Free Republic

Truth be told, it was principally the Republican party in the United States that saw the value of Mohammad Reza as an ally and treated him with warmth, respect, and friendship. Prominent Republican President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1980 to 1988, spoke favorably of the Shah, calling him "a stalwart ally" and criticizing Jimmy Carter's attitudes towards him. Another Republican President, the well-known Richard Nixon, who sat from 1969 until 1974, openly praised the Shah. Hosting the Shah at a dinner at the White House, Nixon referenced a visit he had made to Iran in the aftermath of...

Here's a safe prediction: Florida's same-sex marriage ban is going down. The end could come soon if a Miami-Dade County judge sides with six couples who claim that the ban is unconstitutional. On Wednesday their attorney asked Judge Sarah Zabel to award the plaintiffs summary judgment, meaning they would win without a trial because the facts are clear. Zabel will rule in a few weeks. Based on what has happened in the year since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, however, the six couples should be optimistic. Nearly two dozen consecutive judicial rulings have gone...

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see (evil's) final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."--C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters" Call it déjà vu, the feeling that we've been here before, that events in the news are happening again, only with a...

The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. Unfortunately, bad things happen when the world concludes that the American president has become weakened, distracted, or diffident about foreign policy. As Richard Nixon became increasingly paralyzed by Watergate in late 1973, the enemies of Israel felt that it was an opportune time to launch their so-called Yom Kippur War. The next year, the negotiated armistice in the Vietnam War collapsed, and the North Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta and prepared for a final offensive against South Vietnam. In 1979, after two full years...

t’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for President Barack Obama. His signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a slow-motion train wreck. His poll numbers have tanked. Now, things have gotten so bad for Obama that former president Jimmy Carter has called President Obama incompetent in the family-friendly pages of Parade magazine. “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.” (RELATED: Jimmy Carter: America no longer has a functioning democracy)...

Former President Jimmy Carter said President Obama couldn’t have done anything to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from annexing Crimea. “I think that was a foregone conclusion,” Carter said on MSNBC. “He was going to do it regardless of the consequences. I think now, that’s far enough.” In comments Monday on "Morning Joe," Carter compared Obama's response to his own decisions at the White House in 1979, when he decided to boycott Moscow's Summer Olympics after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is warning Egypt that its transition to democracy after years of political turmoil is faltering ahead of presidential elections later this month. His Carter Center won’t be sending observers for Egypt’s May 26-27 election, which many believe retired Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi handily will win following the overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last year that he led. However, the center will be sending a small team of experts. In a statement Friday, the center warned that “Egypt’s political transition has stalled and stands on the precipice of total reversal.” The center said Morsi’s overthrow...

"It would be impossible to implement any peace agreement between Israel and just one portion of the Palestinians,” the former president wrote in the "Washington Post." The Palestinian unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah offers Israel an opportunity to move the peace process forward since any future agreement would incorporate all of the West Bank and Gaza, former president Jimmy Carter argues in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday. “This reconciliation of Palestinian factions and formation of a national unity government is necessary because it would be impossible to implement any peace agreement between Israel and...

Ramesh and Reason’s Nick Gillespie have been going back and forth over Rand Paul’s claim (from a number of years ago) that Jimmy Carter was a more fiscally conservative president than Ronald Reagan. Mother Jones collected a series of appearances over the years in which the Kentuckian argues that Reagan’s budget performance, compared with Carter’s, is evidence Republicans don’t really mean it when they claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism. Gillespie argues that Reagan’s deficits means he wasn’t a fiscal conservative, while Ramesh argues (and Nick seems to agree to some extent) that probably a better measure is rate of increases in spending...

Anti-Semitism is not a simple bigotry. It is a complex neurosis. It involves assigning malign intent to Jews where none exists on the one hand, and rejecting reason as a basis for understanding the world and operating within it on the other hand. John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was an anti-Semitic act. In remarks before the Trilateral Commission a few days after PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, Kerry said that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it...

