Free Republic

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...

A State Department official closely involved in the Obama administration’s Iran push has been promoting publications from anti-Semitic conspiracy sites and other radical websites that demonize American Jewish groups and Israel, according to sources and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.Alan Eyre, the State Department’s Persian-language spokesman and a member of the negotiating delegation that struck a nuclear deal with Iran earlier this year, has in recent months disseminated articles that linked American-Jewish skeptics of the deal to shadowy financial networks, sought to soften the image of Iranian terrorists with American blood on their hands, and linked deal criticism...

A pair of activists in the state of Washington are promoting an anti-Israel curriculum that high school social studies teachers are considering adopting. Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, have developed “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Bevis gave a presentation on it in October at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies annual meeting, Edward Alexander reported in The Weekly Standard on November 10, 2014. “In 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza from Egypt and Jordan,” the “Teaching Trunk curriculum reads. “Israel instituted a military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank—which...

How Russia could strangle the US space program Jean MacKenzie If you use a cellphone, have a GPS system in your car, or get cash from ATMs, you should be worried. BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — Think Russia has no way to put pressure on the United States? Think again. The US relies heavily on Russia to furnish the engines that power rockets that deliver both military and civil payloads into space. This includes GPS systems in cars and cellphones, and even systems that allow ATMs to function. Weather satellites are launched into space via Russian-powered rockets, and military systems such...

...[Ma]ny observers across the political spectrum argue that there’s no coherent American Middle East policy at all....[C]olumnist Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama is simply presiding over a decline in American influence, while Democratic[s]...like Sen. Robert Menendez apparently can’t make heads or tails of the White House’s Iran policy. If sanctions got the Iranians to the negotiating table...then why is the White House fighting against a further round of sanctions that would give Washington more leverage? Because it’s part of the Administration’s grand strategy. As Obama explained to David Remnick in a recent New Yorker interview, the goal is to create...

What do Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the Iranian parliament have in common? Both are obsessed with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a bipartisan think tank in Washington that we’re proud to call our neighbor. Walt and the Iranians, on the other hand, both see FDD as a pillar of​—​you guessed it​—​the “Israel lobby.” -excerpt- Well, it’s one thing for Iranian officials to think like members of an obscurantist clerical regime, but it’s something else again when a Harvard professor holds hands with them, analytically speaking. In a recent post at FP.com, Foreign Policy magazine’s blog, Stephen Walt claims that...

And so I repeat my challenges to Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. I challenge them to tell us which arguments are new and have not previously been made on hate sites and in anti-Israel screeds. What new evidence has been gathered? Why are there so many factual errors, all cutting against Israel? Why didn’t they present important counterfacts or address any counterarguments? Walt and Mearsheimer repeatedly claim that they have written their paper, at least in part, in order to stimulate dialogue concerning the influence of the Lobby. They claim that it is the pro-Israel side that seeks to suppress...