Free Republic

MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) visited eastern Jerusalem and the Temple Mount on Thursday with members of the Internal Affairs Committee, where he told Arutz Sheva that he is convinced the wave of terror in the capital will only increase in coming days. “The loss of control over Jerusalem, and by continuation also over Gaza, started on the Temple Mount,” Feiglin said, while at the French Hill gas station that Arab rioters tried to explode on Sunday. Feiglin’s comments come in the wake of the dismantling of a new access ramp to the Temple Mount in a folding to Jordanian pressure,...

IDF forces played a crucial role in helping Irish soldiers rescue UN troops from the clutches of Syrian jihadists in a fierce clash on the border with Israel last week. Senior military sources said that Irish soldiers would have been killed or taken captive if it weren’t for action taken by the IDF on August 30 during a mission to evacuate dozens of Filipino soldiers who were surrounded by a larger force of militants, the Irish Independent reported on Sunday.

The University of Illinois board of trustees on Thursday affirmed its refusal to hire a professor who posted a series of harsh anti-Israel tweets this summer. The professor says the act is part of an effort by “wealthy and well organized groups to attack pro-Palestinian students and faculty.” The case has drawn wide attention on college campuses because it raises the issue of the suppression of academic freedom around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a hot-button topic at universities across the country. Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor with an expertise in indigenous studies, accepted a tenure-track position last year to start working in...

In Defense of Christians President Toufic Baaklini issued the following statement in response to a disruption at the Inaugural Summit Gala Dinner: “As Cardinal Rai so eloquently put it to the attendees of the In Defense of Christians’ inaugural Summit gala dinner: ‘At every wedding, there are a few problems.’ In this case, a few politically motivated opportunists chose to divide a room that for more than 48 hours sought unity in opposing the shared threat of genocide, faced not only by our Christian brothers and sisters, but our Jewish brothers and sisters and people of all other faiths and...

Former President George W. Bush said Thursday that he had a moment of clarity in a Florida elementary school classroom on Sept. 11, 2001, when his chief of staff told him the second World Trade Center tower had been struck by a jetliner and the U.S. was under attack. A young girl was reading aloud at the time, Bush recalled during a paid appearance at a college scholarship luncheon, an event that coincided with the 13th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. He said he realized that morning that his job was to protect the girl, her family and their community....

Late comedienne Joan Rivers was forced to hire a bodyguard in the last weeks of her life after she received death threats in response to pro-Israel comments she made during Operation Protective Edge, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Blaine Trump, a personal friend of the Jewish comic, told the paper that a TMZ report which captured her remarks on the Gaza conflict in late July made Rivers fear for her safety. “When she came out and said Israel had every right to bomb Hamas, the death threats started rolling in,” Trump told the Reporter. …

Sen. Rand Paul said President Barack Obama made “one important point ” in his remarks on Wednesday saying that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was neither Islamic nor a state, but questioned the constitutionality of the president’s strategy. “Ultimately, civilized Islam will have to step up. We need to do everything we can to protect ourselves, I’m all in for saying we have to combat ISIS,” Paul said Wednesday on “Hannity.” “So I think it is important not only for the American public but for the world and for the Islamic world to point out that this...

Hamas’s exiled deputy leader said on Thursday the terrorist group could be forced to negotiate directly with Israel, ahead of planned talks in Cairo to consolidate a truce. But an Israeli minister dismissed any possibility of talking directly with the Islamist movement, whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and glorifies killing Jews as a holy duty. Hamas does not recognize Israel, and is a proscribed terrorist group in Israel as well as many other countries—including the US and EU. As a result, the two sides have never had any direct contact. …

Russia has warned that US air strikes against militants in Syria would be a "gross violation" of international law. A Russian foreign ministry spokesman said any such action, without the backing of the UN, would be "an act of aggression". It comes as US Secretary of State John Kerry meets Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia to try to build a coalition against Islamic State (IS) militants. President Obama has threatened action against IS in Syria as well as Iraq. IS controls large parts of Syria and Iraq after a rapid military advance. In a speech outlining his strategy, Mr Obama...

The hundreds of Germans who have traveled to Syria to join jihadi groups are largely young, male and failed at school and in their careers, according to a report from the security services. The report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which has been seen by the Berliner Morgenpost, showed that of the 378 German Islamists who have headed to Syria since mid-2012 just one in four finished high school. Six percent finished post-school training and two percent went into further education. Almost 90 percent of those who have traveled to Syria are men. The youngest...

