Free Republic

(CNSNews.com) – The State Department is committed to meeting President Obama’s goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States this fiscal year, and expects the numbers to “increase exponentially” over the summer, a spokesman said Tuesday. With four months left in FY2016, the administration has admitted 3,566 Syrian refugees as of Tuesday – or 35.6 percent of the 10,000 target number. Although a ways off, achieving the 10,000 goal looks a lot more likely now than it did four months ago, when only 841 had arrived. The State Department set up a special refugee “resettlement surge center” in...

Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Tuesday imposed a siege on the ISIS-held city of Manbij from three directions, after recapturing dozens of villages and farms in the vicinity of the city north of Syria’s Aleppo province. ...Local sources confirmed that a large number of ISIS militants escaped the city using the western exit, and headed to Aleppo.

Billymark's is the most working-class bar in Chelsea, if not all of Manhattan. On a Thursday afternoon in early March, union guys play darts as both TVs air a CBS report on the early days of Syria's fragile cease-fire. A few minutes after five, Guy, 22, and Hristo, 23, walk in and we grab a booth next to a group of day-drunk FIT students. The minute we sit down, it's clear something is different. The two men are vibrating with excitement. "You need a punch?" Guy asks me, as he always does at such meetings. He's asking if I need...

The Six Day War Remembered A reflection on the "what-might-have-beens. " June 7, 2016 Joseph Puder    This May, Israel celebrated its 68th year of independent statehood. On June 5th, Israel commemorated the 49th anniversary of the Six Day War, in which it liberated the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old city, including the Western Wall.  The Etzion Bloc, Jewish property seized by Jordan’s Arab Legion and held for 19 years was also liberated.  The proverbial Israeli “David” of the pre-1967 years has been transformed by the international press and western academia into the post-1967 “Goliath.”  In the process, Israel...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released the deposition transcript of Ambassador Stephen D. Mull, executive secretary of the State Department from June 2010 to October 2012, who suggested that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be issued a State Department BlackBerry, which would protect her identity and would also be subject to FOIA requests. The Mull transcript is available here. Amb. Mull now serves as the State Department’s lead coordinator for Iran nuclear implementation. Amb. Mull’s testimony and other discovery arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that seeks records about the controversial employment status...

Have the Obama White House, the U.S. State Department, and part of the Washington media, press, and TV been engaged in a vast left-wing conspiracy to lie to and deceive the American public about the nuclear deal with Iran? One might think so, since no U.S. official or politician has been held responsible for the tangle of lies, attempt at censorship, and linguistic equivocations on the issue. The great Machiavelli observed that "occasionally, words must veil the facts. But let this happen in a way that no one become aware of it." This seems to have been the objective of...

Two migrants have been arrested today after a migrant camp housed in Düsseldorf’s major international trade fair ground burst into flames. Migrants have been housed in vacant exhibition halls of the colossal trade centre since September 2015, but now hall 18 has been “completely destroyed”, according to statements by fire crews, reports the Rheinische Post.

Jordanian authorities arrested a suspect after an attack on Monday at a Palestinian refugee camp that killed three security officers and two others, state television and an official said. Initial investigations suggested the attack at the intelligence department's office at the Baqaa camp was an "individual and isolated act", Jordanian government spokesman, Mohammad al-Momani, said. He gave no further details. The kingdom, a U.S. ally for decades and with close security ties with Israel, has long been a target of radical Sunni Muslim fundamentalist groups including al Qaeda and Islamic State. King Abdullah has repeatedly warned that the threat from...

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Russia will provide "the most active" air support for Syrian ground troops in and around the city of Aleppo to prevent terrorists from seizing it. We will decide on how our air forces should act, depending on the situation,” Lavrov said in a media conference following talks with his Finnish counterpart. “This will not be a surprise for the Americans.” Al-Nusra Front, an al Qaeda offshoot in Syria, went on an offensive in Aleppo last week. The Russian military blamed the US for stalling Russian airstrikes against the terrorist group’s forces in the region....

As of June 1st, Ghost Squad Hackers – the same group leading #OpIcarus – have launched a series of coordinated attacks against leading members of the corporate mainstream media. Giving credit where credit is due, Tec.mic and Softpedia were the first to report the operation. But their reports only tell a portion of the whole story, we will explain why in a moment. Broadly speaking, the goal of the #OpSilence is to attack all the corrupt major news networks that mislead and censor information from the general public. More specifically, the news agencies who conceal the crimes of Israel, while...

