Free Republic

UN Ambassador Danny Danon sent an urgent letter to the Security Council members in which he revealed the smuggling route from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to Hezbollah Iran is smuggling weapons and ammunition to Hezbollah through commercial flights from the Islamic Republic to Lebanon, according to intelligence information revealed by Israel’s UN ambassador to the Security Council, which was cleared for publication on Tuesday. UN Ambassador Danny Danon sent an urgent letter to the Security Council members in which he revealed the smuggling route from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to Hezbollah: “The Iranian Al-Quds Force packs weapons, ammunition and missile technology...

Authorities in Lebanon commenced this week construction works on an isolation wall to surround the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp following “security concerns” The first blocks of an isolation wall were erected around the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon this week, as a plan to build ‘security’ cordones and watchtowers around Ain al-Hilweh came into effect. The security wall forms part of an agreement between Palestinian factions and the authorities in Lebanon in attempt to contain recent confrontations between Palestinians inside the camp and the Lebanese army, Lebanese and Palestinian officials claim. The isolation wall is set to...

A few months after Hillary Clinton took over as U.S. secretary of state in 2009, a longtime associate with connections to the Clinton Foundation insisted that her senior aides give a job to an unidentified male associate. “Important to take care of [name redacted],” Douglas Band, President Bill Clinton’s former right-hand man, wrote to Clinton aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Nora Toiv in an April 22, 2009, email. “We have all had him on our radar,” Abedin responded. “Personnel has been sending him options.” The subject line on the email read “A favor…” The email exchanged was uncovered by...

Another 296 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails were released Tuesday — exposing key Clinton aides doing favors for billionaires and, on one occasion, leaving the then-secretary of state’s daily schedule in an unlocked hotel room. The documents were released by Judicial Watch, which is suing to recover Clinton’s emails under Freedom of Information Act laws. In an April 2009 email to Clinton’s State Department aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, President Clinton’s former body man, Doug Band, the founder of corporate consultant Teneo, urgently asked them to set up a meeting with an ambassador for a major donor to the...

“This was the heyday of [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order.” He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched...

<p>BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed ``Chemical Ali'' by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.</p> <p>Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who is also President Saddam Hussein's first cousin.</p> <p>Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.</p>

A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq’s WMD located in three Syrian sites. Nizar Najoef, a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “Di Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are: 1. Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons...

Faced with one of the most severe refugee crises in the world, Lebanon has been toughening up its policies towards Syrians who have fled there, leaving many in an increasingly vulnerable state. In one of the latest examples, authorities in the southern village of Kfarruman gave those who did not have a local sponsor 15 days to leave. I put it to Khalil Gebara, the interior minister's adviser for municipal affairs, that the move was illegal. "If we're going to be literal about it, yes," he told me. "But reality is one thing and the law is another," he added....

Peace, brotherhood, and good sportsmanship -- these are the Olympic ideals, we're told, that the games are all about.Of course, greed, commercial exploitation, and corruption make up the true "Olympic spirit," but no one wants to counter the fairy tale.And part of that fairy tale is that athletes -- even from warring countries -- get along perfectly, leaving conflict and bad feelings behind them as they meet in the spirit of good, clean fun and competition.Perhaps we should ask the Lebanese delegation how the fairy tale is working out.Times of Israel: Members of the Lebanese delegation to the 2016 Olympic...

Marine Gen. John Allen, a 1976 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served this country admirably for more than 36 years. Now he has announced he wants to retire. The 59 year-old former top officer in Afghanistan cited his wife's "chronic" illness and said he wants to devote more time to helping his beloved Kathy cope with serious health problems, including an undisclosed "auto-immune disorder." We join the vast majority of Americans who pray the general's wife will get better, and thank him for his service to this country. But one would have to be pathetically naive not to realize...

