Free Republic

The laws of several western countries, besides the Islamic ones themselves, do not permit anything critical to be said of Islam. Such laws forbid what is called "hate speech." They often include other sub-groups like homosexuals, women, or race. Such laws and customs have practically reduced responsible freedom of speech to a dead letter. Fines and jail sentences are meted out if such laws are violated. Such laws are generally based on a civil peace idea rooted in Thomas Hobbes. That is, violence is caused by religious and philosophical controversy. The only way to prevent it is by a civil...

Islamic attitudes toward non-Muslims are determined by many factors of which two are most necessary to consider. The first is Jihad or Holy War. The second is the concept of Dar Al Harb (Arabic for "House of War") and Dar Al Islam ("House of Submission") in Islamic tradition. "House of War" refers to any territory or people who are not living in submission to Islam. "House of Submission," or Dar Al Islam, refers to any territory or people living in submission to the message of Muhammad. The concept of Jihad (Arabic for Struggle) has been given two interpretations, which...

According to experts, the fundamentalist jihadists who carry out murderous attacks are Muslims whose beliefs are rooted partly in longstanding Islamic teachings. ROME - President Barack Obama refrained from describing Nov. 13's Paris attacks as "Islamic terrorism" or even radical Islamic terrorism, continuing his policy of distancing such atrocities from the religion. But that nonetheless leaves open the question: How Islamic are Islamic terrorists? To equate the attacks with "views of Islam" creates "stereotypes" that are "counterproductive" and "wrong," Obama told reporters at the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey, Nov. 16. "They will lead, I think, to greater recruitment into...

Najaf (Iraq) (AFP) - A top leader of Iraq's Popular Mobilisation paramilitary organisation said Monday that Baghdad had turned to Russia because the US-led coalition was not serious about fighting the Islamic State group. A spokesman for the US-led coalition retorted that it had spent $2.3 billion to train and equip Iraqi forces over the past year. "To this day, we have not seen a really serious effort to fight Daesh," Hadi al-Ameri said in the holy city of Najaf, using an Arab acronym for the jihadist organisation. "There are some who try to contain Daesh but not really eliminate...

Saturday's Washington Post had an article which quotes the usual unnamed intelligence sources saying that they are surprised to discover that al Qaeda has "reconstituted" itself. This surprise derives from, inter alia, the computer data found recently in Pakistan, intelligence sources (both ours and friends'), and simply looking at the range of activities in which the terrorists engage. This surprise is, as usual, unsettling, since it has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since...

A prisoner in Saudi Arabia, who was sentenced to death as a child, faces "death by crucifixion" after a final appeal has been dismissed. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested on 14 February 2012 when he was just 17, during a crackdown on anti-government protests in the Shiite province of Qatif. He was accused by the authorities of participation in illegal protests and of firearms offences, despite there being no evidence to justify the latter charge. Ali was initially held at a juvenile offenders facility, where he was denied access to lawyers. Evidence indicates that he was tortured and forced to...

After perilous sea voyages from neighboring Turkey, they have been stranded here for days, some for nearly two weeks, running out of money and desperate to get to mainland Greece and continue their route. The island of some 100,000 residents has been transformed by the sudden new population of some 20,000 refugees and migrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — and the strain is pushing everyone to the limit. ... "Why, man? Why?" one municipality worker, pointing to bottles in the sea, yelled at some young Iraqis sitting by the water throwing bread to fish. ... It doesn't help...

A travel warning for Iraq, updated by the State Department on Monday, continues to warn that “anti-U.S.” Shi’ite militias “may present a threat to U.S. citizens,” naming two groups that are playing a leading role in supporting the Iraqi government’s military campaign against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL). The two Iran-backed groups, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asaib al-Haq (“League of the Righteous”), are at the heart of the Popular Mobilization Forces, set up last year to help Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government fight the Sunni jihadists of ISIS. Although those groups and U.S. armed forces are both supporting Prime Minister Haider...

The media began its speculation as to why resident Barack Obama appeared to snub Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on a park bench at the G-7 summit. The answer to the question might have much to do with Haider al-Abadi who is running Iraq as a state of militia gangs presenting seven thousand Sunnis for mass execution on the altar of sacrifice for political gain with Iran. .... The disintegration of the Iraqi army being at least three years away from being fully retrained and reassembled, according to the Pentagon and now that Iran calls the shots on who lives...

Many of his foreign fighters come from Afghanistan -- men like Murad, who is now being held in Aleppo as a prisoner-of-war... All he had wanted was an Iranian residence permit, he says... he found himself fighting as a mercenary in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Bashar Assad regime... When a violent explosion caused the house he was in to collapse, he found himself thinking about his daughters, he says. "I screamed and thought I was suffocating. And then, everything around me was quiet." Men arrived and pulled Murad, who was still screaming, out of the...

