Free Republic

One of President Obama’s largest financial backers is a key executive at the largest Swiss bank in the world, complicating his criticism of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Robert Wolf is president of Swiss financial giant UBS Investment Bank and chairman of UBS Americas. He has been one of Obama’s most prolific fundraisers dating back to 2006, when the former Senator from Illinois initiated his run for the White House. Wolf has bundled more than $500,000 for the president’s reelection, campaign records show. He is but one of many wealthy bankers Obama has turned to in an effort to win...

Syrian government forces backed by fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah entered the town of Zabadani on Sunday in a bid to take the last rebel-held bastion along the Lebanese border.

Israel's former ambassador to Egypt, Zvi Mazel, currently a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), believes that the Egyptian army is not going to be able to successfully fight ISIS. In the end, he believes, the IDF is going to have to do the job. “The Egyptian army has not collapsed, and it is very large, with 600,000 soldiers,” said Mazel. “But for two years they have been fighting guerrillas in Sinai, unsuccessfully. They are just not experienced enough in guerrilla warfare.” Eventually, it is very possible that ISIS will take over Sinai – placing them along...

Hezbollah’s recent steady military advances against Islamist militants on the rugged outskirts of the northeastern town of Arsal have put MP Walid Jumblatt on edge for two reasons, sources close to the Progressive Socialist Party leader said. First, Jumblatt is worried that the Nusra Front or ISIS militants might carry out security operations or bombings inside Lebanese territory in response to Hezbollah’s military gains on Arsal’s outskirts. Second, Jumblatt also sees threats facing the fate of his fellow Druze in the Syrian province of Swaida, a stronghold of the Druze minority ....

An indictment filed last week in the Nazareth District Court against a resident of the town of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights for espionage and assisting the enemy during wartime portrays Sudki Makat, a Druze supporter of the Assad regime in Syria, as the first Facebook spy caught in Israel..... claims in the indictment relate to things Makat posted on his Facebook page. The Israeli media also broadcast the recordings of interviews he gave from the Golan to Syrian television. The main claim against him in the indictment is that the information he posted — on the Internet and...

Hezbollah is seeking to depict a narrative in which it is protecting minorities such as Christians, Druse, and Alawites in the ongoing Middle Eastern sectarian conflict so as to conceal the ideological sectarian and revolutionary ambitions that it shares with Iran. Hezbollah, a Shi’ite organization, is presenting itself as the defender of the multi-ethnic Lebanese state and minorities against Sunni jihadists. For example, Hezbollah announced that it condemned last week’s killing of 20 Druse by al-Qaida’s Nusra Front in the village of Qalb ...

The EU will indeed merit the "Jew-hater" tag - should its ill-considered and misconceived labelling action proceed. The European Union (EU) runs the risk of being labelled “Jew-hater” - should it proceed with its plans requiring supermarkets and other retailers to label products made by Jews in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) differently from those made by Jews in Israel. No matter what spin the EU uses to justify any such discriminatory labelling—the EU will be seen to be actively supporting the 2005 Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel—whose manifesto states:

Thirty-four Syrians were killed, including 12 children, and more than 190 were injured during an attack of over 300 shells that bombarded government held neighborhoods in Aleppo on Monday. The Syrian rebels have been battling the Assad regime for control of Aleppo since 2012. The event on Monday marks one of the largest attacks on civilians by the Syrian rebel forces according to the British-based Observatory for Human Rights, which stated, “this indiscriminate attack on civilians in the city of Aleppo took place at the very time when [the Observatory for Human Rights] was in Damascus raising with the government...

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is blocking oil sales to northern Syria, activists say, unleashing an economic weapon that could cause food shortages and hospital shutdowns, and may undermine the rebels’ fight against the jihadi force. The blockade also shows how heavily dependent even the group’s enemies are on the crude it produces, and how much influence that allows the jihadis to wield.

Aleppo suffers widespread damage as Syrian insurgents say they're stepping up a campaign to gain full control of the city.

Iran’s support for international terrorist groups remained undiminished last year and even expanded in some respects, the Obama administration said Friday, less than two weeks before the deadline for completing a nuclear deal that could provide Tehran with billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions. The assessment offered a worrying sign of even worse terror-related violence to come after a year in which extremists in the Middle East, Africa and Asia committed 35 percent more terrorist acts, killed nearly twice as many people and almost tripled the number of kidnappings worldwide. Statistics released by the State Department on Friday...

