Free Republic

Palestinian rhetoric and behavior reflect their honest intentions: their official organs and most of their leaders seek Israel’s destruction. State of Palestine A Palestinian supporter wears Palestinian and Union Jack flags outside the Parliament in London during October's vote on recognizing a state of Palestine. (photo credit:REUTERS) dShare on Facebook hShare on Twitter With the Palestinians taking Israel to the International Criminal Court and trying to kick Israel out of the international soccer league, FIFA, while still boycotting normal, constructive, personal, economic or cultural ties with Israel, their war against the Jews continues. Even if Pope Francis – whom I...

From a distance, the reservoir appears topped by a flotilla of rubber duckies. On closer inspection, the water’s surface is packed with thousands of free-floating, 13-inch plastic balls, clustered to form an undulating cover. Developed by the Israeli startup Neotop (formerly known as Top-It-Up), the mass of balls serves as a floating cooling tower, reducing surface temperatures, algae and evaporation up to 95 percent. It’s one of many potential water-saving solutions to come out of Israel’s high-tech dream factory. This could make a difference in California. With the state’s reservoirs at historic lows — the two biggest, Shasta Lake and...

War, what's it good for? Aside from countless deaths of innocent civilians of course, it means a GDP boost for the biggest exporter of weapons on earth, the United States, and even more profits for the US military-industrial complex. Profits which mean the shareholders of America's arms manufacturers get even richer. Which is why following months of middle-eastern sabre ratling and numerous quasi-wars already raging in the region, moments ago the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 10 MH-60R Seahawk helicopters to Saudi Arabia for $1.9 billion, the first step in "a major multibillion-dollar modernization of the Saudi...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Character Studies From The Bible David New International Version (NIV) 19 Now Ahimaaz son of Zadok said, “Let me run and take the news to the king that the Lord has vindicated him by delivering him from the hand of his enemies.” 20 “You are not the one to take the news today,” Joab told him. “You may take the news another time, but you must not do so today, because the king’s son is dead.” 21 Then Joab said to a Cushite, “Go, tell the king what you have seen.” The Cushite bowed down before...

A very important movie about the Holocaust made its way to New York City for the first time this week at the end of a tortuous journey that began 70 years ago when Allied forces and newsreel cameramen stumbled into Nazi concentration camps. Called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” it is as unadorned as its title, a document shot in the moment to capture forever evidence of the unimaginable. Made under the auspices of the British Ministry of Information, produced by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television, assembled with advice from Alfred Hitchcock, the movie was meant to ram...

President Barack Obama is continuing his criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s comments on a Palestinian state and Arab-Israelis before the last elections. In an interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama said that the security relationship between the United States and Israel will remain strong, but reiterated that there will be “consequences” from Netanyahu’s remarks. “In every public pronouncement I’ve made, I said that the bedrock security relationships between our two countries—these are sacrosanct. Military cooperation, intelligence cooperation—none of that has been affected. I have maintained, and I think I can show that no U.S. president has...

President says in Atlantic interview he cares so deeply about Israel that he's motivated to criticize continued settlement activity, comments from Netanyahu. WASHINGTON -- "Political forces" in Washington seek to provide the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a rubber stamp for its policies, US President Barack Obama said this week in an interview with the Atlantic magazine. The interview, with the outlet's Jeffrey Goldberg, was published one day before the president is scheduled to address Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, where he is expected to outline his administration's plans to combat a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Europe....

While Israeli politicians continue to debate the merits of the “two-state solution,” their Palestinian interlocutors have long moved beyond that model for the solution of the Middle East conflict. For Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the idea of a “greater Palestine”—that would stretch from “the river to the sea”—is now an official policy. If this policy had until now been elucidated verbally in Arabic, by “minor” government officials—allowing the PA to say that they had been speaking out of turn or voicing personal opinions—it has now taken on a much more official persona. In a series of videos and images...

