Free Republic

A drastic new message adorns the walls of the Iranian capital, usually reserved for war heroes and weapons. “There is a water shortage!” reads the government poster's slogan, inside a water container that is nearly empty. “It’s fall and there is still no rain.” That’s not news to Erfan Ensani, 39, who returned home from a long day working in the textile section of the city’s central bazaar last week to find his taps running dry. Iran is facing its worst water crisis in decades. With no end in sight and authorities warning they may even have to evacuate the...

Inside Tehran’s newest metro station, Iranians who can be imprisoned for owning bibles will soon walk past a plaque that declares, “the message of Jesus Christ was the salvation of humans from darkness, ignorance, corruption, depravity and discrimination.”Elsewhere in the Maryam-e Moqaddas station, or Holy Mary station, a relief of Christ walking on water decorates a vestibule, and his mother Mary is depicted, larger than life, praying among flowers. Estimates of Iran’s Christian population varies widely but a 2020 survey from the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) reported 1.5 percent of respondents identified as Christian. That...

Nov 18 (Reuters) - Hamas rejected the United Nations Security Council passing a U.S.-drafted resolution endorsing U.S. President Donald Trump's Gaza plan, saying it fails to meet Palestinians' rights and demands and seeks to impose an international trusteeship on the enclave that Palestinians and resistance factions oppose. "Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation," the group added.

In the hope of shifting the debate on divestment from Israel to the real issue—the nature of the divestment campaign—and not the specious accusations regarding University President Lawrence H. Summers’ speech on the issue, I would like to suggest why I believe the campaign is properly characterized as “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.” I would like to look carefully—if necessarily briefly—at the strategy of the campaign and the rhetoric of the petition, in order to show how it implicitly demonizes Jews. Supporters of the divestment campaign insist they seek to protest the policies of the Sharon government, and...

Openly in broad daylight people shouting "death to Khamenei." Ibraham Alra'ii and Mohammed Zade at Mehrabad complex are swearing allegiance to Pahlavi and urging rank-and-file to do the same. Men in uniform showing the pre-revolution Iranian flag on subway platform. Lots of video. Transcript linked below video.

The potential for a military clash between Turkey and Israel is growing. There are several colliding points, and each one of them has the potential to become a full-scale war, despite mechanisms designed to avoid conflict. The most obvious is the Syrian front. Reports indicate that Turkey plans to help Syria’s transitional government develop a military force of approximately 200,000 personnel (approximately 10–15 divisions). Turkey has assumed the role of protector of Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (al-Jolani, his nom de guerre). Israel, for its part, has assumed the role of protector of the Druze minority in southwestern Syria, an area...

A skewed Trump speech edit, a Gaza film built around a Hamas operative’s son, and repeated factual distortions have plunged the BBC into a credibility crisis. Conservatives are celebrating, Trump is threatening a major lawsuit, and the network faces a steep political cost There is no need to attribute superpowers to Donald Trump. No American president, not even a narcissist in White House mode, can shake a public broadcaster in another country and continent and trigger the resignation of its director general and head of news. The BBC misled the public about Trump. It deceived viewers who had always regarded...

“Can I ask a question? How many of you are visiting Israel for the first time? How many have been here before? Wow, two.Well, welcome to all of you. It’s very good to see you here with Foreign Minister Saar and Deputy Minister Sharren Haskel and our Ambassador to Washington, Yechiel. Stand up. Look at this man. Look at this man. Look at him. He, Yechiel, represents the greatest military comeback in recent history.On October 7th, we were attacked with no provocation by the Hamas monsters. They murdered 1,200 of our citizens. They burnt babies alive. They raped and then...

n a land where rivers have run dry, lakes have vanished, and fertile soil has turned to dust, men in clerical robes still stand on pulpits without shame and declare: “Women’s unveiled hair causes drought!” This is not satire, nor the delirium of a lone village cleric. It reflects the mindset of a regime that has ruled Iran for forty-six years, a regime still incapable of understanding that the connection between clouds and rain is scientific, not moral or religious. From its inception, the Islamic Republic was built on ignorance and superstition. Today, it stands idle before the greatest environmental...

