Free Republic

BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) Heavily armed Muslim rebels opened fire inside a hospital in a remote corner of Central African Republic, killing at least 16 people including three local health workers employed by Doctors Without Borders. The medical aid group confirmed that three staff members had been killed in Nanga Boguila, a town located in the northwest near the border with Chad. The attack on the Boguila hospital came after it was surrounded by more than 40 armed rebels on Saturday. Inside the hospital staff members from Doctors Without Borders were meeting with several dozen local village chiefs from...

Over 150,000 people have lost their lives since the March 2011 outbreak of the devastating civil war in Syria, according to new figures. The London based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which closely monitors the conflict using a network of activists and medical staff in Syria, has documented the deaths of 150,344 people. More than a third of those killed in Syria – by shellfire, air strikes and bullets – are civilians, the rights group said. Now in its third year, the war, which continues, unabated, has ravaged entire cities, leaving whole civilian neighbourhoods flattened by shell fire and...

At least 15 senior Taliban commanders were killed on Tuesday in Ghazni province by a suicide bomber reportedly attempting to keep them from carrying out plans to disrupt Saturday's elections, according to Afghan officials. In addition to the 15 confirmed dead, nine other militants were wounded by the blast, which occurred in the Gelan district of Ghazni, according to the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Among the casualties were said to be Pakistani Taliban leaders. Insurgents have publicly stated their intent to derail the elections, which will mark the country's first democratic transition of presidential power in history. The Taliban...

As US president Barack Obama looks to mend ties with Saudi Arabia in Riyadh today, the Saudis hope to shore up regional support. Their $1.5 billion gift has raised suspicions among Pakistanis. Pakistan announced last week that it received a $1.5 billion grant from Saudi Arabia, which it termed a “friendly gift” and an “unconditional grant.” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long had warm ties, but the no-strings-attached gift sparked immediate concern from Pakistani journalists, security experts, and opposition politicians, who question whether the grant is part of a behind-the-scenes deal for Pakistan to provide weapons for Syrian rebels. “There...

Muslims in Syria have butchered 400 people in mass killing fields, and have also impregnated 3000 women through sex jihad. We have learned this information through our Middle East contact Sister Hatune Dogan, who we partnered with in order to rescue Christians in Syria and Iraq, Turkey and Jordan. “Abd Alluhud tells his story driving to his farm, taking the regular route near Idlib and what he sees was so horrific; hundreds of bodies on the side of the road, all decapitated”, so reports Sister Hatune Dogan to Shoebat.com after she came back from her mission to aid Christians in...

(Click on image to see full size) Infographic: Persecuted and Forgotten? Credit: Aid to the Church in Need New York City, N.Y., Mar 19, 2014 / 04:07 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In a recently-released summary report called “Persecuted and Forgotten?” Aid to the Church in Need has revealed a worldwide growth in discrimination against Christians in scope and frequency. The persecution of Christians “has increased over the last 10 to 15 years,” said Ed Clancy, director of evangelization and outreach at Aid to the Church in Need, in an interview with CNA last month, adding that “persecution has many faces,...

Gunmen shot, hacked and burned to death at least 100 people and razed homes in central Nigeria.

60 percent of girls in Afghanistan are married before their 16th birthday. “Despite a law setting the legal minimum age for marriage at 16 for girls and 18 for boys, international and local observers estimated that 60 percent of girls were married before the age of 16,” the State Department said in its most recent human rights report. ... Some girls as young as six or seven were promised in marriage, with the understanding that the actual marriage would be delayed until the child reached puberty. Reports indicated, however, that this delay was rarely observed and that young girls were...

Siskel and Ebert they ain’t, but Islamic scholars, supremacists, jihadists and pressure groups have made their views known, often in quite colorful ways, about numerous motion pictures that you may want to catch. So grab some popcorn and some old tomatoes: it’s movie time down at the mosque!5. Thumbs down: Noah Russell Crowe’s lavish Biblical epic Noah is about to be released in the Middle East, and Muslim scholars are enraged. It has been banned in Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Cairo’s Al-Azhar, which Barack Obama has praised as “a beacon of Islamic learning,” issued a statement denouncing...