Multiple Syrian and other media outlets are reporting that Alaa Makhlouf-the personal bodyguard to Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad-was killed via a car bomb on Saturday, June 4th by members of the Free Alawite Movement. Syria Mubasher and Baladi appear to have been the first outlets to break the story, citing regime sources and the Free Alawite Movement’s Facebook page respectively. “We’ve killed Alaa Makhlouf, bodyguard to the wife of Bashar the beast,” the group declared coldly on Facebook after the attack. The attack took place in central Damascus. Rumors of a possible assassination against Makhlouf had been circulating for...

It’s been nearly 10 months now that I’ve been closely following Russian military operations in Syria on day-by-day and blow-by-blow basis. I admit I was skeptic right from the start — I expected Russians to indiscriminately bombard civilians in insurgent-held parts of Syria. My standpoint drew criticism not only from many of my readers, but also from most of my colleagues. My contacts who serve as professional military pilots could never imagine their Russian colleagues would do such things as bomb civilians. I’m not the least bit pleased that my worst expectations have become truth. I’m only trying to understand why the...

Syrian troops reach edge of Raqqa, after Russia-backed offensive REUTERS 12:00 AM JUNE 6, 2016 The Syrian army has pushed into Raqqa province, home to the de facto capital of ­Islamic State, after a major Russian-backed offensive against the militants, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday. The offensive is the third big ­assault on the self-proclaimed caliphate in recent days after Iraqi forces attempted to storm Fallujah in central Iraq and a Syrian militia advanced with US support ­towards Manbij in the north, near the Turkish border. The offensives are some of the most aggressive campaigns against Islamic...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu headed to Moscow this morning, for his third visit to the Kremlin in nine months, as Israel-Russia ties continues to burgeon. The meeting is the fourth one between Netanyahu and Russia President Vladimir Putin during the same period, after the pair also met at the sidelines of the recent UN climate change conference in Paris. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has also met with Putin during that time, even cancelling a trip to Australia to visit the Russian leader at the Kremlin. In an illustration of the growing alliance between their two countries, this time Netanyahu is...

Russia's foreign minister said Washington has asked Moscow not to target the al-Qaida's branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, but the U.S. insisted Friday that it only wants Russia to carefully select it targets to avoid hitting civilians and legitimate opposition groups. Sergey Lavrov said that Russia has long insisted that the moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups should leave the areas occupied by Nusra. He said in televised remarks that Russia and the U.S. have engaged in close dialogue on how to secure a cease-fire in Syria, but added that fighting the Islamic State group and Nusra should be a top...

Nearly 50 air strikes hit rebel-held areas in and around the Syrian city of Aleppo on Sunday in some of the heaviest recent raids by Russian and Syrian government aircraft, residents and a monitoring group said. The group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also said an unidentified war plane had crashed in countryside south of Aleppo, in an area where Islamist rebel fighters are battling the Syrian army and Iranian-backed forces. It had no information on what caused the crash. A civil defense worker said at least 32 people were killed in the rebel-held parts of the city during...

Many Lebanese expatriate groups have roundly condemned the Hizbullah, Iran and Syria. Some of them are also calling for Israel to press ahead in its military campaign. The Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council (LCCC), a coalition of organizations in Canada, has released a statement laying out its vision of what measures should be endorsed by the world community at an international conference on the ongoing warfare in Lebanon. The conference is to be held in Rome on Wednesday, pursuant to a recommendation issued by the United Nations Security Council on July 21, 2006. Among the measures the LCCC is recommending are...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that he sees Israel as the victim in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he would “100%” come to its defense if it was attacked in an interview broadcast on Monday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

  Palestine, a Land virtually laid waste with little population  A review of Palestine, before the era of prosperity began with the late nineteenth-century renewal of Jewish land settlement, shows that periodically Palestine was virtually laid waste, and its population suffered acute decline. An enormous swell of Arab population could only have resulted from immigration and in-migration (from Jordan and the West Bank to the coastal area). It is helpful to see the land that was virtually emptied-and why. Dio Cassius, writing at the time, described the ruin of the land beginning with the destruction of Judah: Of their ...

A speech by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, March 4, 2002 I will discuss seven reasons, which I mentioned once before, why Israel is entitled to the land they have and that it should not be a part of the peace process. If this is something that Israel wants to do, it is their business to do it. But anyone who has tried to put the pressure on Israel to do this is wrong. We are going to be hit by skeptics who are going to say we will be attacked because of our support for Israel,...