TAMPA — Her business card is utterly ordinary. No big titles. No hint of connections with the military and political elite. It lists her address, her phone number and her name in elegant script: "Honorable Jill G. Kelley." But the outsized portrait of herself that Kelley presents to the world will fit on no card. It's seen in her emails to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and others. She drops names. She mentions lunch at the White House in a casual aside, one of three visits she has made there in the last six weeks. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan...

Egypt’s foreign minister paid a rare visit to Israel on Sunday, saying that his country remains a “steadfast and unwavering” supporter of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians but warning that conditions for achieving that are deteriorating. Sameh Shoukry’s trip was the first official visit to Israel since 2007 and reflected the strong but low-profile ties that have developed between the two countries in recent years. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said Shoukry’s visit was aimed at reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. …

She’s a walking parody of an unhinged leftist ‘reporter.’...But even among leftist hacks, Amanpour is a special case: It’s almost as if she’s trying to mock herself — a Trump-is-a-Clinton-plant conspiracy theory, if you will, but in the mainstream media. She referred to devout Christianity as “totalitarian” in her August 23, 2007, CNN profile “Christian Warriors.” But in 2008, she fawned over the “progress” achieved by Fidel Castro, and in 2013 she wished Zimbawean dictator Robert Mugabe a happy birthday. If a higher-profile (read: important) person had such a rich historical cache of commentary, they would have already been driven...

Israel has announced that it will be building 800 new housing units. Of these, 560 will be in Maale Adumim, a town of 40,000 located four miles east of Jerusalem, and 240 will be in three Jerusalem neighborhoods.State Department spokesman John Kirby reacted with unusually strong language: If it’s true, this … would be the latest step in what seems to be the systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalization of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution. We oppose steps like these which we believe are counterproductive.Kirby added that Washington was “deeply concerned”:...

Responding to parents who complained about the distribution at public schools of a map which labeled Israel as “Palestine,” the City of Paris said it was the result of “a simple production error.” The city’s media department gave the explanation in a statement it published Friday about the distribution earlier this year to elementary school pupils of a calendar that contains a map of Europe and parts of the Middle East. The map, which ends north of central Israel and the West Bank, designates the territory of Israel included in it as “Palestine,” alongside Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. In...

Taysir Kubaa, deputy head of the Palestinian National Council, on Thursday called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to abandon the path of negotiations with Israel which, he said, does not lead to success for the Palestinians. Speaking in an interview with Hamas's Palestine newspaper, Kubaa said that the Palestinian reliance on false negotiations is wrong, since negotiations are “worthless”, as he put it, and “the only option we face is a return to national unity and enlisting our people to the forces of the struggle.” Referring to the French peace initiative which calls for an international conference to renew peace...

The time has surely arrived for trilateral negotiations to be commenced between Israel, Jordan and Egypt to allocate sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza between their respective sovereign States The Quartet—America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations—has effectively consigned any negotiated two-state solution to political oblivion with its latest Report. Two statements in the Report stymie any resumption of negotiations—stalled since April 2014.

Franks said that one strategic strike could create blackouts nationwide. And the consequences of this could be a field day for hackers, cripple our military defense system, and that’s not even mentioning what life would be like for normal Americans if they had no power. The risk of an EMP attack has been around since the Cold War but according to Franks, “we’re a thousand times more vulnerable than we were even 50 years ago.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee heard expert testimony detailing the Palestinian Authoritie's payment of funds from its budget in assistance to imprisoned and dead terrorists and their families. Yigal Carmon, the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute says that most of the funds come from donor countries like the US and western Europe, making them virtually complicit in attacks on Israeli citizens.

A senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently threatened Israel, saying the ground is ready for the annihilation of “the Zionist regime”. The comments by IRGC Deputy Commander Hossein Salami were made at a sermon in Tehran this past Friday prior to prayers marking Al-Quds Day. He also declared that Iran has over 100,000 missiles waiting in Lebanon alone and that tens of thousands of other missiles were placed throughout the Muslim world in order to wipe "the accursed black dot" – that is Israel – from the map of the world. Salami also threatened Kurdish leaders...