Free Republic

he post-Manchester analysis festival is under way, with all parties occupying predictable bandwidths. Conservatives are using the concert bombing as evidence of the dangers of insufficient attention to Muslim migrations, while liberals engage in posturing designed to limit the damage to their already flagging reputations on national security. As details dribbled out of yet another jihadist plying his murderous trade in Europe, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) took to CNN Tuesday with his list of concerns. Did they include beefing up American resolve to identify and root out Islamists in America? Was there a call for increased European vigilance? Not so...

President Trump just gave ISIS its new name: Losers. (Short for Evil Losers). If you think that’s no big deal, you’re wrong. It’s a big deal. This is – literally – weapons-grade persuasion from the most powerful Master Persuader of our time. As I have taught you in this blog, President Trump’s clever nicknames for people are not random. They are deeply engineered for visual impact and future confirmation bias. In this case, the visuals will be provided by future terror attacks. That reinforces the “evil” part, obviously. But more importantly, the Losers will be doing nothing but losing on...

“He did talk about Iran. He did talk about the threat of Shia terrorism,” Gorka said of Trump’s remarks. “But he was also explicit — he was talking to a room full of Sunni Arab leaders, and he said that ‘you must drive the terrorists out of your places of worship, out of your community.’” “I think it’s not a fair summation to say that it was of one side, with regard to who the terrorists are,” he said. “The bottom line is, everybody who’s been suffering — in the intelligence community, law enforcement, the military — with years and...

Pope Emeritus Benedict discussed the joint perils posed by radical Islam and radical atheistic secularism in a message he sent to a conference held April 19 in Warsaw, Poland, on the topic of his thinking about the concept of the state... I was greatly moved, grateful and happy to learn that an academic conference on the topic of “The Concept of the State From the Perspective of the Teachings of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI” (Pojęcie Państwa w perspektywie nauczania Kardynała Józefa Ratzingera/Benedykta XVI), attended by the representatives of Poland’s government and Church and organized under the patronage of the...

Should French Jews fear the potential election of Marine Le Pen? Should they leave France if she wins the presidency, per the advice of a leading rabbi? Is she rightly characterized as a “hate” candidate, following in the footsteps of her Holocaust-denying father? And is she right in calling for France’s Jews to make certain sacrifices, since she will ask Muslims to do the same?The short answer is: It’s complicated but clear. Let me explain why.According to Francis Kalifat, president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, Le Pen is a “candidate of hate” and Jews should unite...

Kori Ali Muhammad is suspected of fatally shooting three people in Fresno, California. When the police were taking him into custody, he shouted an all-too-familiar phrase in the world of radical Islam. This is how the Associated Press described what Muhammad said: “Fresno police say suspect in triple slaying told them he hates white people, shouted ‘God is great’ before killings.” There’s just one, glaring problem. The Fresno police chief actually said Muhammad yelled “Allahu Akbar” — not “God is great.” So why would a trusted news organization like Associated Press change what he said but for the connotation? We...

Two men have been arrested in Marseille, southern France, on suspicion off planning an "imminent" terror attack just five days before presidential elections. The two suspects, aged 23 and 29, were arrested on Tuesday morning by intelligence agents and elite anti-terror police in Marseille's 3rd arrondissement. --SNIP-- The police source said the two men appeared to have turned to radical Islam during a term in prison. A search of a rented apartment was underway.

Ronald Reagan's major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke -- exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam. Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation...

Every Islamic extremist act of terror is an opportunity for some radical Islam apologist to remind us how most Muslims did not slaughter any innocent people and how the Islamic faith played absolutely no role in the attack, even if the perpetrators specifically cite their faith as the motive. It is also an opportunity for some clueless individual to invoke the Timothy McVeigh rule. The McVeigh rule is as follows: We must disregard any and all connections between Islam and acts of terror because a man who may or may not have had a Christmas tree in his home as...

The embassy says he wasn't tracked by Saudi security services and didn't have a criminal record there. The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in London says that the Westminster attacker was in the country three times and taught English there. A statement released late Friday says Khalid Masood taught English in Saudi Arabia from November 2005 to November 2006 and again from April 2008 to April 2009.