In Love: A Musing on Yom Yerushalaim 28 Iyar 5775, Rabbi David Lapin http://rabbilapin.com/ "The world’s growing intolerance for a Jewish State – like anti-Semitism – is an emotional issue, not a rational one. Emotion cannot be countered with reason. Emotion can only be countered with emotion." *** I left Israel for the UK on June 4th, 1967, a day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War. Barely seventeen, I arrived there a few weeks earlier to start my Yeshiva career in Kefar Hassidim, a small agricultural village eight miles south-east of Haifa and less than 40 miles from the...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

For all the horror of the reports coming out of the ‘Islamic State’, there seems to have been a fairly widespread assumption that ISIS is, if not beaten at least contained, and that in due course it will burn out/be burnt out. Historical parallels are dangerous to draw and they often lead to some wildly incorrect conclusions, but ISIS’s position in Syria and Iraq reminds me more than a little of the situation in which the nascent soviet state found itself during the early years of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks were encircled by hostile forces, who, on paper,...

The Islamic State terror group now controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said. Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time. In Damascus, state TV acknowledged that pro-government forces had withdrawn from the town. A Facebook page close to ISIS published a statement Thursday, purportedly from the group, saying "the soldiers of the Islamic State" completed their control...

A Boston University professor has defended to WND his creation of a Common Core-compliant lesson plan that uses role-playing workshops to teach students to sympathize with Hamas, create a Palestinian state and divide the city of Jerusalem. Professor Carl Hobert’s “Whose Jerusalem?” project has been lauded by those at the pinnacle of the education establishment as an important work that will, in the words of Boston University School of Education Dean Hardin Coleman, “help students acquire the skills they need” in conflict resolution “to be successful in the 21st century.” But the role-playing exercises have also come under fire recently...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Character Studies From The Bible David New International Version (NIV) 16 When David had gone a short distance beyond the summit, there was Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, waiting to meet him. He had a string of donkeys saddled and loaded with two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred cakes of raisins, a hundred cakes of figs and a skin of wine. 2 The king asked Ziba, “Why have you brought these?” Ziba answered, “The donkeys are for the king’s household to ride on, the bread and fruit are for the men to eat, and...

The United Nations will explore options with Israel's new government for a return to negotiations on creating a Palestinian state within a reasonable timeframe, the body’s new envoy said Tuesday, according to AFP. Nickolay Mladenov, the UN special Middle East coordinator, told the Security Council that "the coming period will be critical to the future of the peace process." Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have been comatose since a major American push for a final deal ended in failure in April 2014. UN efforts to revive the peace process were effectively on hold in recent months...

Iran's supreme leader vowed Wednesday he will not allow international inspection of Iran's military sites or access to Iranian scientists under any nuclear agreement with world powers. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told military commanders Wednesday that Iran will resist "coercion and excessive demands" from America and other world powers. Negotiators from Iran and a six nation group — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — have launched a new round of talks in Vienna focused on reaching a final deal that curbs Iran's nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions. The two sides reached a framework agreement in...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Character Studies From The Bible David New International Version (NIV) Psalm 51[a] For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. 1 Have mercy on me, O God,     according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion     blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash away all my iniquity     and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions,     and my sin is always before me. 4 Against you, you only, have I sinned     and done what is evil in your sight;...

RUSH: There's been a bunch of document dumps lately. We now know, thanks to Judicial Watch and Freedom of Information Act request, we also know the value of stonewalling. We now know everything that there practically is to know about Benghazi. We know enough to know that this country was lied to from beginning to end by Obama and Hillary. But now so much time has gone by that people have lost their emotional reservoir for that. "I mean, Benghazi? Who cares. Come on, Mr. Limbaugh, let's move on." But the fact is they knew about the Benghazi attack 10...

Clip on a nametag, pick up a paper cup of lukewarm water and you can sit down in the audience at a thousand liberal Jewish establishment panels where the likes of Peter Beinart or Jeffrey Goldberg will sanctimoniously lecture their bored audience on the growing gap between American Jews and Israel. Yawn through the usual references to “settlements”, “democratic character” and “one state solution.” Wake up just in time for the sales pitch for J Street and tough love BDS for the Jewish State. And then go out and get some fresh air. The gap isn’t between Israeli and American...

Israel has put out feelers to the US about increased military aid in the form of fighter aircraft and missile defense systems to offset the expected deal with Iran on its nuclear program, according to reports in Israeli media. The reports range from speculation to concrete news of “preliminary” and “unofficial” talks. Ronen Bergman of the mass circulation Yediot Ahronot, a journalist specializing in defense and intelligence issues, cited an unnamed senior American source as saying that "the White House is willing to pay a hefty price to get some quiet from the Israelis at this point. We are surprised...