Free Republic

The victim of a violent gang rape has been sentenced by a Saudi Arabian court to 200 lashes and six months in jail for the crimes of speaking to the press and indecency. According to Sharia Law, a Saudi Arabian woman must be accompanied by a male guardian at all times in public, something the 19 year old victim did not obey when she went to meet a friend, according to website Live Buddhism. While in a car with a student friend, retrieving a picture, two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area. She said...

Militants fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq have released gruesome new images of alleged thieves having their hands hacked off in front of crowds bloodthirsty onlookers. The photographs were taken in ISIS stronghold Mosul and show in gruesome detail how the terrorists pump their victims full of drugs before using a massive meat cleaver to cut off the hands. Hundreds of people are seen lining the streets of the oil-rich city to get a better view of the barbaric act, which is carried out by several masked militants led by a white-bearded elderly man named Abu Ansar al-Ansari, who...

(CNSNews.com) – Iranian American Lisa Daftari, an investigative journalist and contributor to Fox News, said on Friday that Sharia law is being followed by practitioners of radical Islam right here in the United States, even if many Americans think of the human rights abuses towards women by these practitioners as something that only takes place in the Middle East and Africa. “And some might ask why should Americans care about what goes on in those countries?” asked Daftar, whose family fled Iran during the 1979 revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and established an Islamic state in the country. “How...

An ISIS e-book on how to accomplish their caliphate goal of sacking Rome stresses enlisting “the Islamic State’s secret weapon = secret white converts” to take on Italy.Much of the book, “Black Flags from Rome,” is dedicated to laying out a case for why Muslims in Europe should rise up and assist ISIS from within, citing justifications for discontent from modern-day anti-immigration protests back to post-Ottoman creation of Muslim “ghettos.”The Rome title is one of a series disseminated online that includes Khorasan, Syria, Arabia and Persia, with a forthcoming “Black Flags from Palestine” title promised.It uses graphics from Pew...

In his much talked about article, “What ISIS Really Wants” in the March issue of The Atlantic, Graeme Wood punctures Western fantasies that the Islamic State is made of psychopathic discontents, or in President Obama’s estimation, al Qaeda’s “JV team.”   Instead, he discovers, they are a formidable force, drawn together by a coherent faith and ideology. Here are our take-aways from Wood’s 10,000 word article.   According to Wood: 1. ISIS and al-Qaeda are not one and the same. ISIS has eclipsed al-Qaeda and views its leaders as apostates. We have made a mistake in not realizing the difference...

Female members of Saudi Arabia's advisory Shura Council attend a session (AFP) Saudi Arabia’s consultative assembly has passed a law requiring female television to wear “modest dress”, according to local media reports. Arab News, which is part of a group of companies owned by King Salman's son Prince Turki, said the law passed in the Shura Council, an advisory body, will make it mandatory for women not to “show off their beauty” while on air. The law will come into force once approved by the country's cabinet and will apply to “women media workers in the Kingdom” including on the...

The latest issue of ISIS’ magazine, Dabiq, devotes an article to defending the murder of a Jordanian pilot by burning him alive in a cage. Contrary to claims that such punishment is “un-Islamic,” ISIS lays out the case that it is in keeping with Islamic law.

A clear trend emerges when President Obama discusses religion. When discussing Islam, it is within the sole context of a “peaceful religion.” When discussing other religions, it is within the context of their once having fostered hatred and violence, as he said at the National Prayer Breakfast and the Summit to Counter Violent Extremism (SCVE).

The graffiti on a building in Belgium says it all: "Welcome to 'Belgistan." In fact, some are now calling it the Muslim capital of Europe.

American and European citizens and journalists are spurring jihadi violence by protesting the arrival of Muslim populations into their societies, President Barack Obama declared Thursday. “We’ve also seen, most recently in Europe, a rise in inexcusable acts of anti-Semitism, or in some cases, anti-Muslim sentiment or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama told a Feb. 19 audience of U.S. and foreign officials and advocates, who met to discuss ways to minimize jihadi violence. Peaceful criticism of Islamic culture is bad, he suggested. ”When people spew hatred toward others — because of their faith or because they’re immigrants — it feeds into terrorist narratives....

