Free Republic

In both Britain and America, ideological prejudices are coming to undermine the rule of law. In a number of incidents, people who have committed criminal acts have been acquitted or had their cases dismissed purely because they represent a politically correct cause or belong to a "powerless" victim group.

Even given Obama’s ever more terrifying and lethal performance in office, his comments about the jihadi murder of Daniel Pearl, and in front of Daniel’s bereaved family, are simply astounding. This is what Obama said: ‘Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.’ Daniel Pearl was not murdered because he was a journalist. He was decapitated because he was an American Jew. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed cut off his head in an act of unimaginable barbarism, which was videoed in order to...

review of The World Turned Upside Down, by Melanie Phillips Melanie Phillips, the columnist for the British newspaper the Spectator, has written a fine new book: The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power. Ms. Phillips lives up to her reputation for tackling political and social issues in this attempt to create an overarching thesis for why we have seen such absurdities as climate change fraud, political correctness run amok, unbalanced portrayals bordering on propaganda regarding Islam and Israel, and the war in Iraq. This is a challenge that Phillips meets head on and masters....

While the west has been on vacation, truly momentous events have been occurring in Iran. With stupendous courage, the people have been on the streets in enormous numbers demonstrating against the hated regime and declaring that the Supreme Leader Khamanei will be overthrown. In bloody street battles last Sunday, the nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was shot dead along with nine others. On Monday, the regime started rounding up opposition leaders as well as arresting hundreds of protesters, beating and shooting them and using vehicles to run them over. As the Wall Street Journal reports, one of...

Alan Dershowitz vs. Melanie Phillips By: Frontpagemag.com FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, July 24, 2009 <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Book Antiqua"; panose-1:2 4 6 2 5 3 5 3 3 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; dummy:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} p {mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; dummy:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New...

Melanie Phillips highlights troubling contradictions contained within Alan Dershowitz's Wall Street Journal editorial. To use the proverbial "canary in the mine shaft" description of Dershowitz would be generous. Coming from a professor of law (wasn't Obama supposedly a professor too or so he told us?) of his stature one would hope for more than a wishful thinking op/ed on his part. more

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest. But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews,...

SNIPPET: "Today, I received two emails from an Elly Kilroy on behalf of WLUML, asking me to “please immediately remove the link to Women Living Under Muslim Laws from your list of recommended websites; we do not want to be associated with you in any way.” The email reads as follows: “Dear Phyllis, Please could you remove the link to Women Living under Muslim Laws from your list of Recommended Websites; we are more than uncomfortable about being in the same list as names such as Daniel Pipes, Melanie Phillips and Internet Haganah to name just a few. We are...

Among American Jews, a degree of ‘buyers’ remorse’ has been detected recently. Almost 80 per cent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama as President. Those of us who warned that this man would endanger Israel were scorned. How could that possibly be, said the secular, liberal American Jews. He’s a Democrat, he’s black and he’s pro-abortion. With this triple-lock of unassailable virtue, how can he be bad for Israel? Now some of them are getting an awful feeling that they may have made the biggest misjudgment of their lives. As the world watched events unfold in Iran, Obama’s double...

There is chatter in some quarters that the Iranian ‘green revolution' may be petering out. Well, it depends whom you’re reading. The Iran expert Michael Ledeen says he has no idea what’s going to happen. But there are signs that the regime is preparing for an all-out assault; and that they are panicking and the ayatollahs are at odds amongst themselves; and that, most interestingly of all, this: ...that there are cracks in the regime’s edifice, ranging from declarations of small groups of Revolutionary Guards calling on their brothers to defect to “the people,” to a phenomenon that is just...

So Obama has equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the true resistance against apartheid in South Africa. Thus the moral bankruptcy of the moral relativist. Next, he repeated that the settlements (all of them? just new ones?) undermined peace and so had to stop. But they don’t undermine peace. It is Arab rejectionism that prevents peace in the Middle East, and the settlements are a palpable excuse. Yet Obama delivered no ultimatum of any kind to Iran, the real threat to peace in the region and the world... For his egregious sanitising...

