Free Republic

“Our response to this situation matters. If we respond to this situation by casting aspersions on millions of people that adhere to a particular religion or if we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we are more likely going to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them.” Of course we should not cast aspersions on people who had nothing to do with this jihad attack. But this kind of talk is used to preclude any examination of the motivating ideology underlying such attacks, and that leaves us more vulnerable to more such...

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease. But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness. Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The 24-year-old Muslim man who carried out the July 16 terrorist attack in Chattanooga was radicalized for at least a year before he opened fire on two military sites and killed five U.S. service members, an FBI agent told the Times Free Press today. The FBI believes people who knew Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez knew he was becoming radicalized before the attack, but failed to report Abdulazeez to authorities, Special Agent Ed Reinhold said. Abdulazeez was radicalized online before he took a July 2014 trip to the Middle East to visit family and discussed committing jihad before he carried out the...

After the Orlando attack, Obama ranted that it did not matter what we called Islamic terrorism. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

former Department of Homeland Security official Philip Haney insisted terrorism in Orlando, FL and San Bernardino, CA might have been prevented had the his former agency not deleted a list he compiled linking some Muslims with terrorism. Haney .. was able to link a mosque where San Bernardino shooters Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik worshiped to a network that tied the mosque where Orlando shooter Omar Mateen worshiped, but under the leadership of resident Barack Obama, that database was deleted. Farook would have been put on the no-fly list and not allowed to travel, or his pending fiancé would have...

We all know that Barack Obama was nominally a lawyer at some point in his past – not a good one, by anyone's account, but he was one. Assume for the moment that Barack Obama had as his client The Muslim Brotherhood, or CAIR, or Hamas, or any one of dozens of organizations dedicated to taking down the United States. Could he possibly have done a more effective job of hiding his client's actions or intentions while they went about conducting criminal operations unmolested as he has for seven years? Could he have been more successful at misdirecting and obfuscating...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday that Donald Trump isn't the only Republican who is trying to single out Muslims in the effort to reduce terrorist attacks against the United States. Earnest called out former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for making statements that the president also opposes. "It was Gov. Bush who initially advocated for a religious test on individuals who were entering the country," Earnest told reporters Tuesday during his daily press briefing. "It was Sen. Cruz who made the reference to enhanced surveillance of Muslim communities. It...

According to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who spent hours interviewing Obama about his foreign policy doctrine, the president “has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates” and “frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do.” That’s right, our commander in chief sees the mass shooting of 49 people in Orlando as akin to a slip in the tub. In his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama blithely dismissed the Islamic State as “fighters on the back of pickup...

A senior figure from a Syrian rebel group with links to al Qaida was allowed into the United States for a brief visit, raising questions about how much the Obama administration will compromise in the search for partners in the conflict. Labib al Nahhas, foreign affairs director for the Islamist fighting group Ahrar al Sham, spent a few days in Washington in December, according to four people with direct knowledge of the trip and who spoke on condition of anonymity. His previously undisclosed visit is a delicate matter for both sides – the conservative Salafist insurgents risk their credibility with...

If you want to understand why 15 years after 9/11 the West is still fighting the Global Jihadi Movement, look no further than President Barack Obama’s recent comments in the Atlantic. During a conversation with columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, the President argued that analogizing between the Cold War Communist threat and today’s jihadist threat is detrimental to America’s cause – that we must not “paint with a broad brush” lest we create a “clash of civilizations.”The President’s remarks illustrate two points: his apparent ignorance of the nature of the Communist and Islamic extremist threats, and his greater concern with not offending...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison, who served in the Reagan administration.President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have until March 17th to issue a determination that ISIS’ attacks on Christians in the Mideast are genocide. Time is running out. The foot-dragging and hesitancy of this administration in calling it genocide is inexplicable. Why do they have to be prodded to do what is right? All of us have seen the horrific images of 21 Coptic Christians lined up on a North African beach and beheaded. These Egyptian martyrs died with the name of Jesus on their...