Germany is not ruling out military action against Islamic extremists Isis in Syria, following US President Barack Obama’s announcement that airstrikes against the terror group will be expanded into the Middle Eastern country. “I won't rule out [German participation] in these airstrikes,” Philipp Mißfelder, foreign affairs spokesman in the Bundestag for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian-Democratic (CDU) party, said on Thursday morning. […] Germany might also send units to take part in aerial surveillance and allow flights over its territory to and from the conflict zone, Mißfelder said, but added that deployment of ground troops “from the West as a whole”...

Reports surfaced Wednesday night that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was "booed off the stage" at an event hosted by a purportedly Christian organization. Cruz, the keynote speaker at the new "In Defense Of Christians" organization's dinner in Washington DC, had offered the crowd--a number of whom were Christians from the Middle East, including Palestinian Christians--public support for Israel. After doing so, some members of the crowd booed at Cruz, and they persisted until he left the stage, noting their hatred and saying he can't stand with them if they don't stand with Israel.

William Schabas, the Canadian professor who was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to head a commission of inquiry into Israel’s military operations in Gaza, on Wednesday insisted that he is not anti-Israel, despite the many remarks he has made in the past proving the contrary. Speaking to the Arab-language newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, Schabas claimed that “even if Spiderman was heading the probe, they would’ve attacked him.” “I do not hate Israel,” he declared, but also said, “I will put my prior positions aside.” “This is an investigation that is necessary,” Schabas said. “I will not resign.” …

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney -- a longtime journalist before he joined the Obama administration in its infancy -- is back in the media game as a political analyst for CNN. We caught up with Carney on Wednesday, in the hours before President Obama addresses the nation to outline his plan for dismantling ISIS, the brutal terrorist group that's roiling Iraq and Syria. A former White House insider, Carney had insight into how the President and his team are preparing for such a major address. But he also riffed on the state of the news media, the "not...

US President Barack Obama says he has the “legal authority” to order US airstrikes on Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) forces in Syria, according to sources present at a dinner with foreign policy experts at the White House on Monday. Obama “thinks he has the legal authority he needs” to expand action in Iraq and Syria under the War Powers Act, according to Jane Harman, the president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who told the Washington Post about the dinner. Another attendee of the dinner, former undersecretary of defense for policy Michèle Flournoy, told the paper Obama...

He says that “these young people do not see themselves as being part of this [Western] society: they were not brought up to blend in in a positive way.” Whose fault is that? Imams all over Europe preach against assimilation and integration.Then he adds: “There is also some discrimination and indirect persecution against Islam and Muslims that is defined here as ‘Islamophobia.'” And this is why Muslims join the Islamic State, you see — because they are victims of non-Muslim injustice. Here again we see the ever-recurring phenomenon: Islamic supremacists never, ever take responsibility for their own actions, but always...

. Panic in Adamawa’s second-largest town Mubi Boko Haram insurgents appeared to have taken Michika, one of the major towns in the northern part of Adamawa State, yesterday. They entered the town in the morning and took over many places apparently when security personnel reportedly fled on seeing the Boko Haram convoys. Residents who fled the violence said well-armed militants are now patrolling the streets of the town. Some of them are reported to have set up base at the emir’s palace. The attack on Michika came two days after Boko Haram militants captured neighbouring Gulak, headquarters of Madagali Local...

The mosque on Prospect Street is not only Cambridge, Massachusetts,' largest mosque, but it is also the city's only mosque. As many as 1,000 people a week, including immigrants, students, families and residents from surrounding neighborhoods, stop by to pray up to five times a day as Islam requires. Known as the Cambridge mosque, it is run by the Islamic Society of Boston and is just a few short blocks from the well-traveled Red Line, which serves Boston's many universities and colleges. "The mosque is open to everyone," says spokeswoman Nicole Mossalam. "We don't have a core membership. It's very...

Free Syrian Army commanders around Arsal vehemently deny any involvement in recent clashes with the Lebanese security forces, but admit to cooperating with Islamist groups in military operations along the Syrian-Lebanese border. Often at odds on the Syrian battlefields, the FSA, Nusra Front and ISIS have entered a tenuous allegiance of convenience to fight Assad-aligned forces in the badlands surrounding Arsal. “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in ... Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade. “We have reached a point where we have to...

Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a robe and she began wearing a burka.The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer...