Free Republic

NEW YORK -- The developer who once proposed a mosque and Muslim community center near ground zero now plans a museum devoted to Islam at the same site. According to The New York Times, Sharif El-Gamal said through a spokesman he wants to build a three-story museum "dedicated to exploring the faith of Islam and its arts and culture."

Lady Cox spoke of Islamist groups making massive investments in the educational system in UK in order to alter the institutions to serve their purposes. ... Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it,” as some of its adherents try to “inhibit criticism,” ... In England, if you criticize Islam, you are called a racist, ... Cox spoke of Islamist groups that have been implementing a strategic plan and making massive investments in the educational system in Britain in order to alter the institutions to serve their purposes. For example, she said, is a recent report that allegedly...

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri has called on Muslims to kidnap Westerners, particularly Americans, who could then be exchanged for jailed jihadists including a blind Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 of conspiring to attack the United Nations and other New York landmarks. In a wide ranging audio interview, the al Qaeda leader expressed solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood which is facing a violent crackdown by the army-backed government in Egypt and urged unity among rebels in their fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

There is very dangerous legislation making its way through both the House of Representatives and Senate that will finish the United States. The sharia bill calls for Islamic blasphemy laws — the criminalization of speech that offends or insults — who, exactly? Well, that is up to the enforcer, is it not? On Wednesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced “The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014″ (S.2219), which seeks “to examine the prevalence of hate crime and hate speech on the Internet, television, and radio to better address such crimes.” Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) introduced a companion bill in the...

The National September 11 Memorial Museum will be showing a film called “The Rise of Al Qaeda” when it opens next month. The film tries to explain the roots of the terrible attacks and why radical Islamists killed so many people that terrible day. In an attempt to get feedback from the Muslim community on the film, which portrays Al Qaeda as radical Islamists who were on a jihad against the United States, the museum showed “The Rise of Al Qaeda” to an “interfaith advisory group of clergy members.” This group included Muslim leaders. After seeing the short film, which...

Past the towering tridents that survived the World Trade Center collapse, adjacent to a gallery with photographs of the 19 hijackers, a brief film at the soon-to-open National September 11 Memorial Museum will seek to explain to visitors the historical roots of the attacks. The film, “The Rise of Al Qaeda,” refers to the terrorists as Islamists who viewed their mission as a jihad. The NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who narrates the film, speaks over images of terrorist training camps and Qaeda attacks spanning decades. Interspersed with his voice are explanations of the ideology of the terrorists, rendered in...

CHIBOK, Nigeria (AP) — Parents say 234 girls kidnapped from Nigerian school by Islamic extremists, up from 85.

Islamists kidnap 100 schoolgirls, who face living hell as sex slaves By Associated Press MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Suspected Islamic extremists abducted about 100 female students from a school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Tuesday, but some of the teens managed to escape from the back of an open truck, officials said. The girls were abducted after midnight from a school in Chibok, on the edge of the Sambisa Forest that is an insurgent hideout, said Borno state police commissioner Tanko Lawan. Gunmen killed a soldier and police officer guarding the school, then took off with at least 100 students, a...

After being publicly sacked by al Qaeda leader Aymann al-Zawahiri and accidentally beheading a fighter from one of their main allies in Syria, it’s fair to say the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s PR campaign has suffered in recent weeks. So, like any half decent group of militant extremists, they obviously want to address this slip. Unfortunately, a traditional media outreach is very difficult for them, given ISIS’s policy of kidnapping journalists. So they've turned, like many before them, to social media. Over the past few weeks, foreign fighters from ISIS and their subgroup the Muhajireen Brigade have been...

DAMATURU, NIGERIA – Suspected Islamic militants killed dozens of students in a pre-dawn attack Tuesday on a northeast Nigerian college, survivors said, setting ablaze a locked hostel and shooting and slitting the throats of those who escaped through windows. Some were burned alive. Adamu Garba said he and other teachers who ran away through the bush estimate 40 students died in the assault that began around 2 a.m. Tuesday at the Federal Government College at Buni Yadi. It is a co-ed school about 45 miles south of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, and difficult to communicate with because extremists...