John Brennan, the CIA director, told a Senate committee Tuesday that the violence and instability in the Middle East was the worst it had been in 50 years, painting a dire picture of a region he said was facing "unprecedented" bloodshed. Brennan spoke at the Senate Intelligence Committee's annual worldwide-threats hearing, emphasizing the threats the US faces as the Middle East devolves further into chaos. "The Middle East right now I think is racked by more instability and violence and inter-state conflict than we've seen certainly in the past 50 years," Brennan said. "And the amount of bloodshed and humanitarian...

Columnist Charles Krauthammer stated that President Obama's reported quotation that he didn't watch enough cable news to understand the anxiety people had about terrorism was him stating people "are not as cool, intelligent, and far-seeing as I am" on Friday's "Special Report" on the Fox News Channel. Krauthammer said, "to me he was being sarcastic. He was - this is a way of dissing, of sort of showing condescension to the rabble our there. After all this is an interview he gave, January 23rd of this year. Asked, 'Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people...

President Obama addressed an anxious nation last night in an instantly-forgettable, perfunctory speech that was largely devoid of news and announced no meaningful changes to US policies or military strategy. In an effort to reassure Americans that he's confronting the terrorist threat aggressively (his public approval rating on handling terrorism and ISIS is weak) Obama said, "for seven years, I've confronted this evolving threat each morning in my intelligence briefing." The public learned several years ago that this president skips his in-person briefings far more frequently than his predecessor, though his staff insists that he reads through the written version...

During Sunday's address to the nation, President Obama went to bat for Islam, as he so often does. It matters not when, where, or how he defends it. His compulsion to advocate for the ideology he so adores is relentless. If he shills for Islam immediately following an Islamic terror attack, no problem. Perhaps he even enjoys it, like poking his finger in our eye. His sickness knows no bounds. And so, among other things, Sunday he said: ISIL does not speak for Islam. They're thugs and killers, part of a cult of death. And they account for a tiny...

One of the biggest mistakes in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism is to blame only Islamic State (ISIS) when it is, in fact, part of a much broader movement and more than one organization. Regardless of the specific motives behind the timing of the killing spree in San Bernardino that killed 14 people, this horrific massacre was a clear-cut act of radical Islamic terror. Not surprising, at the UN climate summit in Paris, a baffled Barack Obama said that the San Bernardino massacre motive is a mystery - then uses the tragedy to push for gun control and declare "climate...

Reporters were “storming into the apartment of the San Bernardino terrorists, less than 48 hours after the [jihad] attack [there],” writes Joel Pollack of Breitbart. The Federal Bureau of Investigation “handed the apartment back over to the landlord, who let the media in with a crowbar.” To many Americans, this decision—on the part of our Executive—demonstrates a lack of competence. It was not. Pollack knows this. “While the journalists’ behavior was disturbing,” he writes, “it fit a pattern: the Obama administration is careless about, or is reluctant to find, evidence of terrorism.” It would have seemed incredible only a few...

US moved carriers into the region to prevent Israeli craft from attacking suspected Iranian nuclear plant. In an explosive report we learn that ever since 2012, the United States has been spying on Israel in order to prevent the Jewish State from attacking suspected Iranian nuclear sites, according to Friday's Wall Street Journal. The White House had sent an additional aircraft carrier to the region after learning that Israeli aircraft had flown into Iranian airspace in what U.S. officials feared was a test run for an attack on Iran's Fordow plant. The carriers had attack aircraft on board prepared to...

The Christian Orthodox Church, which holds an important place in an insurgent Russia, has described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi opposition groups in Syria as a “holy war.”According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department: The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the...

The presidential election of 2008 seems so long ago. When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, he and his legions of supporters at the time assured us that if only we would elect him, the first black American president with an Islamic-sounding name, that “the world” would love us once more (as if those against whom we were fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq ever loved us to begin with. If only Barack Hussein Obama would become the 44th president of the United States, the murderous hatred of Islamic militants for America (and her allies) would all but...