Free Republic

Nothing Secretary of State John Kerry does should surprise anyone anymore. But in praising Islamic Malaysia as a "multi-faith" model as something of a benchmark for balancing cultural diversity, he shows his true colors. He is a traitor to the United States just like his boss. Malaysia is nothing more than an Sunni Islamic fundamentalist country, where only those who belong to the recognized Islamic sect are not punished. Malaysia is no different than any other Islamic nation. ... Bibles are a direct threat to the Islamic faith and must be destroyed. Too, Hindu temples have been destroyed, and even...

Iraqi and Lebanese Shi'ite militia backed by Syrian army firepower overran a southern suburb of Damascus on Wednesday, opposition activists said, in a blow to Sunni Muslim rebels trying to hold onto strategic outskirts of the capital. At least 20 rebels were killed when Hezbollah guerrillas and Iraqi militiamen captured the town of Sheikh Omar under cover of Syrian army artillery and tank fire and aerial bombardment, the activists said, with tens of Shi'ite fighters killed or wounded.

Senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials met with representatives of the Iranian government several times over the past two weeks in Beirut and in Tehran, to discuss developments in the region, Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported Monday. The parties conducted an assessment of recent events in the Middle East, including the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the Syrian crisis and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Officials reportedly also agreed to fortify what they called the “axis of resistance.” …

The Criminal Court on Wednesday sent Lebanese-Swedish man Atris Hussein, believed to be linked to the Hezbollah militant group, to prison for two years and eight months after finding him guilty on charges of illegally possessing restricted chemical substances.Hussein was arraigned in the Criminal Court on Feb 29 last year for violating the weapons control law after police seized nearly 2.8 tonnes of ammonium nitrate and urea-based fertiliser from houses he rented in Samut Sakhon on Jan 16, 2012. The chemicals, which are widely used in the agricultural sector, can be used to make bombs. The court initially sentenced him...

Bahrain authorities banned the circulation of books that are about Hezbollah, written by people who are affiliated with the Shiite group or who support it, the Bahrain news agency reported Friday. Authorities have reportedly shut down a publishing house affiliated with Hezbollah. …

CBS News teased an exclusive interview with Bashar al-Assad conducted by Charlie Rose yesterday, in which the Syrian dictator promises to respond to any attack from the United States. Assad told Rose that an attack on his armed forces would tip the civil war in favor of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and scoffed at John Kerry’s assertion that the US has evidence that the regime conducted the chemical-weapons attack:

The buzz in the Middle East media is that the real reason President Obama changed his mind about striking Syria last week was not, in fact, that he is indecisive. Nor was it that the concept of war goes against his grain. Nor that there’s a major division between his personal advisors and government officials. Nor that the Arab League voted against America striking Syria and wanted the United Nations to intervene. Nor even that the British House of Commons pulled the rug out from under him by voting against a British attack on Syria—essentially slapping Obama’s primary supporter, Prime...

Israel is acting to prevent Syrian weapons from reaching Lebanon's Hizbullah and will continue to do so, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, AFP reports. His remarks came two weeks after air strikes near Damascus that were widely attributed to Israel, which a senior Israeli source said were aimed at preventing the transfer of sophisticated Iranian arms to Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shiite ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Netanyahu said the Middle East was going through its most sensitive period for decades, with the conflict in Syria at the center of the turmoil. "We are closely following developments and...

Iran Plots Revenge on U.S. Officials Say Intercepted Message to Militants Orders Reprisals in Iraq if Syria Hit By JULIAN E. BARNES and ADAM ENTOUS WASHINGTON—The U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to Shiite militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria, officials said, amid an expanding array of reprisal threats across the region. Military officials have been trying to predict the range of possible responses from Syria, Iran and their allies. U.S. officials said they are on alert for Iran's fleet of small, fast...

Full title: Iran Aggressively Recruiting ‘Invisible Army’ of Latin American Converts to Infiltrate U.S. Through ‘Soft Belly’ of the Southern Border Iran is recruiting an “invisible army” of revolutionary sympathizers in Latin America to infiltrate the U.S. through the “soft belly” of the southern border, U.S. officials and national security experts told TheBlaze. And they’re using one website in particular to do it. The Iranian regime’s conversion efforts are becoming increasingly aggressive, especially over the Internet, with the goal of conducting operations against United States interests in the Western Hemisphere, according to U.S. government officials who spoke on the condition...

