Free Republic

The Islamic State beheaded another American this week. The Obama administration's response revealed its stubborn determination to deny reality. Peter Kassig was a former Army Ranger and emergency medical technician who was moved by the suffering of Syria's civilians and returned to the region after his discharge to provide aid. He helped some of the one million Syrian refugees who have fled into Lebanon, using his own funds to buy supplies like diapers and other necessities and driving an ambulance into Syria. He was kidnapped in October of 2013. According to those who analyze such things, something went wrong with...

A State Department spokesman said Monday the administration was seeking clarity from the United Arab Emirates over its decision to list two American Muslim groups as terrorist organizations. Spokesman Jeff Rathke seemed unaware that one of the two groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has long been engaged in outreach programs with the U.S. government. CAIR and MAS have expressed shock at the move, with MAS saying it would look to the U.S. government to help. “The State Department works...with CAIR all the time, no?” a reporter asked. “I mean, there’s all sorts of outreach programs between the government...

A new law in Saudi Arabia banning ‘tempting eyes’ has become the latest example of female oppression in the country. The law, which states that women with alluring eyes will be forced to wear a full veil, has been branded ‘stupid’ by dissenters and roundly criticised on social media, aina.org reports. Sheikh Motlab al Nabet, spokesman of the Saudi Arabian Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, said they ‘had the right’ to force women to cover their face. ‘The men of the committee will interfere to force women to cover their eyes, especially the tempting...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus claimed the discovery in the name of Spain. "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said. Erdogan said that Ankara was even...

The Islamic State's Sinai Peninsula terror organization, which was named Ansar Bayt al-Makdas until it swore allegiance to Islamic State (aka ISIS), has blown up the pipeline carrying gas from Egypt to Jordan. The pipeline, which is 1,200 km long, and was built at a cost of $1.2 billion, is used for exporting natural gas to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In the past, it was repeatedly attacked by Islamist terror groups, until Egypt's gas exports to Israel were halted. The Islamic State's Sinai Peninsula notified the press that it would not allow gas to be exported to Jordan unless ISIS...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot there. "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the conservative president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said.

While they may be appearing less often in the daily news cycle – the atrocities being committed by ISIS continue unabated. The innocent, weak and defenseless people living under ISIS rule in Iraq and Syria face horrific and inhuman choices everyday. Over the last few months we’ve brought you stories of massacres, beheadings, beatings, torture, rape and monstrous brutality… have we become inured to the horrors? The BBC was interviewing Kurdish activists in London with direct knowledge of what is happening on the ground within ISIS controlled Iraq and Syria when they told the story of a young Yazidi girl....

Washington (AsiaNews / Agencies) - For the first time in 35 years, Boeing has sold aircraft components to Iran. Breaking the news, the industry itself stated that it has sold "aircraft manuals, drawings, and navigation charts and data" to Iran Air. The sale, which has yielded Boeing 120 thousand dollars, is the first since 1979, the year of the "hostage crisis" which was followed by United States sanctions on all trade useful to aviation. The sale, said the company, took place between June and September this year, producing 12 thousand dollars in profits and was possible thanks to a US...

Iran hanged a woman on Saturday who was convicted of murdering a man she said was trying to rape her, the official IRNA news agency reported. ... The victim's family could have saved Jabbari's life by accepting blood money but they refused to do so. Iranian media reports say the family insisted on their legal rights under the Islamic principle of "an eye for an eye" partly because Jabbari accused Sarbandi of being a rapist

Afted Islamic extremism with “Zionist extremism” in remarks on Monday regarding the fight against terrorism. He made the comments during a meeting with Jordan’s president and members of the Lower House’s Democratic Gathering Bloc. While saying that there was a civil war taking place between moderate and extremist camps within Islam, the Jordanian monarch added that at the same time, “there is Zionist extremism,” and that “stakeholders should acknowledge there is extremism in all camps,” The Jordan Times reported...

Nearly two months after President Obama first vowed to eradicate ISIS, this cancer is spreading in North Africa — within striking distance of Europe’s soft underbelly.  On Sept. 15, a group of Algerian jihadists broke away from the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb network to pledge allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The self-proclaimed “Soldiers of the Caliphate in Algeria” proved their worth days later, ambushing a group of French tourists in a popular Algerian national park, kidnapping and beheading one of them.  On Sept. 23, the new group Soldiers of the Caliphate in Egypt popped...

