Free Republic

We are in the middle of a hot war in the Middle East, with constant terror attacks all over the world, including the United States, Europe, and Asia. The enemy is called violent Islam, or radical Islam, or fascist Islam, or reactionary Islam, or merely "orthodox Islam." We constantly waste time quibbling about the name. But we know the enemy by now. (And yes, there are plenty of Muslims who want peace, but who are too scared to speak out, with some brave exceptions I mention below. As long as the West colludes with violent Islam, peaceful Muslims will be...

Who knew Obama was so budget-conscious? You wouldn’t think it with his latest $4 trillion budget, but he’s actually pinching pennies here.Just think, every missile that takes out a terrorist is a lawyer that can’t be hired for the EPA. Every time we bomb an ISIS camp, that’s money that can’t be used for an environmental review. Every apology for a dead Jihadist is money that can’t be used to study the drinking habits of overweight lesbians.(Not a joke. It costs $1.5 million to study why lesbians are fat and $2.7 million to study why they drink too much.)Obama wants...

It’s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for “modernizing Islam.” But most of his catalogue of Christian violence...

After six years, it is no surprise that the Obama administration does not see the Taliban as “terrorists” or that it will not associate “violent extremism” with radical Islam or just Islam. After all, when Maj. Hasan murdered U.S. soldiers it was nothing more than “workplace violence,” as if he were a disgruntled post office employee of the 1970s. Our two top intelligence chiefs assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular” and that jihad “was a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Add in “workplace violence” and the old “overseas contingency operations.” Do we remember that Ms. Napolitano’s Department of...

It’s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for “modernizing Islam.” But most of his catalogue of Christian violence...

Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” President Barack Obama “rejected the notion” that the war on terrorism is any kind of “religious war” against radical Islam. Obama said, “I think that the way to understand this is, there is an element growing out of Muslim communities, in certain parts of the world, that have perverted the religion, have embraced an annihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam.

Criticized for avoiding the phrase “Islamic extremism,” President Obama said he doesn’t want to alienate the majority of peace-loving Muslims as the U.S. fights to defeat terrorist networks around the world. “I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for: order, peace, prosperity,” Mr. Obama said on CNN. “And so I don’t quibble with labels.” The president also said he doesn’t want to “overinflate” the importance of terrorist groups by sending U.S. troops...

Pundits agonize over President Obama’s resistance to calling Islamist terror “Islamist terror.” How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence? How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they—secularized Christians and non-observant Jews—know Islam’s character better than Muslims themselves? It’s easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations. In the mid-20th century, leftists, bereft of God and desperate for a new faith, insisted...

Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems. But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side? It can’t be beheading people in public. Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised...

Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) was on “The Kelly File” tonight following his testimony about terrorism at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. […] “Radical Islam has increased four-fold in five years,” Keane told Megyn Kelly. […] “This administration has been paralyzed by the fear of adverse consequences in the Middle East driven by the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Keane told Kelly. …

Taunting of Muslims a form of fanaticism The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has published yet another new cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad (Page 8A, Jan. 18). Supposedly, the purpose is to taunt the so-called Muslim fanatics and to show that the sacred right of free expression will not be compromised. These cartoonists are going overboard. They know that every time a cartoon about the Prophet Muhammad is published, the feelings of more than a billion Muslims are hurt, there are protest demonstrations all over the Muslim world, some fanatics resort to violence, almost always some human lives are lost, and...

Ever since the savage attacks in France, our pencil-waving, cartoon-pixelating media and Islamic theologian body politic have gone on an Islamic charm offensive. In the face of 24,935 jihadist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, we are told over and over again that Islam, one of the world’s great religions, is peaceful and merely being distorted by misunderstanding violent extremists with no particular ideology. Whether or not you believe this, in spite of Islam’s supremacist goals and history, Koran-endorsed strategic lying and deception by way of taqiyya, the totalitarian theopolitical doctrine of Shariah that compels the systematic persecution of women, gays...

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” when asked why the administration is refusing to use the term “radical Islam,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said, “Lets be clear nobody denies these are Muslims.

Since at least the time of the outset of the Iraq War—and quite possibly well before then—there has been much debate among those to the right over why Islamic militants have set their sights upon America and the West. George W. Bush expressed the consensus among most Republican politicians and commentators when he remarked that they hate us because of our values. Ron Paul, in contrast, represents most libertarians when he attributes to America’s enemies a hatred of, not American liberties, but American foreign policy. Both groups are both right and wrong. For failing to see this, they argue past...

A widely distributed political cartoon by Ranan Lurie, published after the massacre of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, depicts a tiny shrub above ground, and just below the surface, supporting the plant, is a web of thick twisted roots spread in the design of the swastika. These Nazi roots are more than a cartoonist's imagination, carefully tended by the anti-Semites of France, exposed when the French rounded up their Jews, men, women and children, and shipped them to the death camps of World War II. If the cartoonist had dug deeper, he could have drawn the roots...

With a degree from the prestigious HEC Paris business school, five years at a global consulting firm, and a three-floor “dream apartment” in the French capital’s 10th arrondissement, Mickael Nadjar had a comfortable and prosperous life in his native France. Four years ago, he left it all behind and headed for Tel Aviv. While he initially came to lead a business project in Israel, Nadjar ended up staying because he was tired of the daily frustrations and slights endured by practicing Jews in France. After the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket this month, Nadjar says,...

Violent extremists killing children and others in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and other parts of the world may cite Islam as a justification, but the West should be careful about calling them Islamic radicals, Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience of opinion leaders Friday at the World Economic Forum. In a speech calling for a global effort against violent extremism, Kerry said it would be a mistake to link Islam to criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking and other factors. 'We have to keep our heads,' Kerry said, according to the Associate Press. 'The biggest error we could...

Why Obama goes into metaphoric pretzel mode all to avoid calling the scourge of the day what it undeniably is: Radical Islamic Terrorism What’s in a name? Everything when power is your game. That’s why Barry Soetoro (Barack Obama) and Warren Wilhelm Jr., New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio changed theirs. Barack Obama sounds much more exotic than plain old, plebe-like Barry Soetoro. Bill de Blasio is a name that goes so much further to impart the image of being “one of the guys” than does Warren Wilhelm. Both Obama and de Blasio know the power in a name;...

A few years ago, Robert Reilly wrote a book that may offer the key to understanding the advance of Islamic terror against the West: The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. At the heart of Reilly’s book is his argument that the “denigration of dialogue is due to the demotion of reason that took place in the ninth-century struggle between the rationalist theologians, the Mu’tazilites and their anti-rationalist theologians, the Ash’arites. Unfortunately, for those who prefer dialogue, the Ash’arites won.” “The Ash’arites’ position was that reason is so infected by men’s self-interest...

The famed French weekly Charlie Hebdo has continued to draw a somewhat contradictory reaction across the Muslim world. Many Muslims have expressed disgust at the deadly assault on the magazine’s Paris office by Islamic extremists who killed 12 people. However, many also remain deeply offended by the magazine’s record of publishing cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. Those passions were further inflamed this week when the magazine’s first issue following the attack carried a cover cartoon depicting Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign. According to mainstream Islamic tradition, any physical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad—even a respectful one—is considered blasphemous....