Every so often, a book is published which, it is instantly clear, is the definitive last word on the subject. Such a book has just appeared on the global lunacy of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In his devastating study Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science (Quartet) Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and previously Professor of Earth Sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and, in the UK, Newcastle systematically shreds the theory and the hallucinatory propaganda industry it has spawned. There is simply nothing left of it when he has finished – and...

The Equality Bill currently going through Parliament is the latest and potentially most oppressive attempt to impose politically acceptable attitudes and drive out any that fall foul of these criteria. Since the attitudes being imposed constitute an ideological agenda to destroy Britain’s foundational ethical principles and replace them by a nihilistic values and lifestyle free-for-all, they represent a direct onslaught on the Judeo-Christian morality underpinning British society. The most neuralgic of these issues is gay rights. This is because the tolerance of homosexuality that a liberal society should properly show has long been hijacked by an agenda which aims at...

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable....

As was entirely predictable, Obama has gone to his good friends the Saudis to help him throw Israel under the bus. Having bowed deeply to the Saudi King Abdullah when they were in London last week (an image which tells you everything you need to know – and so has been conspicuous by its absence from the MSM; the Queen, by contrast, merited only a protocol-busting hand on the back) Obama, according to his Middle East envoy George Mitchell, is adopting the Saudi Israel destruction “peace” plan as his solution to the Middle East impasse. Ha'aretz reports: The Arab peace...

In the Sunday Times yesterday Andrew Sullivan claimed, in respect of the controversy over the alleged use of torture by counter-terrorist investigators under the Bush administration, that a senior al Qaeda suspect named abu Zubeydah had given false information under torture that there had been an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda – furthermore, that he had been tortured specifically to get him to make that statement in order to help justify the war in Iraq. Sullivan wrote: This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for...

As London locks down in feverish anticipation of the arrival of The One,Commentary publishes an important essay by John Bolton on an academic paper articulating what he correctly perceives to be the underlying rationale for Obama’s foreign policy – nothing less than the ending of American sovereignty. The progressive classes in Britain and Europe have signed up to this idea for years. Dubbed ‘transnational progressivism’, it is based on the belief that the nation state is in and of itself the cause of all the ills of the world, from prejudice to war. Nations cause nationalism; nationalism causes conflict; abolish...

Amil Imani has written an impassioned piece about the way in which Obama is betraying Imani's fellow Iranians: "President Obama said, ‘The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.’ But, Mr. President, the Iranian nation does not wish to be associated with this occupying regime, whatsoever. In fact, they want the Islamic Republic to be thrown into the dustbin of history as quickly as possible. Mr. President, today, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the greatest threats to the stability of the civilized world and humanity at...

Although Charles Freeman is no longer to become chairman of the National Intelligence Council, disturbing questions raised by his aborted appointment remain. Freeman, a veteran Arabist who blamed 9/11 in part upon America's poliicy towards Israel was forced out over concerns about his financial links to the Chinese and Saudi regimes and his support for the Chinese crackdown at Tiananmen Square and his dismissal of Tibetan protests against Chinese oppression as a "race riot." And Freeman's ravings about a Zionist conspiracy were not the views of a solitary crackpot. The big question is how the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis...

The atmosphere is cooling, the ice is expanding, the seas are not rising -- even though carbon emissions are increasing. The evidence is now crystal clear to anyone with an unwashed brain that man-made global warming theory is sheer unadulterated bunkum. So how do the warmers react to the ever more embarrassing evidence that they have hitched their reputations to the biggest anti-scientific scam in history? By ratcheting up the hysteria to fever pitch and shrieking that their predictions about the impending irreversible environmental apocalypse have grievously underestimated the catastrophe which is going to be far, far worse. At the...