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned European Union leaders that violence from Islamic extremists could escalate if the EU rejects Turkey as a member... Turkey signed the association agreement for EU membership in 1963 and it is expected that a two-day EU summit this week will finally decide to begin formal membership talks, probably in the second half of next year... Taking Turkey’s 69 million, mainly Muslim, population into the Union is widely disputed... In Germany, leader of the Christian Social Union Edmund Stoiber told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that his party in government would do what it...

Hezbollah, a radical Islamist movement, is recruiting Druze, Christian and Sunni men to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Lebanese daily news website the Daily Star reported Wednesday. The recruitment process, which is taking place in east Lebanon, is reportedly still ongoing. The new recruits are offered weapons and trainings to “to counter the threat of ISIS and its affiliates.” Lebanon is engaged in a battle against jihadists from ISIS and the Nusra Front along its northern and northeastern border with Syria

A coalition of moderate rebel factions known as the Southern Front took control of the Brigade 52 base by early afternoon, spokesman Issam al-Reis said. Brigade 52 is the largest military installation in Daraa province, which borders Jordan, and is key to the defense of northern routes leading to the Syrian capital, Damascus... The loss of the base is another blow to Assad's forces, which have recently suffered a string of battlefield defeats. A largely Islamist rebel alliance that includes al-Qaeda's powerful Syria affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, has seized most of northwestern Idlib province. The Islamic State militant group has captured...

The Syrian army is a threat that has ceased to exist for the coming decade and the regime is in "the most grave predicament" since the outbreak of war in March 2011, a senior Israeli army officer said Wednesday in a briefing. Hezbollah, the Assad regime's ally, has lost 700 men since the start of the fighting and 100 over the past two weeks alone, he said. The officer characterized Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who has delivered four saber-rattling speeches over the past eight days, as suffering from "no small amount of embarrassment" in Lebanon, and said that Israel has...

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah once again threatened Israel on Friday, saying his group would displace “millions” in Israel if the Jewish state attacks Lebanon. Nasrallah made the threat in a televised address weeks after an Israeli army official warned that Israel would “have to” target civilian areas in Lebanon in a future confrontation with Hezbollah, reported AFP. “If they threaten to displace 1.5 million Lebanese, then the Islamic resistance in Lebanon (Hezbollah) threatens to displace millions of Israelis,” Nasrallah fired back. “We are not afraid of your war or of your threats,” he declared. “If you assume that we are...

Asharq Al-Awsat says Moscow has pulled military experts from Assad's war room in Damascus, evacuated non-essential personnel and stopped declaring there is no alternative to Assad. Russia is pulling away from its relationship with embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and withdrawing key personnel from Damascus, the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Sunday, citing senior Gulf and Western officials. "The Kremlin has begun to turn away from the regime," the newspaper said. The report also quoted Syrian opposition sources as saying that Hezbollah and Iranian military experts have left Assad’s war room in Damascus, along with Russian experts.

Iraqi forces have seized from Islamic State militants a string of hamlets and villages in the dust-choked desert southeast of Ramadi... But the yellow-and-green flags that line the sides of the newly secured roads and flutter from rooftops leave no doubt as to who is leading the fighting here: Kitaeb Hezbollah, a Shiite militia designated a terrorist organization by the United States. Iraq’s two main allies — Iran and the United States — have vied for influence over Iraq’s battle to retake ground from Islamic State militants in the past year. While Iranian-linked Shiite militias have spearheaded the fight elsewhere,...

In September 2013, the Obama administration congratulated itself on an agreement, brokered by Russia, that supposedly ended the use of chemical weapons (CW) in Syria. For the killings by using sarin gas, Syria’s president Assad was not punished in any way, but he was supposedly going to turn over all his CW and the possibility of a recurrence was thus ended. President Obama said this: "I welcome the progress made between the United States and Russia through our talks in Geneva, which represents an important, concrete step toward the goal of moving Syria’s chemical weapons under international control so that...

The United Nations special representative of the secretary-general for children and armed conflict, Leila Zerrougui, is set to recommend blacklisting the Israel Defense Forces as a terror group for regularly causing harm to children. The designation would place the IDF in the same group as terror groups such as Islamic State, Boko Haram, and the Taliban. According to Yedioth Ahronoth, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is leaning towards leaving Israel off the list—despite heavy lobbying by the Palestinians and pro-Palestinian groups—over concern of damaging the world body’s relationship with the Jewish state. The Israeli Foreign Ministry slammed the hypocrisy of the...