Discussing the London terrorist attack, Bill Maher and his panel tonight ended up clashing in their views of Islamic terrorism with Maher’s asserting that people can’t say it has “nothing to do with Islam.” ... “Every time some bomb goes off, before it goes off,” Maher said, “somebody yells ‘Allahu Akbar.’ I never hear anybody go ‘Merry Christmas. This one’s for the flying nun.'” ...

A U.S. visa program designed to temporarily admit religious workers from other countries may be letting jihadists into the country, security experts and religious leaders warn. The R visa program is for non-immigrant clerics and religious workers and allows successful applicants to stay in the U.S. for up to five years. They are then allowed to apply for a permanent residency under their R-1 status. But some critics say the visa raises red flags and has long been abused by leaders with extreme views.

Donald Trump’s new national security adviser has told staff at the White House he does not wish to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe the terrorist threat the US faces, according to multiple sources.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser has told his staff that Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion, rejecting a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world. The adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told the staff of the National Security Council on Thursday, in his first “all hands” staff meeting, that the label “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to people who were in the meeting. That is a repudiation of the language regularly used by both...

President Trump has confirmed that retired Lt. General H.R. McMaster is his new choice to be his National Security Adviser. Score one from the swamp. A source that has asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals has informed me that he was present in August 2014 when McMaster was the featured speaker for the President's Lecture Series at National Defense University in Washington, D.C. McMaster addressed an assembly of all the students in the colleges of the National Defense, including the National War College, the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security...

A Maryland-based mosque held a memorial celebration Sunday for an Islamist assassin who was convicted of murdering a Pakistani governor for criticizing the country’s blasphemy laws. The Gulzar E Madina mosque hosted an “Urs” for convicted murderer Mumtaz Qadri, reported Ehsan Rehan of the Rabwah Times, a Pakistan-based news agency. Urs is a traditional death anniversary usually reserved for Sufi saints celebrated by Muslims in South Asia. A Pakistani high court charged Qadri with murder after he killed Salman Taseer, the former governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province. Qadri, who was part of Taseer’s bodyguard, shot him 27 times with an...

Donald Trump took up so bandwidth during the 2016 election cycle that we all paid insufficient attention to the people lurking within his campaign operation who have now moved into key policymaking positions. Foremost among these worrisome characters is White House political strategist Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs employee, Hollywood producer, and Breitbart chairman who appears to be behind much of Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign policy. But you could add oddballs like self-promoting national security “experts” like Sebastian Gorka (who falsely claimed to have been an expert witness at the Boston Marathon bombing trial) and nutcase Islamophobe Frank...

"...While they carried on their endless discussion of the completely tangential list of exactly which countries citizens had their nonexistent “right” to enter the United States curtailed, the administration continued to pursue its clearly defined purpose. That purpose is to focus the full resources of the federal government on the only ideology that threatens the republic at this time." From Reuters: The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters. The program, “Countering Violent Extremism,”...

“A Sinister Perception of Islam Now Steers the White House,” blared a Thursday headline on the front page of the New York Times. Could anyone imagine it running an equivalent headline about Obama’s White House and Christianity — “A Sinister Perception of Catholicism Now Steers the White House”? Later, the paper changed “sinister perception” to “dark view of Islam.” Whether or not leading imams hold a “sinister perception” of the West never figures into the story. Not a single one of their open declarations of jihad is quoted in the article. How Muslims define their own religion is of no...

What are we to make of the glaring contradiction between the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) and the many other verses that call for war, slavery, and death to those who refuse to submit to Islam (9:5, et al)—to say nothing of the militant behavior of the prophet of Allah, Muhammad?  This is the question Stephen M. Kirby examines in his new book, Islam’s Militant Prophet: Muhammad and Forced Conversion to Islam.  Rather than offer speculations or cite nearly 1,400 years of Islamic history that is heavy laden with forced conversions, Kirby answers the question...