Three failed asylum seekers who arrived in the UK on small boats have appeared in court charged with gang raping a woman on Brighton beach. Two Egyptians and an Iranian Kurdish man are accused of dragging the 33-year-old woman onto the stone beach before subjecting her to a horrific ordeal. The three migrants appeared at Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex today where a trial date was set for next year. symbol

Throughout the arid regions of Iran, agricultural and permanent settlements are supported by the ancient qanat system of tapping alluvial aquifers at the heads of valleys and conducting the water along underground tunnels by gravity, often over many kilometres.Each qanat comprises an almost horizontal tunnel collecting water from an underground water source, usually an alluvial fan, into which a mother well is sunk to the appropriate level of the aquifer. Well shafts are sunk at regular intervals along the route of the tunnel to enable removal of spoil and allow ventilation. These appear as craters from above, following the line...

One of the most unexpected things I stumbled across during a visit to Strasbourg, France, was a group of Protestant Christians meeting in the basement of a Catholic Church. Most of them were from Iran. And almost all of them were former Muslims. Muslims in France aren’t a surprise. They make up an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population, and ongoing migration remains the biggest factor driving Muslim growth. But Muslims becoming Christians in France? That was something I hadn’t heard about. So I traveled to Strasbourg to meet an American missionary reaching Muslim immigrants by planting a French...

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At least 12 people were killed and 27 others wounded on Tuesday in an attack on Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, according to officials. It was the first major attack to hit the city in more than a decade and comes as Pakistan is facing a resurgence of assaults by several insurgencies. An attacker detonated a bomb near the entrance of a courthouse around lunchtime, according to the Pakistani interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the attacker had tried but failed to enter the court complex, with hundreds of lawyers, defendants and judges inside. The attacker died at the scene, the authorities...

A Glimmer of Justice Amidst Enduring Shadows:Venezuela's Unlikely Strike Against Islamic Fascist Republic of Iran / Hezbollah's Legacy of Jewish BloodIn a stunning turn that defies the toxic alliance between Venezuela's Chavismo regime and the genocidal mullahs of the Islamo-Fascist Iranian Republic, President Nicolás Maduro's forces have apprehended Ali Hage Zaki Jalil—a Lebanese-Arab Hezbollah terrorist long-sought for his role in the barbaric 1994 bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 over Panama.[0][1] This monstrous act of Jew-hatred claimed 21 innocent lives, including 12 precious Jewish souls en route from Colón to Panama City, their dreams shattered by the same Iranian-backed terror...

Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.— Deuteronomy 11:17Mother Nature may accomplish something that neither the U.S. nor Israel could ever have contemplated: the evacuation of Tehran's 9.7 million inhabitants. Iran is currently experiencing its fifth consecutive year of drought, and the autumnal rainfall is about a quarter of that in 2024, that would be two millimeters. In short, Tehran...

The State Prosecutor's Office has submitted a request to the Haifa District Court to permanently confiscate 50 foreign vessels that attempted to breach the maritime blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip, as part of the "Sumud Flotilla." According to the petition, a significant number of the vessels were owned by the Hamas terror organization. The request is based on international law, which grants states the right to seize vessels attempting to violate a maritime blockade, and gives courts the authority to order their confiscation. The State argued that the "Sumud Flotilla," which arrived in the area last month,...

Madani, who has long warned of environmental mismanagement in Iran, said the current water crisis across the nation was predictable. "The water bankruptcy situation was not created overnight," he said. "The house was already on fire, and people like myself had warned the government for years that this situation would emerge." President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that without rainfall before winter, Tehran could face partial evacuation, according to The Associated Press. Iran is facing its worst drought in decades, raising fears of evacuations in Tehran while threatening the regime’s stability and nuclear ambitions, according to a leading environmental expert. Kaveh Madani,...

Indonesia, Azerbaijan and Pakistan are the top contenders to supply troops for a future stabilization force in the Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. defense official and a former U.S. defense official granted anonymity to discuss sensitive ongoing discussions. Negotiations on the makeup of the force are ongoing, and no country has made a firm commitment… Trump’s 20-point plan for peace in Gaza says the U.S. will work with Arab and other partners to deploy a temporary stabilization force that will train and support vetted Palestinian police forces and will consult with Egypt and Jordan on the effort. The U.S....

Iran is set to turn off the water in several regions, including Tehran — as the country falls into the grips of its worst drought in decades. The Islamic Republic announced it would be shutting off its water supply on Saturday night due to the mounting crisis which will see the capital dry up — with officials contemplating evacuating it, Haaretz reported. “We are forced to cut off water supply to citizens on some evenings so that reservoirs can refill,” Energy Minister Abbas Alibadi said on state television Saturday.