Nations intone “Never again,” but we are watching a human catastrophe happen as Western powers fail to employ their massive resources. It is time for the world to wake up and do something to aid the Kurds in their battle with Islamic State before it is too late.

Today in predictable news: The teenage girls who abandoned their families in Austria to become jihadis for ISIS feel they’ve made a terrible mistake by joining the barbaric lifestyle and they want to come home. Samra Kesinovic, 17, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, are believed to be married, pregnant and living in the Islamic State-controlled city of Raqqa in northern Syria, Central European News reports.Evidently, the move didn’t work out as the pair had hoped: The change of heart is a much different tune than the note they left behind for their parents when they fled back in April, which read:...

The blogosphere and cable channels are all atwitter over a discussion Bill Maher had with Sam Harris, Ben Affleck, and Michael Steele last week. The topic? Whether too many Americans are engaged in Islamophobia in their criticism of Islam. At one point, Affleck said, “We've killed more Muslims than they've killed us, by an awful lot.” At another, he called the criticism of Islam “ugly,” “gross,” and “racist.” He compared the criticism of Islam with someone calling a Jew “shifty.” Is he right? He is not—and neither is the decade-plus shutting down of this important discussion. The shibboleths used to...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday the besieged Syrian city of Kobani was in imminent danger of falling to Islamic State and called on the U.S.-led coalition fighting the radical group to bolster its air raids with ground operations. The U.S.-led air campaign hit Islamic State positions Tuesday near the Syrian border city of Kobani, known in Arabic as Ayn al-Arab, but officials and Syrian opposition members said the militants were still advancing against Syrian Kurdish fighters. During a visit to a refugee camp in the border province of Gaziantep, Mr. Erdogan declared Kobani was “about to fall” and...

When Christian villagers from the Iraqi town of Caramles fled advancing IS forces, 80-year-old Victoria was among a dozen or so unable to leave. The widow, a Chaldean Catholic, knew nothing about the sudden evacuation that had suddenly emptied this ancient village she had known for so long. Next morning she went to church – St Addai’s – as she did every day. She found the place locked; the streets deserted. She knew IS had come. We met Victoria on our first evening in Erbil at the start of a fact-finding and project assessment trip for Catholic charity aid to...

Translated from TV2 (note: strong language is included in this account). Sign up for more translations and support at 10news.dk Christians with Middle Eastern backgrounds in Denmark experience harassment, verbal attacks and in some cases direct violence from Muslims. TV2 News has been in contact with a number of Christians here in Denmark who tell of violent experiences.Jojo was born in Denmark of Lebanese parents. She lived in Gellerupparken (a major Muslim area) until she was eight.One day she sat in her car in Nørrebro (a Muslim-dominated area in Copenhagen). Seven young people with Arab background surrounded the car. One...

A beheading video of French hostage Hervé Gourdel was released on September 24, 2014 by the Algerian group Jund al-Khilafah (Soldiers of the Caliphate). The video is significantly different than the three previous high production Islamic State beheading videos of Americans James Foley and Steve Sotloff and British hostage David Haines. The Algerian jihadist group kidnapped Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide, while he was hiking in the Djurdjura National Park in Algeria. They released a video two days prior to the beheading giving France an ultimatum, either stop the aggression against the Islamic State or Gourdel would die within 24-hours....

Asiya Ummi Abdullah doesn't share the view that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group rules over a terrorist dystopia and she isn't scared by the American bombs falling on Raqqa, its power center in Syria. As far as she's concerned, it's the ideal place to raise a family. In interviews with The Associated Press, the 24-year-old Muslim convert explained her decision to move with her toddler to the territory controlled by the militant group, saying it offers them protection from the sex, crime, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey. “The children...

Recent revelations of significant financial ties between the Brookings Institution and Qatar’s government are raising new questions about the policy positions of the influential Washington think tank—including one top scholar’s writings about an al Qaeda-linked group, known as Ahrar al-Sham, that is funded by a terrorist financier linked to the Qatari royal family.The New York Times reported earlier this month that Qatar has pledged a $14.8 million, four-year donation to Brookings, making it the “single biggest foreign donor” to the think tank. That money will help finance Brookings’ Doha Center in Qatar and its project on U.S. relations with the...