Free Republic

Ahead of a possible presidential run, Hillary Clinton appears to be distancing herself from what she called President Barack Obama's foreign policy "failure": the decision not to intervene during the early stages of the Syrian civil war. In an interview with The Atlantic published on Sunday, the former secretary of state says the "failure" of the United States to those protesting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad led to the rise of al-Qaida-inspired groups like ISIS, the militants currently creating havoc in Syria and Iraq. “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who...

Ron Paul: Don’t Palestinians Have a Right to Defend Themselves Too? Ron Paul Institute August 5, 2014 Speaking on Voices of Liberty, RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul explains that, while he agrees with the often repeated in the media declaration that “Israel has a right to defend herself,” he wonders why more people in the media don’t voice support for Palestinians’ right to defend themselves too. Paul elaborates: And [Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu says 'Don’t second-guess me, don’t push a peace treaty on me because I’m gonna defend this country.' I think Israel absolutely has a right to...

Photos have appears on Iraqi social media depicting Russian-made rocket artillery arriving in Baghdad. The snapshots, published on July 25, show TOS-1A systems unloading from giant An-124 cargo planes. The rockets could help Baghdad battle Islamic militants. TOS-1 was the Soviet army’s secret hammer during the last decade of the Cold War. It fires powerful rockets to smash enemy trenches, fortifications and buildings, cracking defensive lines to allow tanks and infantry to punch through.

Joy Reid made this absurd comment during her August 4, 2014 MSNBC show: "So far the war in Gaza has left more than 1,800 Palestinians dead – the population equivalent to 100 9/11s."  Others – e.g., Politico, have already debunked her use of “population equivalent.”  Her comment is absurd for another reason: it insinuates that IDF operations in Gaza, launched for the purpose of ending Hamas rocket attacks, amount to terrorism on a grand scale. In effect, Reid is accusing Israel of being a terrorist state. We should agree that 9/11 was a terrorist attack against the United States.  Those...

Fighters Abandoning Al-Qaeda Affiliates To Join Islamic State, U.S. Officials Say By Greg Miller August 9 U.S. spy agencies have begun to see groups of fighters abandoning al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Africa to join the rival Islamist organization that has seized territory in Iraq and Syria and been targeted in American airstrikes, U.S. officials said. The movements are seen by U.S. ­counterterrorism analysts as a worrisome indication of the expanding appeal of a group known as the Islamic State that has overwhelmed military forces in the region and may now see itself in direct conflict with the United States....

BAGHDAD — Thousands of desperate Iraqi Yazidis who have been trapped by Islamist extremists on a parched mountaintop for almost a week trekked Friday into Syrian territory, seeking refuge in another war-ravaged country.

Turkey's defense minister on Saturday ruled out a Turkish military intervention against Islamic State fighters in Iraq, and said his country was not involved in U.S. airstrikes against the extremists near the Kurdish regional capital of Irbil. Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters central Anatolian province of Sivas that his country had not provided "any support to the U.S. so far." He cited Turkey's responsibility toward 49 Turkish citizens taken hostage by the IS from the Turkish consulate in Mosul in June. The hostages include diplomatic staff, special forces police and children. Due to this, Yilmaz said, "it is impossible...

A court in Egypt has dissolved the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing. The ruling will effectively prevent the banned Islamist movement from formally participating in parliamentary elections expected later this year. The government declared the Brotherhood a terrorist group in December.

Hamas states on Saturday that it would continue attacks on Israel, if Palestinian demands it put forward in indirect talks in Cairo were not met. Palestinian demands include lifting the siege, reopening the border crossings, and allowing construction material into the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians are also demanding free passage between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, freedom of fishing within 12 miles of the coast, reopening the Palestinian airport in the southern Gaza Strip, construction of a seaport and cancellation of buffer zones along the border with Israel. At the same time, Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri said the group...

For 35 years, since Iranians seized the American Embassy on November 4, 1979, and kept the Americans in it as hostages, the United States has been at war with radical Islamists. They knew it. We hid from it. Now, in an arc of terror from Boko Haram in Nigeria through Hamas in Gaza to ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, there is a clear wave of vicious religious warfare being waged against civilization by fanatics who openly promise and engage in genocidal killing. ISIS has made its murderous intentions painfully clear. It has proven in town after town that it...

