Free Republic

For the first time in Vatican history, the pope allowed for the reading of Islamic prayers and Koran readings from the Catholic facility. The readings and prayer came as Pope Francis met with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Vatican City, a gathering designed to pray for Middle Eastern peace. A Holy See spokesman said the prayers were supposed to be a “pause in politics,” Breitbart reported. The pope said, too, that he hoped the interfaith prayers would foster peace specifically between Israelis and Palestinians, the news outlet said.

Islam will reportedly become the world's largest religion 55 years from now based on recent projections, but the barbarous practices of the Islamic State could undermine the growth of the world's Muslim population, experts said. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, Christianity and Islam will be near parity by 2050, with Christians expected to comprise 31.4 percent of the planet's population against 29.7 percent who follow Islam. The study said Islam will grow more than twice as fast as any other major religion over the next half century because of a higher fertility rate in Muslim dominated countries....

A group of religious leaders and health experts yesterday called on President Obama to provide access to funding so that women who have been raped by terrorists abroad can have abortions. Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders met at St John's Episcopal Church, just opposite the White House, to raise awareness of the need to provide post-rape care, including abortions, for the victims of groups such as ISIS in Syria and Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria. "Women are dying now. Families are being pushed further into poverty now because this care is not available to them," said Rev Harry Knox,...

What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race, religion and culture with none of the disadvantages. Islam is a religion when mandating that employers accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to bring it into the schools, places that are legally hostile to religion, American students are taught about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and recite Islamic prayers to learn about another culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t is...

It has become a common occurrence over the years for Muslims in the Middle East who have converted to Christianity to claim to have been compelled to do so after dreaming of a person who they believe is Jesus Christ. Now, one militant belonging to the brutal Islamic State that has massacred Christians has converted to his victims' religion after dreaming of "a man in white" with a startling message, according to one missionary's account. "One of our YWAM workers in the Middle East was contacted by a friend earlier this year and they met up and he was introduced...

For years, religious conservatives argued against same-sex marriage by saying that it would put society on the slippery slope to (horrors!) polygamy. Now comes the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat, a day late and a dollar short. In yesterday’s column, Douthat seizes upon a new Gallup study that shows a broad shift to the left in Americans’ social values during the present century. The exception, he says, is on abortion, but actually it’s not an exception; the pro-choice position has gained some ground. The exception is adultery — where the old-time disapproval is holding firm at over 90 percent. You’d...

Sons of Liberty International, a group headed by Baltimore-native Matthew VanDyke, a renowned Libyan revolutionary and former prisoner of war, has been operating in northern Iraq since December 2014. The organization is training recruits in the Nineveh Plains Protection Unit, a militia made up of a couple thousand Christians. Matthew VanDyke, the leader of the Sons of Liberty International, a group that focuses on training and equipping Iraqi Christian militia to combat ISIS, recently discussed the lack of help from outside forces in the region. He told PRI.org that no one else is helping Christians from Iraq, including the U.S....

Yesterday, upon the air, I heard a word that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today, I wish that it would go away… (With apologies to Hughes Mearns) In his report yesterday on the latest OSCE conference, Henrik Ræder Clausen included this summary of a dominant meme among ideological leaders in the West: Panel members stressed the importance of not calling the Islamic State the “Islamic State”, for doing so could give the impression that Islam motivates people to war, terrorism and other crimes. The avoidance of the I-word seems to have become a fixation in the revolving-door world...

In a village 20 km south east of Mosul in northern Iraq, Islamic State (IS) militants have burned an Iraqi Christian woman to death. Sa’ed Mamuzini, representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) office in Mosul, told BasNews on Tuesday that the militants burned the 80-year-old Iraqi Christian woman, who was from Kremlis in the Nimrud area of the Hamdaneya sub district, east of Mosul. Mamuzini said that villagers told him that the woman was killed for failing to comply with the strict laws of the Islamic State.

By AllahÂ’s will, Jerusalem belongs to the Kurds, the Turks, the Arabs, and to all Muslims. And as our forefathers fought side by side at Gallipoli, and just as our forefathers went together to liberate Jerusalem with Saladin, we will march together on the same path [to liberate Jerusalem]. These are the words just declared by Dovutoglu, the Prime Minister of Turkey. You would think its coming straight from the mouth of the Antichrist. The amazing speeches by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu were given at the inauguration ceremony at the countryÂ’s 55th airport...

