Free Republic

The misleading interpretations of Islam as a cruel religion have sparked a fear of Islam in Malaysia, says Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. “Before this, there was no controversy over the teachings of Islam. But now, a lot of things and reactions have surfaced where people do things that may not be agreeable to the Muslims. “They like to portray Islam as a cruel, unreasonable or unjust religion and that makes non-Muslims in Malaysia afraid of Islam, when the reality is, there is nothing to fear,” he added. “For example, the verse that allowed Muslims to kill non-Muslims only touched on...

Even as local Islamic scholar Imtiaz Mohammed condemned Wednesday’s attack at Charlie Hebdo he says freedom of expression cannot be exercised without religious sensitivity. Mohammed, president of the Islamic Missionaries Guild, said the rampage, which left 12 people dead, was not “Islamic behaviour.” In the same vein Mohammed said the media must exercise its use of freedom of expression with cultural sensitivity. “It is fine to criticise Islam. We do not have a problem with that, everybody is free to criticise everyone’s religion. But not with the words and images and so on to degrade and disrespect the individual or...

Yemen: Another Failure The Obama Administration Touted As a Success Katie Pavlich | Jan 09, 2015 As law enforcement officials hone in on two Islamic terrorists who carried out an attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this week, we're learning more about where the terrorists came from, what their backgrounds are and where they received their training. There are three suspects total. Two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, are still on the run but officials know where they are and have been in contact with them throughout the morning. The youngest of the terror suspects turned himself in earlier...

Western media acts free of any legal and moral constraints to spread bigotry against Muslims, attack Islam, insults Prophet Mohammad, for no reason other than it can do so in the name of “ freedom of press” and with legal and moral sanction from the political establishments there. To attack Islam and Prophet Mohammad in the name of freedom of press is irresponsible and is a form of racism and intolerance. In the minds of millions of decent and law abiding Muslims everywhere in the world, only Islam is treated in such irresponsible and racist manner by the western media....

It would be a big mistake to see the terror attack in Paris as an attack on the freedom of the press. Such a statement puts the massacre in the French capital in line with attacks against journalists by members of a Colombian drug cartel or the Chechen mafia. That's not the case. The goal of the attack on the office of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was not to frighten newspaper editors so that they would not publish one cartoon or another. The goal was to show and prove who controls the streets and consciousness of the French Republic: The...

Where does the story begin? Quite simply with colonialism. It's no mere coincidence that at least two of the Charlie Hebdo attackers are reportedly of Algerian descent and the third from Senegal. France's 1830 invasion of Algeria began a 130-year odyssey of murder, expropriation, racism, exploitation and misrule that only ended after a vicious anti-colonial struggle costing well over one million Algerian lives. It's no more shocking that some Muslims have become psychotic enough to murder, rape and pillage their way across eastern Nigeria and eastern Paris than it is that France, home of "liberty", "equality", and "fraternity", sells billions...

Police are hunting for the girlfriend of one of the three gunmen who brought three days of terror to France, saying she may be "armed and dangerous". Hayat Boumeddiene, a suspect in the murder of a Paris policewoman on Thursday, is on the run after her partner Amedy Coulibaly was killed when armed officers brought his kosher supermarket siege to a violent end. The 26-year-old could hold the key to the ongoing terror investigation, as police admit they may be dealing with a larger extremist cell and authorities brace for more attacks. Details are emerging of the young woman of...

Daily Caller France’s Multiculturalist Agenda Makes Jews Pack Their Bags 4:50 PM 01/06/2015 Ryan Girdusky Political Consultant As more French Jews face anti-Semitic attacks, many are leaving for Israel. Most of the attacks have come from Muslims, whether immigrants or French-born, many of whom have not assimilated into French society – if not rejecting French society entirely. Compounding the dangerous situation, France’s left-wing government refuses to acknowledge the scope of this crisis, apparently more afraid of losing Muslim votes they depend on than in defending France’s half-million Jews. Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption is expecting “Little Paris” neighborhoods to pop...

The two brothers named by French authorities as chief suspects in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris were on the U.S. no-fly list, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said Thursday. Another U.S. official said Said Kouachi, 34, has traveled to Yemen. It was unclear whether Kouachi, 34, was there to work with extremist groups like Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based there.

One of the suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine has been killed and the two others are in custody, a two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News. Authorities identified the three men as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, both French and in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear. One of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly discuss the investigation, told The Associated Press that the men were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. And Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism...

An anti-terror raid has been launched in north-eastern France after 12 people were killed during a gun attack on a newspaper office, according to reports. AFP news agency reported that France's elite anti-terrorist unit had begun the raid in Reims on Wednesday night. Two brothers and a third man have been identified as suspects behind the attack on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris.

The two French police officers, who both lost their lives in the effort to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attackers from executing their grim mission, are heroes. Their sacrifice in defense of their fellow citizens is beyond noble, and their bravery will be remembered in the coming days. It is not a knock on Parisian police but French domestic policy to note and criticize the fact that the first responders who arrived at the scene on bicycles and without defensive weaponry were entirely unprepared to face an ongoing attack by murderous, AK-47-wieldling Islamist gunmen. The first police to arrive at...

In a major positive development, Egypt's President Al Sisi has made an impassioned plea for a "religious revolution" in Islam. Speaking at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Sisi spoke directly to the religious establishment of Egypt: Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible! I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema – Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I'm talking about...

Speaking before Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry on New Year's Day, 2015, in connection to Prophet Muhammad's upcoming birthday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a vocal supporter for a renewed vision of Islam, made what must be his most forceful and impassioned plea to date on the subject. Among other things, Sisi said that the "corpus of [Islamic] texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years" are "antagonizing the entire world"; that it is not "possible that 1.6 billion people [reference to the world's Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so...

Two men were arrested as part of an ongoing counterterrorism investigation into a group that officials have accused of plotting to kill a random member of the public in Sydney, police said Wednesday, one day after the nation's prime minister warned of heightened terrorist chatter in the aftermath of a deadly siege in a Sydney cafe. Sulayman Khalid, 20, was charged on Tuesday with possession of documents designed to facilitate a terrorist attack, while a 21-year-old was charged with breaching a control order, police said.

Once a Constitutional Republic famed for its pragmatism, the United States has lately become a country notorious for its inconstancy, no longer recognizing that actions have finite and foreseeable consequences. In this space, for example, I recently argued that the release of the “torture report” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence came perilously close to the constitutional definition of treason by “giving Aid and Comfort” to America’s enemies. Admittedly, that was a tough assessment. But barely a week after the report’s release, the Huffington Post published an article linking those revelations with their most immediate effects on our allies....

KANO, Nigeria — More than 102 people were killed in the bomb explosions at the central mosque in this city, said a hospital worker. A mortuary attendant at the Murtala specialist hospital Kano, Malam Isa Labaran, on Saturday told Associated Press that he counted over 102 dead bodies deposited inside the mortuary on Friday after the multiple explosions at the mosque.

The most persecuted and victimized people in the world today are Christians in the Middle East. The perpetrators of the widespread destruction of that region's Christian community? Islamists. Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim lays out the grim details.

Maria Bamieh, a British prosecutor at the heart of EULEX corruption revelations, says the only way to restore faith in the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo is by holding an external enquiry. The scandal erupted on Monday (27 October) when Kosovo daily Koha Ditore wrote, citing evidence from leaked EULEX documents, that senior officials colluded with suspects in criminal cases, took bribes to shut down investigations, and quashed internal EULEX probes. …

Fascist or realist?