement is to solve the Palestinian issue. If there were no Palestinian issue, there would be no BDS movement," Ambassador Lars Faaborg-Andersen said at a conference in Jerusalem. The EU does not expect Israel to be able to solve the conflict unilaterally, the ambassador stressed....

City First Lady Chirlane McCray is handing over more than $500,000 to an Arab-American activist who came under fire for denouncing critics on Twitter as “Zionist trolls.” The Arab-American Association of New York, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit run by Linda Sarsour, was selected as one of 14 groups by the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York to receive $10 million over five years to integrate mental-health services into their community programs. McCray oversees the fund.

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Pat Leahy’s Israel Obsession The Vermont senator’s fixation with the Jewish State turns ugly. April 1, 2016 Ari Lieberman    Vermont, the state that gave us unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is home to another radical liberal breed named Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Along with Sanders, Sen. Leahy represents the left flank of the Democratic Party and often finds himself at loggerheads with its more centrist members. Not unsurprising, Leahy is also a visceral critic of Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy and stalwart U.S. ally. In 2011, citing alleged human rights violations, he proposed a bill that would have cut...

The Obama administration recently gave a $270,000 grant to an Islamic charity that has been banned by Israel and the United Arab Emirates because of alleged financial ties to the terrorist group Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided the funds last month to the U.K.-based Islamic Relief Worldwide ... In 2014, Israel and United Arab Emirates banned IRW, which is headquartered in Birmingham, England, from operating within its borders alleging that the group supports and funds Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s military arm in Palestine. Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon alleged in...