Free Republic

A decade after U.S. leadership declared a “war on terror,” all it has to show for it is the creation of the Islamic State—an Islamic body that has taken terror and atrocities to a whole new level. How did this happen? A key factor often overlooked is the intelligence community’s failures concerning what fuels the jihadis. Consider Michael Scheuer, author of the 2004 national bestseller Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. Scheuer’s credentials as described in that book are impressive: “For the past seventeen years, my career has focused exclusively on terrorism, Islamic insurgencies, militant...

ACTRESS Brigitte Bardot has led calls for Muslims in France not to slaughter animals in public during this weekend's Eid celebrations. ... In France the government has been providing skips because many followers discard their carcasses to rot in the streets after they have killed them. ... Thousands of Muslims order sheep and then go to their local abattoirs to kill them to celebrate the feast of the slaughter, while others still carry out the acts in the street. However, Ms Bardot, 81, has called for practising Muslims to avoid making religious sacrifices in public particularly after terror attacks in...

More reports of the brutal treatment that Christians and other minorities experienced at the hands of the Islamic State (SIS) emerged during May. One account told of a couple who, after their children were abducted by ISIS militants, answered their door one day to find a plastic bag on their doorstep. It contained the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being brutally tortured and raped.

An old (and tiresome) debate appears to have been settled by those best positioned to settle it. According to Andrew Gripp, a former political science professor: Since 9/11, one of the defining fault lines in American and Western politics has concerned whether jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS are motivated by their religion or by politics – or more specifically, by grievances against Western foreign policy. Some insist that Islamic doctrine is the basis of their violence, while others insist that such groups are not truly Islamic, but are instead using the guise of religion to lash out against...

The most efficient way of solving a problem is to first break it down to its simplest parts—its bare-bone elements. This was the ultimate point of a recent article where I asserted that: When it comes to the connection between Islam and violence against non-Muslims, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in the West are either liars or fools, or both. No other alternative exists. Both in the comments section on my site as well as those of other websites that carried the article, and through emails, many begged to differ....

Are Western women responsible for provoking Muslim men into raping them? Some Europeans certainly seem to think so. Recently, after a 20-year-old Austrian woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beat, and robbed by four Muslim men from Afghanistan—including one who “started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women”—police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair: At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on...

The Orlando Massacre Is Just the Beginning Everything that led to it is still well entrenched. June 14, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. What is the greatest lesson of the Orlando massacre, where a Muslim shooter killed at least 50 people at a homosexual night club—an event that is now considered the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the September 11 attacks of 2001?  It’s that such an attack had to happen—and is destined to happen again.  Why?  Because the surest way of seeing an act occur repeatedly—say a terrorist attack—is...

The Jihad on Christian Church Tents It’s not enough to ban, bomb, and burn church buildings. May 25, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Note: Raymond Ibrahim was interviewed about this article on Ave Maria Radio’s “Kresta in the Afternoon.”Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.A Christian church in Egypt was recently torched to the ground.  According to a statement by the Coptic Christian diocese in Minya, Upper Egypt: “The Virgin Mary Church in Ismailiyah, which is about four miles north of Minya, was exposed to an attack by some extremists who set fire...

The West Lies Down Before Saudi Lies The greatest exporters of Islamic terrorism moralize at the Munich Security Conference. May 11, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Saudi Arabia—the world’s greatest hypocrite—is at it again. On February 12, 2016, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) was held.  It’s described as “the world's largest gathering of its kind”; “the most important independent forum for the exchange of views by international security policy decision-makers,” where “about 350 senior figures from more than 70 countries around the world to engage in an intensive...

U.S. at Easter: Ignore the Muslim Slaughter of Over 10,000 Christians and Destruction of 13,000 Churches in Nigeria Par for the course of the Obama administration. March 28, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Originally published by the Gatestone InstituteRaymond Ibrahim is a  Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamic extremist group, has killed more people in the name of jihad than the Islamic State (ISIS), according to the findings of a new report. Since 2000, when twelve Northern Nigerian states began implementing or more fully enforcing Islamic law, or Sharia, "between 9,000 to 11,500 Christians" have been killed. This...