Stupidity and cowardice is latent in the DNA of the American Left when it comes to the threat from Jihad.. In a recent article in The Hill, it is clear that the administration refuses to acknowledge the terror threat to the US posed by ISIS/ISIL/IS.This is part of a long-standing pattern of denial to make Obama appear triumphant, particularly since the death of Bin Laden, but also before. The denial of the Jihadi connections and intentions of the Fort Hood and Little Rock shooters are examples as well…

On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Mr. Obama’s limousine. The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide. With American...

WASHINGTON (AP) - For years, Kurdish officials have beseeched the Obama administration to let them buy U.S. weapons. For just as long, the administration has rebuffed America's closest allies in Iraq. U.S. officials insisted they could only sell arms to the government in Baghdad, even after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki broke a written promise to deliver some to the Kurds. Their peaceful, semiautonomous northern region had been the lone success story to come out of the 2003 U.S. invasion. The U.S. has resisted arming the Kurds because Washington's aim is to keep Iraq united. A strong Kurdish army could hasten...

It was strange. Joe Scarborough had just completed a comprehensive indictment of failed American foreign policy around the globe. But at the very moment when he should have laid those disasters at the feet of the sitting President of the United States, Scarborough came down with a bad case of . . . cold feet. Scarborough laid out to David Gregory a tour d'horizon of failed American foreign policy from the Middle East, to Iran, to Russia/Ukraine, describing it as "one disaster after another." But perhaps fearful of where the ineluctable logic of his comments was taking him, Scarborough suddenly...

WASHINGTON - The Iraqi government delivered a planeload of ammunition to Arbil, the capital of Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, on Friday in an unprecedented act of military cooperation between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, a US official said. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi security forces, under the command of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite Arab, delivered the mostly small-arms ammunition in a C-130 cargo plane to resupply the Kurdish Peshmerga forces as they fight militants from the Islamic State. The Obama administration is working with the Iraqi government to ensure that additional requests from the Kurdistan...

Paul ranks alongside ultra-liberal Dennis Kucinich as having the weakest foreign policy stances in the U.S. House. Tuesday, Paul and Kucinich were two of only 12 House members that voted against imposing new sanctions on Iran. The resolution that would penalize foreign companies from selling oil to Iran passed 412-12. "This will unify the Iranian people against us," Paul incorrectly predicts.

Italy said Tuesday it is expelling a Moroccan imam caught on video inciting violence against Jews during Israel's offensive against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, as reported by Arutz Sheva Monday. The cleric was filmed during a Friday sermon in a mosque near Venice last month calling for Jews to be killed "one by one", according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which published the video on its website. Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said he had ordered the expulsion of Raoudi Aldelbar "for seriously disturbing public order, being a danger to national security and for religious discrimination," after experts...

(CNN) -- A man arrested in July and accused of having a role in the kidnapping and killing of the three Israeli teenagers is "a senior member of Hamas," Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told CNN's Jake Tapper. Regev made the remarks Wednesday during a live interview on CNN's "New Day." "Apparently he was trying to illicitly cross the border into Jordan, but we got him in time," Regev said. "His arrest will lead, I hope, to further arrests." After the on-air interview, Regev was asked what proof Israel has that this man is a member...

On Saturday, Israel began to withdraw some of the soldiers it had previously deployed to areas of Gaza in which terror tunnels had been uncovered. Though widely interpreted as the beginning of a "unilateral ceasefire," the move is more likely the beginning of a switch from defense to offense. Before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could penetrate any further into the Gaza Strip, the threat of surprise attacks in the rear had to be removed.

IDF forces in the Gaza Strip found a Hamas manual on “Urban Warfare,” which belonged to the Shuja’iya Brigade of Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. The manual explains how the civilian population can be used against IDF forces and reveals that Hamas knows the IDF is committed to minimizing harm to civilians. Throughout Operation Protective Edge, Hamas has continuously used the civilian population of Gaza as human shields. The discovery of a Hamas “urban warfare” manual by IDF forces reveals that Hamas’ callous use of the Gazan population was intentional and preplanned. This Hamas urban warfare manual exposes two...