Free Republic

Senior Saudi, Emirati and Qatari leaders will meet with US President Donald Trump in the next couple of months, Reuters reports US officials as saying, amid efforts by Washington to try to resolve a dispute between the Gulf neighbors. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani are all planning to have bilateral visits with Trump in March and April, a senior US official said. The agenda will include setting up a Gulf Cooperation Council summit, the official said, which...

Survivors Describe Attacks on Tents, Home, Farm (Beirut) – Turkish Armed Forces appear to have failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties in three attacks in northwest Syria in late January 2018, Human Rights Watch said today. The attacks killed 26 civilians, including 17 children.On January 20, Turkey opened a military offensive in the Afrin district. The area, which is under the control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – a Syrian Kurdish political party – has a civilian population of approximately 323,000, including 125,000 people displaced from elsewhere, according to the United Nations. “It appears that vulnerable...

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — During his CPAC speech, Donald Trump took a moment to savage Barack Obama, John Kerry and the Iran nuclear deal as the “worst negotiated” deal in history. “We declined to certify the terrible, one-sided Iran nuclear deal,” Trump said to cheers from the crowd. “That was a horrible deal.” “Whoever heard — you give $150 billion to a nation that has no respect for you whatsoever?” Trump asked. “They are saying death to America while they are signing the agreement.” Trump took direct aim at Kerry, who was secretary of state and helped negotiate the agreement...

The UN Security Council is struggling to agree a resolution seeking a ceasefire in Syria and has put back a vote until Saturday. The vote has already been delayed several times since Thursday. Russia wanted changes to the draft that calls for a 30-day calm to allow for aid deliveries and medical evacuations. Western diplomats have accused Russia, Syria's key ally, of stalling for more time. France said failure to act may spell the of the UN itself...... Commenting on Friday evening, US President Donald Trump pointed the finger of blame firmly at Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran,...

Officials tell the Associated Press that the new US Embassy in Jerusalem will open much earlier than some had predicted. They're working to make the move by May 2018 in celebration of Israel's 70th anniversary.

In a long, rambling February 20, 2018, speech before the UN Security Council, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas fed fables to his audience — and continued to attack Israel’s legitimacy. The speech marked the third time in two months that Abbas has publicly distorted history, and shifted blame for the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And once again, Abbas had a key ally: An uncritical press, seemingly determined to present the Palestinian leader in the best possible light. In his opening remarks before the Security Council, Abbas claimed that Palestinians “are the descendants of the Canaanites...

In a Nov. 25, 2017 article marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, published in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Lebanese journalist Karam Al-Hilu compared the meager accomplishments of the Arab world in the past century with those of the rest of the countries, particularly Israel. He noted that Israel’s supremacy in the areas of science, economy, society and politics is the source of its strength, as well as the source of Arab failure in confronting it. The following are excerpts from his article:[1] “A century after the Balfour Declaration . . . the Arabs have not managed to build...

With perfect timing, and taking advantage of the vacuum left by Obama’s decision not to get involved in Syria, Putin had put Russia back on the geopolitical map. He made a surprise visit to Damascus in December to declare: Mission accomplished. He should have learned from former U.S. President George W. Bush never to say that – because now everything is starting to fall apart for the Russians.

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, one of the country’s leading human rights advocates, to two-and-a-half years in jail for a 2016 Twitter post advocating peace. A former head of Mazlumdar, a prominent Turkish human rights group, Gergerlioglu was sentenced for “disseminating terrorist propaganda”, a charge he denies.The 53-year-old human rights activist was sentenced for a message he posted on Twitter on October 9, 2016, when he downloaded a photograph of a World Peace Day demonstration featuring Kurdish mothers protesting behind two symbolic coffins, one draped in the Turkish flag and the other in a Kurdistan Workers’...

Turkey has raised the possibility of opening a new dialogue with Syria as its supporters threatened to join Kurds in resisting a Turkish invasion in the northwestern district of Afrin. Ankara initially denied Tuesday that a massive convoy of fighters supportive of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad— an ally of both Russia and Iran—entered the Kurd-held enclave and later claimed that Turkish airstrikes turned the incoming forces back. Videos surfaced of pro-Syrian government and Kurdish fighters chanting "one Syria," in celebration of an alliance that Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Wednesday would have "serious consequences" for...