<p>A quick glance at this morning's news coverage makes clear that the media is more than a little eager to let Secretary of State John Kerry off the hook for accusing Israel of devolving into an "apartheid state" if it doesn't make peace with the Palestinians. The media is also going to let Kerry get away with claiming that those who criticized his reprehensible remark are motivated only by "partisan politics."</p>

Today is Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — a day on which Jews and all civilized people around the globe commemorate the 6 million who died at the hands of virulent antisemites. Israel takes this day very seriously. For those unclear on the whole Israel concept (Obama, Kerry, and State Department, I’m speaking to you), Israel is the only liberal democracy within the Middle East. It’s the only nation in that region that allows all people to worship freely, that accords full rights to women, and that protects all minorities, including sexual and racial minorities, from discrimination, even while...

Secretary of State John Kerry has issued a statement on his controversial remark about Israel and apartheid that led Senator Ted Cruz to call for his resignation today, saying he “would have chosen a different word” if he had a second chance at saying it. Kerry says that during his service at the State Department and in the U.S. Senate, he’s “walked the walk” and shown repeated support for the state of Israel, reiterating his desire for a two-state solution “that results in a secure Jewish state and a prosperous Palestinian state.” He defiantly declares, “I will not allow my

Reporting for Duty, unfit as ever.Not since Jimmy Carter wrote the widely unread book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has a higher ranking know-it-all suggested that Israel might become an apartheid state. For the record, “apartheid” is a term appropriated from the racist regime of South Africa and applied to Israel because it always elicits the desired outrage. As far as emotional college slogan campaigns go, it’s right up there with “Free Palestine.” The Apartheid accusation is false at every level, and was a deliberate propaganda strategy devised at the anti-Semitic Durban NGO conference in 2001. In other words it works...

Secretary of State John Kerry says he chose the wrong word in describing Israel’s potential future after coming under withering criticism for saying the Jewish state could become an “apartheid state” if it doesn't reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. In a statement released by the State Department Monday, Kerry lashed out against “partisan political” attacks against him, but acknowledged his comments last week to a closed international forum could have been misinterpreted. While he pointedly did not apologize for the remarks, he stressed he was, and is, a strong supporter of Israel, which he called a “vibrant democracy.”...

Big lies don’t always start out big. They don’t even always start out as lies. They only grow big in the cover-up when the truth has to be beaten off with a stick made out of even bigger lies. A brief read of the daily newspapers, a quick flick through the cable news networks and an ear cocked to the drive time news minute might give you the idea that Israel is isolated and besieged. Israel is indeed a small country. It’s always been isolated in a Muslim region that is willing to kill even fellow Arab Christians and fellow...

Secretary of State John Kerry has said he chose the wrong word in describing Israel´s potential future after being criticised for saying the Jewish state could become an ´apartheid state´ if it does not reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. In a statement released yesterday by the State Department, Kerry lashed out against ´partisan political´ attacks against him, but acknowledged his comments last week to a closed international forum could have been misinterpreted. He pointedly did not apologize for the remarks, but stressed he was, and is, a strong supporter of Israel, which he called a ´vibrant democracy.´

Demonstrating once again that Israel remains a favorite whipping boy of the liberal media, there was John Heilemann of New York magazine on today's Morning Joe defending John Kerry's grotesque claim that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state." According to Heilemann, Kerry's ugly accusation was "not actually an unreasonable statement." To his credit, Joe Scarborough promptly riposted, saying "I couldn't disagree with you more." View the video here.

onday night Secretary of State John Kerry issued an almost apology for warning that if Israel did not make peace it would become an apartheid state. In the statement he issued (below) he never says he is sorry, simply that he has always loved Israel, the criticism he received for his statement was political, and if he could say it again he would change the words he used. For more than thirty years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel, I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it...

The secretary of state said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become ‘an apartheid state,’ like the old South Africa. Jewish leaders are fuming over the comparison Kerry also said that at some point, he might unveil his own peace deal and tell both sides to “take it or leave it.”