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- A Somali police officer says a suicide car bomber accidentally detonated his explosives near a popular hotel in the Somali capital. Capt. Mohamed Hussein said the bomber appeared to have prematurely detonated his explosives-laden car Saturday as he tried to park near a hotel. No others were hurt or killed in the blast...

From the “not what you might expect” files, here’s a fact about Catholicism in the early 21st century that flies in the face of conventional wisdom: It’s growing by leaps and bounds in the heart of the Muslim world. Many Americans have heard or read reports about an exodus of Christians out of the Middle East, and in terms of the indigenous Arab Christian population that’s all too real. Christians now make up only 5 percent of the region’s population, down from 20 percent a century ago. In places like Iraq, whole Christian communities are on the brink of extinction....

An Asian lesbian has spoken of her experiences about hiding her sexuality from her family. “I know this sounds like a complete paradox. But I am a lesbian. And I am a Muslim. A practising Muslim,” she says. Jay, as she wanted to be referred to said she rarely talks of her feelings to anyone and growing-up she felt ostracised. But at university she was able to be a little more open about her sexuality. “I can’t talk about this to anyone apart from my close friends. I would never dare to admit this to my family. “At school, all...

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is proudly announcing that the U.S. military is again using their chaplains.

Russia may be tightening its grip on Crimea, with little resistance to date, but they have yet to face the Crimean Tatar factor. There are 266,000 Crimean Tatars in Crimea, over 13% of the local population. They are Sunni Muslim, traditionally pro-Ukrainian, and much better organised than the local Ukrainians, who make up 23% of the population.

A couple of days ago, I commented on Facebook about how the Nazi persecution of the Jews and other undesirables in Germany was being denied now. How Ike ordered that as many photos as possible be taken because eventually, the incident would be denied. Now, the Muslims are denying that it happened and are trying to continue the Nazi's work on Jews in the Middle East. I commented that in the end, all we needed to know about Muslims was how to killed them as efficiently as possible. I hate to be that way, but I do not see any...

So a lesbian walks into a Muslim barbershop, and asks for a “businessmen’s haircut”. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it really happened, and now a government agency called the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario will hear her complaint. Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo. Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women...

Turkey's Prime Minister accused political enemies of hacking encrypted state communications to fake a phone conversation suggesting he warned his son to hide large sums of money before police raids in a graft inquiry that reached into government. In a dramatic session of parliament after posting of an 11-minute audio tape on YouTube, Tayyip Erdogan described it as a shameless and treacherous "montage". He did not name those he held responsible but made it clear he was talking of a network run by former ally, Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. The head of the main parliamentary opposition insisted the conversation was...

Here Are The Countries That Spend The Most On Food Matthew BoeslerFeb. 24, 2014, 8:28 PM Renaissance Macro Research, Congressional Research Service This chart plots the share of household income in a given country spent on food against the level of household income in that country. Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, warns that rising food prices may serve as an additional economic headwind to some of the emerging markets in the top-left region of the chart (India, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria, to name a few). "Food prices are climbing for a range of items including cattle,...

A rare polyandry case in the Middle Eastern kingdom of Jordan has sparked controversy when the four husbands take a dispute over the pregnancy of their shared wife to court. The London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat reported this week that a court in Jordan’s northern town of al-Ramtha is considering the case, which reportedly involves two Syrian men, a Jordanian and a Saudi Arabian. Each man claimed to be the real impregnator of the wife, denying awareness that she was married to another man, according to al-Hayat. The court resorted to DNA tests to resolve the dispute. Many people expressed their...

Syria is submerged in civil war. The Sunni and the Shi’ia of Iraq are renewing their 1300-year-old conflict. Libyan rebels have shut down the nation’s oil industry. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has been suppressed and is resorting to terrorism. Pakistan is a cauldron of violence and assassinations. In short, the Muslim world, as usual, is at war with itself. This is not a contemporary phenomenon. Islam has been attacking its neighbors ever since the Prophet Mohammed received the Koran from the Angel Gabriel in the 7th century. Within 50 years of his death, Muslim armies had conquered the known world from...