A spokesman for Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union called Turkey to withdraw its forces from Afrin on Wednesday. < Speaking to Deutschlandfunk radio Jürgen Hardt said he could only "urge" Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to end the operation in northern Syria”. Describing Turkey’s actions against YPG in Afrin as “not proportional” Hardt advised Turkey to “focus on securing the Turkish-Syrian border”. The Turkish government is, therefore "well advised to withdraw quickly from this mission now". The federal government had withheld criticism of the Turkish attacks on Afrin for a long time. On Tuesday evening, the Foreign Office called on...

U.S. has provided Kurdistans’ forces with arms, air support and military advisers… regards the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, as key ally against Islamic State IS and the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria. // snipp // Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Russia had stepped in to block Syrian forces in Afrin, where Ankara is seeking to destroy the Kurdish YPG… Erdogan later said in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Damascus would face consequences if it struck a deal with the YPG. // snipp // On Sunday, a Kurdish...

On January 20, the Turkish military began an invasion of the Kurdish-controlled Afrin region in northern Syria. Turkey’s government has declared that its operation aims “to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity,” remove “terrorist elements,” and protect civilians. The Independent, however, published the first Western media report from Afrin, and Robert Fisk reports that the list of dead includes infants. “One-year old Wael al-Hussein, a refugee…was killed on 21 January, six-year old Moussab al-Hussein from Idlib (clearly from another refugee family) on the same day,” he writes.Many journalists in Turkey, in the meanwhile, are rubbing their hands. Necati Doğru, a columnist with...

As part of its exclusive series on Libya during the rule of late leader Moammar al-Gaddafi, Asharq Al-Awsat examines the regime’s ties with local and foreign powers, including its attempts to finance western presidential campaigns, particularly in France, the United States and Ukraine. Witnesses from the former regime said that Tripoli had spent some 50 million euros in 2007 to fund the campaign of French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Lebanese businessman Ziad Takeieddine, who was present at Sarkozy’s meetings with Gaddafi revealed that the “figures were much higher than that.” Tripoli also pumped 5 million dollars in the presidential campaign...

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations Security Council that PA residents are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, claiming that ‘Palestine’ made significant contributions to humanity prior to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. During his address at the UN Security Council in which he called on the international community to hold a Middle East peace conference, with the goal of launching multilateral negotiations, Abbas claimed that the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were in fact descended from the ancient Canaanites. "We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years...

Last week, the American Journal of Human Genetics published a study connecting the DNA of ancient Canaanites to modern-day people in Lebanon. Various news outlets immediately reported that this study proved the Bible wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution News' David Klinghoffer compiled a helpful series of headlines: “Study disproves the Bible’s suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out” (The Telegraph) “Bible says Canaanites were wiped out by Israelites but scientists just found their descendants living in Lebanon” (The Independent) “Bronze Age DNA disproves the Bible’s claim that the Canaanites were wiped out: Study says...

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

The new samples come from Sidon, a coastal city in Lebanon. Marc Haber, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., extracted enough DNA from the ancient skeletons to sequence the whole genomes of five Canaanite individuals, all around 3700 years old. Haber’s first mission was to figure out who the Canaanites were, genetically speaking. Ancient Greek sources suggested they had migrated to the Levant from the East. To test that, Haber and colleagues compared the Canaanite genomes to those of other ancient populations in Eurasia. It turned out the Greeks were half right: About 50% of...

In the Wake of the Phoenicians: DNA study reveals a Phoenician-Maltese link The idea is fascinating. Who among us hasn't considered our heritage and wondered if we might be descended from ancient royalty or some prominent historical figure? Led by a long-standing interest in the impact of ancient empires on the modern gene pool, geneticist and National Geographic emerging explorer Spencer Wells, with colleague Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut, expanded on that question two years ago as they embarked on a genetic study of the Phoenicians, a first millennium B.C. sea empire that—over several hundred years—spread across...

Turkish jets bombard Iranian militia entering Afrin