A Muslim prayer was recited at the start of the second day of the White House summit on “Countering Violent Extremism,” but no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press. Imam Sheikh Sa'ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, Minn., recited a “verse from the Quran” following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress. “In translation those verses of the Quran mean ‘Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land, it’s as if he has slain mankind...

ihad Enclaves: With names like Islamberg and Mahmoudberg, some 22 of what the FBI calls "enclaves" have been established across the U.S. by a group linked to a Pakistani militant group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra. The specter of 21 Christians being murdered "on the shores of Tripoli" in Libya where U.S. Marines first encountered Muslim forces — the Barbary pirates — and threats by the Islamic State against Rome show how President Obama's "JV team" has metastasized as a global threat. And, yes, it can happen here. The Islamic State is encouraging attacks on infidels in the West like the one...

Can better urban planning help prevent terrorist attacks? The idea sounds fanciful, even disrespectful to victims of extremist violence. But officials in Paris, still reeling from last month’s deadly terrorist attacks on a satirical magazine and a kosher deli, are putting some hope in a plan to re-zone the city and annex the notorious inner suburbs, or banlieues, where the terror plot was born. In what would be perhaps the greatest redesign of Paris since Baron Haussmann laid out its famed boulevards in the mid-19th Century, the “Métropole du Grand Paris” would attempt to bring the poor, heavily immigrant neighborhoods...

ISIS in Libya have released pictures of armed fighters burning musical instruments as the extremist group continues its propaganda assault in the north African country. Pictures of the heavily armed masked militants watching while a pile of drums burnt in the Libyan desert were released earlier today - purportedly by the 'media wing' of the local group. It is understood the brightly coloured instruments had been confiscated by the religious police, and were destroyed near the port city of Derna, in eastern Libya. A message released with the pictures explains: 'Hesbah seized these un-Islamic musical instruments in the state of...

VATICAN CITY — “African values are not on sale,” the new Chairman of Communications for the African bishops has said. But Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of Oyo, Nigeria, is convinced they are under threat from what Pope Francis has called an “ideological colonization” that is seeking to destroy the family. It's so bad, he says, that the United States has made clear it will not help Nigeria fight the Boko Haram terror group unless the country modify its laws regarding homosexuality, family planning and birth-control.

"What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as...

A shul security guard was shot and killed in Copenhagen while a bas mitzvah was taking place inside. At least three policemen were injured by gunfire. The attack occurred shortly after midnight on motzei Shabbos Parshas Mishpatim. The Israel Foreign Ministry named the Jewish victim as Dan Uzan, 37, whose father is Israeli and mother is Danish. He was a volunteer guard at the shul. Police believe the same person perpetrated both attack, referring to the earlier shooting in the Arts Café in which one person were killed and three policemen wounded. The earlier hosted in the Arts Café was...

Mr Tawfiq said: "It's not that I went looking for Islam. Islam came looking for me. "I loved my former life and my work, but now I've found a peace that I never knew before." Mr Tawfiq explained that he made the decision to leave the priesthood when he realised how lonely he was. "I left my job, but not the Catholic religion," he said. "I had no intention of changing my faith. That wasn't part of the plan at all." "My Christian faith slid away slowly and Islam became more and more important. "I play down my Catholic priesthood,...

It appears that Islam Web, a popular website owned by Qatar’s Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, may have been responsible for the rationale used by the Islamic State to burn alive a Jordanian pilot captive. On February 7, 2006, the widely accessed Arabic website issued Fatwa No. 71480, titled “The Burning of Ias bin Abdul Yalil by Abu Bakr.” The fatwa, or Islamic decree, concluded that burning people as a form of punishment is permissible. Ironically, hours after the Islamic State burned the pilot alive, Fatwa No. 71480 was removed from Islam Web. What is interesting to note is...

Anjem Choudary, A London-based Islamic cleric who lectures on Sharia law, says that it was acceptable to Islam to burn the Jordanian pilot alive. "If you want to look at this from an Islamic perspective, what they are arguing is that it is qisas, in other words, reciprocation. "The fact is that the pilots — not just this Jordanian one but many others via drones and other bombing campaigns — have burned a lot of men, women, and children, and indiscriminately. "Obviously we don't see the pictures or images of those because they're not available, but hundreds of thousands of...