Iraqi state television is reporting the country's prime minister has ordered security forces not to abandon their positions in Anbar province to the Islamic State group. The order Sunday by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi came as some Iraqi forces retreated from Ramadi, the provincial capital. It wasn't clear whether Iraq still maintained any control of the city, which the Islamic State group seized much of in recent days. Already Sunday, coordinated suicide bomb attacks targeted Iraqi forces in Ramadi. Some Iraqi forces apparently left behind their weapons and vehicles. Earlier, al-Abadi ordered Shiite militias to prepare for going into the...

On Monday, Israeli officials reported that Iran has upped its delivery of weapons to the Lebanese Shiite terror group Hezbollah in the past few weeks. Channel 2 stated that the shipments have been made to both Lebanon and the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. In addition, the report stated that Iran was sending weapons to Hamas chiefs in Gaza and arming Hamas members in Judea and Samaria. Channel 2 asserted that the ease in sanctions on Iran from the present nuclear negotiations would allow it to spend “billions of dollars” shipping weapons to Israel’s enemies. The increase in Iranian...

NEW YORK, USA (UPI): Relatives and friends said the four men arrested in an alleged plot to bomb jet fuel tanks at Kennedy International Airport in New York were wrongly accused. "The man is no extremist," Rudy Thorne, a lifelong friend of Abdel Nur in Guyana told the Friday's Miami Herald. Another suspect, Kareem Ibrahim, told a friend in Trinidad that his Shiite branch of Islam meant peace, not overthrowing governments, Wendell Eversley, the friend, told the newspaper. The Herald said the four suspects -- Nur, Ibrahim, Abdul Kadir, and Russell Defreitas -- are black converts to Islam and three...

We talked before about whether Obama is a Sunni or Shiite Muslim. Recent revelations about Obama's father being a Shiite Muslim. Obama hired Valerie Jarrett.. an Iranian operative to run his Administration. Now he's essentially given the green light for Iran to make nuclear weapons. Obama used the Sunni group ISIS to knock out dictators. Once they are in power.. Shiite groups, which outnumber them, will wipe them out and fill the power vacuum. And today he says he would like to visit Iran before the end of his Presidency. The cat's out of the bag folks. The US has...

Airstrikes by Saudi Arabia against Iran-backed Shiite rebels in turbulent Yemen have added a regional dimension to the conflict in the Arab world’s poorest country. Five reasons why the world should care about what is happening there: Yemen is home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which Washington has viewed as the most lethal branch of the global network founded by Osama bin Laden. AQAP has been linked to several attempted attacks on the U.S., including the underwear bomb plot of December 2009, and it claimed the January killings at the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie...

Yemen's crisis is getting worse and then some. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have started bombing rebel positions inside Yemen. The Sunni Kingdom added that it would do "anything necessary" to deter the Iran-backed Shiite rebels who are taking over Yemen and trying to oust US-backed President Abd Rabbah Mansur Hadi. A Saudi source told Reuters that ground troops might be needed in Yemen to "restore order." Saudi Arabia is reportedly contributing as many as 150,000 troops and 100 warplanes to the campaign against the Houthis.

During a recent TV debate on the destruction of antiquities by ISIS, Syrian political analyst Yahya Badr said that the Egyptian people was entitled to claim legal rights in Australia, since inscriptions in ancient hieroglyphics had been found near Sydney, indicating that the grandson of a pharoah had landed there. On the show, which aired on the Turkish TRT TV channel on March 6, 2015, Badr was introduced as owning the patent to mummy technology. Following are excerpts: TV host: Let's discuss the destruction of antiquities. Yahya Badr: This is a crime, because antiquities constitute documentation, which preserves the [legal]...

A television network owned by Yemen's Shiite rebels says a total of 137 people were killed and 345 injured in quadruple suicide bombings that hit a pair of mosques controlled by the rebels in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Al-Masirah TV raised the death toll on Friday hours after the attacks, making it the deadliest violence to hit the fragile war-torn country.

Wearing a camouflage uniform with militia patches and a green headband, Nawar Mohammed is the image of an Iraqi Shiite fighter except for one detail: he is Sunni. Mohammed is one of some 250 Sunni residents of Al-Alam who joined Asaib Ahl al-Haq, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia with a fearsome reputation for kidnappings and killings targeting their community, to battle the Islamic State group after it seized their town. It would once have been all but unthinkable for a member of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority to join a Shiite militia, but opposition to ISIS, which overran large areas north and...

All this, ISIS (Sunni) vs Iraq (Iran-Shiite) mortal enemies from Islam's earliest days have fought this same battle for centuries. The enmity for each other is so intense, they consider each other more abominable than Jews. As an illustration, Iran announced that the first order of business once their nuclear aspirations have been realized was to nuke Saudi Arabia's oil fields, their number one Sunni arch enemy. Notice, Israel is not their first target. The 'Law of Unintended Consequences' is an unforgiving maiden .George Bush was warned of the genocidal miasma to come if he dared remove Saddam from power....