A Kurdish group captured a town in Syria from Islamists on Saturday, in a battle in which at least 28 fighters were killed, most of them Islamists, Reuters reported, citing a monitoring group. If the Kurds can keep hold of Tal Brak, on a highway between the cities of Hassaka and Qamishli, it would mark a significant advance in their quest for wider control in the northeast. Online Islamist activists said fighting was still going on, but the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Kurdish People's Protection Units had taken the town. Syrian Kurds have been fighting Islamist...

PC: According to NBC News, the Justice Department will soon prohibit religious profiling in terror cases. The move, if true, would completely blind federal law enforcement to the threat from Islamic extremism. Already, the department has forced the FBI to bleach references to "Islam" and "jihad" from its counterterrorism training materials. It's also made it harder for agents to infiltrate radical mosques. But Attorney General Eric Holder reportedly now wants to make it illegal for agents to even consider religion in their investigations. Democrats on the Hill are cheering the changes, along with the ACLU and radical Muslim Brotherhood front...

In his 2005 book, The West’s Last Chance, Tony Blankley noted that there is a “natural human instinct to forget the distant past and to assume that the more or less benign trends of the recent past will continue.” Nevertheless, observed Blankley, “shocking divergences from the status quo have defined the path of history.” But these divergences are seldom anticipated. For example, “Londoners in the summer of 1939, my parents included, never expected that forty thousand of their fellow Londoners would soon lie dead in the streets from German bombing.”The West’s Last Chance is about the danger that Islamization...

Killings of Christians by Islamists Doubled in 2013 By Majid Rafizadeh On January 17, 2014In Daily Mailer,FrontPage According to Open Doors, a non-denominational group that supports persecuted Christians worldwide, the official number of Christians killed for their faith around the world doubled in 2013, compared to 2012. According to the annual survey, the number of Christians killed in Syria in 2013 comes to more than the whole global total of 2012. Approximately 13 percent of the Syrian population is made up of Christians. In the list of nations with the highest number of killings of Christians, Syria was followed by...

Vladimir Putin has vowed to pursue terrorists to “total annihilation”, in his first public comments since the Volgograd suicide bombings. In his traditional New Year's Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers. “In the past year we have faced problems and serious challenges including the inhuman terror attacks in Volgograd and unprecedented disasters in the Far East,” he said. “Dear friends, we bow our heads in memory...

Islamist rebels killed at least 15 civilians from the minority Alawite and Druze sects in the central Syrian city of Adra on Wednesday and Thursday, the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A Paris appeal court on Wednesday upheld the right of a nursery to fire a female employee who insisted on wearing an Islamic headscarf at work. The ruling is the latest round of a long-running legal battle which has pitted France's secular authorities against sections of the country's large Muslim minority. The case has been brought in the name of a 23-year-old French woman who claims the burqa ban violates her rights to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and a prohibition against discrimination. Belgium and some parts of Switzerland have followed France's lead and similar bans...

For decades his picture dominated Turkey, piercing blue eyes staring from hoardings, keeping watch over city streets and army barracks. Schoolyards echoed every morning to his oath: "Happy is he who can say 'I am a Turk!'" Now that oath rings out no more and the image of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular republic, seems for some to be retreating into the shadows, victim of a new ruling class they suspect of cherishing a new more 'Islamic' Turkey. Turkey's "Kemalists" flinch at Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan advising women on the number of children they should have, fostering restrictions...

A French hostage held in Nigeria managed to escape on Saturday while his captors, Islamist militants from the Ansaru group, were praying. Francis Collomp, 63, is due to brought home to Paris by France’s Foreign minister later on Sunday. French hostage Francis Collomp, 63, escaped his captors in Nigeria, the office of President François Hollande said in a statement on Sunday. Collomp had been held since being abducted by the Ansaru Islamist group on December 19, 2012. FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Nigeria, Aminu Abubacar, reported that there were no military operation involved and that Collomp managed to escape entirely on...

Our AFDI honor killing ads which hit the streets last week were taken down today. I just received a call from CTV asking me what I thought of the removal of our ad, which was designed to help Muslim girls in trouble. I had not been told. It was the first I was hearing it. We placed our ads in Edmonton because human rights activists there wanted to partner with our organization to do so. Honor killing is a grim reality that is largely ignored, and girls are suffering as a result. Muslim fathers kill their daughters for real or...