The recent “draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas not only drew fire from two armed jihadists, it also drew fire from Christian leaders and media critics. One of the chief objections was that events of this type will alienate moderate Muslims and possibly drive them into the radical camp.

One tactic Soviet-bloc countries would use to stifle dissidents was involuntary confinement to mental institutions. After all, you have to be crazy to oppose state ideology, right? Now, though, 26 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall comes a similar shocking story — from well west of where the wall stood. It is alleged that a French mayor has been involuntarily confined to a mental asylum for “Islamophobia.” The story involves Robert Chardon, mayor of the southern French town of Venelles; the problems began when, participating in a public Twitter discussion initiated by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the mayor proposed...

<p>Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the crowning feature of the holy city’s crowning glory, the superlative summit of what will be the world’s largest hotel when it opens in 2017.</p>

A Syrian priest who has worked for the restoration of a monastery and for improved relations between Muslims and Christians in Syria has been kidnapped. ​The Syrian Catholic Archdiocese of Homs confirmed the news Friday, said Fides news agency. Just a day before he went missing, Father Jacques Mourad, prior of the Monastery of Mar Elian and pastor of the community in Qaryatayn, wrote an appeal as jihadist forces spread out from the nearby city of Palmyra: "We are currently experiencing a very difficult time because the extremists who call themselves Daech approach our city Qaryatayn after their domination of Palmyra,...

In the tradition of charlatans like Ahmed Deedat and Zakir Naik, Yusuf Ismail is convinced that he can be as inaccurate as he likes, because most of the people listening to him won't bother examining what he says (so long as he sounds confident when he speaks). This tactic is based on numbers. If 400 people are watching a debate, and a Muslim debater completely distorts the facts while sounding like he knows what he's talking about, how many in the audience will take the time to research his claims? One or two? And if one or two do the...

The idea that Islam needs to reform is again in the spotlight following the recent publication of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. While Ali makes the argument that Islam can reform – and is in desperate need of taking the extreme measures to do so – many of her critics contend that Islam is not in need of reform. The one argument not being made, however, is the one I make below – namely, that Islam has already “reformed.” And violence, intolerance, and extremism – typified by the Islamic State (ISIS) – are...

One of the most common assumptions is that religiosity is linked to economic and technological underdevelopment. As a society gets more technologically and economically advanced, the thinking goes, religiosity naturally fades away and is replaced by a more secular worldview. Exhibit A is usually Western Europe, which grew more secular as it grew richer (and much, much more violent) across the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhibit B is the world's most religious continent — Africa — which happens to be its poorest. Under this view, the 21st century will be the century in which secularization spreads even further as the...

Sulaiman Vali is a softly spoken 32-year-old computer engineer. A natural introvert not drawn to controversy or given to making bold statements, he’s the kind of person who is happiest in the background. He lives alone in a modest house on a quiet street in a small town in East Northamptonshire. He doesn’t want to be any more specific than that about the location. “If someone found out where I lived,” he explains, “they could burn my house down.” Why should such an understated figure, someone who describes himself as a “nobody”, speak as if he’s in a witness protection...

In recent months, cliched calls for reform of Islam, a 1,400-year-old faith, have intensified. “We need a Muslim reformation,” announced Newsweek. “Islam needs reformation from within,” said the Huffington Post. ..After all, Christianity had the Reformation, so goes the argument, which was followed by the Enlightenment; by secularism, liberalism and modern European democracy. So why can’t Islam do the same?Yet the reality is that talk of a Christian-style reformation for Islam is so much cant. Let’s consider this idea of a “Muslim Luther”. Luther did not merely nail 95 theses to the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg in...

On 19 may, Hellenism commemorates the extermination of 353,000 Pontian Greeks killed during a genocide. During the years 1914-1923, in the 1st World War, the Greek minority of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey's predecessor, were removed from Western Anatolia. An estimated 350 thousands Greeks were killed between 1913-1922, ending thousands of years of Hellenic civilization in Asia Minor. Pontian and Anatolian Greeks were victims of broader Turkish genocide project at all Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. More than 3.5 million Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians were killed under the regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal....