Free Republic

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The FBI has launched an inquiry into the activities of a grocery store owner who is allegedly the U.S. leader of a radical Islamic group banned in parts of Europe and the Middle East, authorities said. Iyad Hilal, an Islamic author and philosopher who owns an Orange County market, hasn't drawn much attention to his writings or his role in the group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which means Party of Liberation. But since the July 7 bombings in London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has suggested banning the group there. Hilal is apparently not suspected of any terrorist...

Facts are stubborn things - except when you create your own. When I was asked about the "Jenin Massacre" by a Muslim student during an event at Norfolk's Old Dominion this week, it became clear we were coming from two very different perspectives: reality vs. mythology. There was no "Jenin Massacre." Period. The only "massacre" that took place at Jenin was that of the truth. Palestinians, long masters of media manipulation, went by the hundreds to foreign media - whom Israel kept outside of the armed conflict - to claim that over 500 innocents had been slaughtered. The man at...

Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), represents himself and his organization as stalwart opponents of terrorism who are actively working with the FBI and California law enforcement agencies to combat it. At a joint press conference with representatives of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department on October 14 of this year, Marayati waxed expansive and almost poetic in his glowing account of his organization’s cooperation with law enforcement agencies in the war against terrorism. MPAC has announced a “National Anti-Terrorism Campaign,” and is holding its 4th annual conference (see its poster here)...