Infiltration by people with ties to terrorist groups is a major worry at the CIA, according to a Washington Post report. Some job seekers were found to have connections to groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, and the agency apparently has millions of dollars targeted at investigating its own staff, according to a classified budget document obtained by the Post from ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Among job applicants with questionable backgrounds, about one-fifth had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” according to the document.

Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah group, a close ally of the Syrian regime, is redeploying its forces ahead of possible US strikes on Damascus, according to witnesses in Lebanon. The reports come as the daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to both Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, said on Monday that the group had "called on all its officers and members to man their positions." Residents speaking to AFP in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre said there appeared to be a general mobilisation of the group's members, even if such a movement was not being publicly discussed. Many Hezbollah fighters have disappeared...

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s collection revealed Monday. The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported. The specifics of those ties were...

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from the Edward Snowden collection revealed Monday. The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported. The specifics of those ties were not...

An al Qaeda-affiliated group in Lebanon has claimed responsibility for last week’s terror attack on Israel, according to a newly released statement from the group. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, named after Osama bin Laden’s mentor, released a statement in Arabic late Monday claiming official ownership of the four rockets launched into Israeli territory on Thursday of last week. “This operation comes within the series of our jihadi work directed at the Jews,” read a translation the terrorist group’s statement, which was accompanied by several tweets from group member Sirajuddin Zureiqat, who posted photos of the rockets shot into northern Israel....

For more than two decades, the United States has placed the issue of Eastern Mediterranean maritime ­security on the backburner. But the 2010 discovery of what may potentially be 3,450 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil in the Eastern Mediterranean’s Levant Basin brings that region’s security to the forefront. Turkey and Cyprus have competing interests in tapping the newfound oil and gas and in defending their access to those resources, while Israel and Lebanon continue to dispute their shared maritime boundary and territorial waters. Against this backdrop, political tensions are escalating in Egypt, Moscow...

“The supersonic and long-range anti-ship Yakhont missiles of the Syrian army and the Lebanese Hezbollah (resistance movement) are serious deterrents to a US naval attack by its warships in the Mediterranean Sea,” Dr. Mostafa Zahra, a military analyst and strategic studies expert, told FNA on Monday. He said that Syria’s Iskandar high-precision ballistic missiles and its anti-ship Scud missiles will also target the US warships in case of a US naval invasion of Syria, reminding that the American military vessels are not equipped with any weapons system to intercept or divert the Syrian anti-ship missiles. The P-800 Oniks, also known...

The ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has enabled Hamas to begin to restore its strained relations with Iran, according to Arab journalist Ali Hashem. .... Hashem noted that not of all Hamas’s bridges were burned in Tehran, despite the rift over Syria, thanks to a few officials in Gaza who decided on their own that relations with Iran shouldn’t halt. One of those, wrote Hashem was Ahmad Jaabari, who maintained strong ties with Iranian officials and had his own lobby within the political bureau. Jaabari was killed by Israel in what started the counterterrorism Operation Pillar of Defense in...

The way the U.S. President talks about terrorism matters. As chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative Michael McCaul (R–TX), recently put it, “Great leaders do not tell their constituency what they want to hear; they tell them what they need to know.… The American people deserve to make informed decisions, and they do not deserve to have the real threats against them obscured, or our real efforts to combat them diminished.” Two years ago, the Heritage Foundation released a report, “A Counterterrorism Strategy for the ‘Next Wave,’” which highlighted the need to prevent the emergence of a global...

(WASHINGTON) -- The outgoing director of the FBI gave a sobering assessment Thursday of the current threats facing the U.S. homeland: a biological weapon of mass destruction detonated inside the country and a plane downed in mid-flight are viable scenarios, he said. Mueller added that Americans now traveling to war-torn Syria could bring terrorist tactics home with them. Terrorism has "changed so much since the days after Sept. 11th," director Robert Mueller said in a rare interview with ABC News' Pierre Thomas. In particular, Mueller said, the threat emanating out of Afghanistan and Pakistan has now "migrated" to places like...