Because enmity for non-Muslims is so ironclad in the Koran, mainstream Islamic teaching holds that Muslim men must hate -- and show that they hate -- even their non-Muslim wives, for no other reason than that they are “infidels.” If Muslims must hate those closest to them -- including fathers, sons, brothers, and wives -- simply because they are non-Muslims, is there any surprise that so many Muslims hate foreign “infidels” who live oceans away -- such as Americans, who are further portrayed throughout the Islamic world as trying to undermine Islam? Thus, even our best Muslim friends and allies...

In word and deed, in Islamic and non-Islamic nations, Muslim men appear to think that non-Muslim women--impure "infidels"--exist solely to gratify their sexual urges. First, consider the beliefs and actions of those committed to waging jihad for the cause of Allah, such as the Islamic State: In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old [non-Muslim] girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her -- it condoned...

CAIR Blames America for San Bernardino Massacre The return of the "grievance" myth. December 8, 2015 Raymond Ibrahim ​Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Another Islamic terrorist attack has taken place on American soil--in San Bernardino, where 14 people were murdered--and none other than that unindicted co-conspirator of Islamic terror, CAIR, is saying it's America's fault. Frank Camp of the Independent Journal reports that "During an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Friday [Dec. 4], Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) L.A. branch director Hussam Ayloush said the United States is partly responsible...

One of the primary reasons Islamic and Western nations are “worlds apart” is because the way they understand the world is worlds apart.  Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies.   This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere.  When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources—words and goals that prompted over a thousand...

One of the primary reasons Islamic and Western nations are “worlds apart” is because the way they understand the world is worlds apart. Whereas Muslims see the world through the lens of history, the West has jettisoned or rewritten history to suit its ideologies. This dichotomy of Muslim and Western thinking is evident everywhere. When the Islamic State declared that it will “conquer Rome” and “break its crosses,” few in the West realized that those are the verbatim words and goals of Islam’s founder and his companions as recorded in Muslim sources—words and goals that prompted over a thousand years...

While America prepares to take in tens of thousands of Muslims, Obama is deporting Christians back to ISIS on a technicality. The fate of those Iraqi Christians who had fled from the Islamic State only to be incarcerated in the United States has finally been decided by the Obama administration: they are to be thrown back to the lions, where they will likely be persecuted if not slaughtered like so many Iraqi Christians before them. Fifteen of the 27 Iraqi Christians that have been held at a detention center in Otay Mesa, California, for approximately six months, are set to...

Not only is the Islamic State (IS) persecuting Christians but so are the U.S.-supported “rebel” forces, which the Obama administration assures are “moderate.” According to a recent NPR report, “With backing from U.S. allies, like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, this [U.S. supported] rebel coalition fights both the Syrian regime and the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. But the coalition has extremists in its own ranks who have mistreated Christians and forced them out of their homes”—just as IS has done.In response, Mideast Christian leaders made clear that, far from expecting the West to intervene on their behalf, they merely wish...

U.S. and West Victimize Christians Fleeing ISIS While welcoming Muslim asylum seekers with open arms. September 7, 2015 Raymond Ibrahim    Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Not only does the West facilitate the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, but in the West as well. According to a recent NPR report, the U.S. supported “moderate” coalition fighting both Bashar Assad and the Islamic State in Syria “has extremists in its own ranks who have mistreated Christians and forced them out of their homes”—just as IS has...

Last May in Italy, a Muslim boy of African origin beat a 12-year-old girl during school because she was wearing a crucifix around her neck. The African schoolboy, who had only started to attend the school approximately three weeks earlier, began to bully the Christian girl — “insulting her and picking on her in other ways all because she was wearing the crucifix” — before he finally “punched the girl violently in the back [1].”What is it about the Christian cross that makes some Muslims react this way?The fact is, Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering fact of...

On April 25, police raided a Christian worship service in Asella just south of the capital, Addis Ababa. The Church of Asella had just baptized 40 new converts to Christianity, prompting mass arrests.One of those imprisoned, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity known only as “Palus Ejigu,” said, “We were gathered for sharing and encouraging each other with the Word of God. After we finished the service, police imprisoned us. Some of our friends ran away when they saw the way we were harshly handled.”After weeks of suffering harsh prison conditions and abuses, Ejigu was eventually released. But five...