Free Republic

Obama’s “most trusted ally” and “favorite friend” on the world stage. Erdogan, devout Muslim ... famously said, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers….” Now he is showing how disastrous it is for his “friend” Obama to be relying on him to take action against the Islamic State. In a stunning speech, Erdogan railed against Western “spies” and journalists and seemed to endorse the ISIS plan to redraw the region’s borders. Turkish President took on the iconic Lawrence of Arabia Monday in a furious anti-Western diatribe. The Turkish president...

Britain’s House of Commons votes 274-12 in favor of symbolic motion that stands as initial stage of UK recognition of a Palestinian state.

Last Tuesday 7 October counter-terrorism officers and armed police have arrested four jihadists plotting a "significant" terror attack in London, and are still interrogating them. One line of enquiry is that the group was plotting a Mumbai-style gun attack in the capital. Scotland Yard and the MI5 suspect that the plot was linked to the Islamic State, the first plot directly inspired by the IS. At least one of the four men in their early 20s arrested had recently returned to Britain from Syria. The police are convinced we are in a more intense phase of Islamic terrorism, increased...

Some six weeks before the conclusion of crucial nuclear talks between P5+1 world powers and Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a Twitter feed he is believed to operate, posted a graphic laying out 11 non-negotiable “red lines,” beyond which his country’s negotiators would, presumably, not budge. “During the past year, Ayatollah Khamenei, in line with his support for the Iranian negotiators, has also stressed on the Iranian nation’s rights and has called it necessary to observe the red lines in the course of the nuclear talks,” the infographic, which was posted on Sunday, said. The talks with the P5+1 include...

The Book of Genesis is foundational to all of the Revelation of God to man. It is a succinct theological account of the earth and man’s beginnings. It is by no means exhaustive. Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters, for example, but Genesis focuses on the story of Cain and Abel. Every account in Genesis was hand-picked by the Holy Spirit because it offers the fundamental understanding of some aspect of either the fall or the salvation of humanity. Ironically, though Genesis is an account of the beginnings, it is also full of eschatology, the beginning corresponds to...

NORFOLK--Fourteen years after al Qaida suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole, shipmates, friends and families of the fallen sailors will come together to remember. A private ceremony is planned Sunday at Naval Station Norfolk. It was October, 12, 2000, when the guided missile destroyer was refueling at the Port of Aden, Yemen, when terrorists blew a 40 x 40-foot hole in the ship's hull, killing 17 crew members. Former Cole sailor Anthony VanCampen served as ship's bugler then. He plans to play "Taps" at this weekend's memorial service. "The biggest thing for me is that somebody has to tell the...

The teenage girls who abandoned their families in Austria to become jihadis for ISIS feel they're made a terrible mistake by joining the barbaric lifestyle and they want to come home.

With Washington pressure rising, secretary of state heads to Vienna next week as target date for agreement on curbing Tehran atomic program nears America’s top diplomat is plunging back into Iranian nuclear talks, keeping one eye on the longtime US adversary and the other on political developments at home, as pressure rises in Washington for a deal ensuring the Islamic Republic cannot become a nuclear state. The prospect of a Republican takeover of the Senate means Secretary of State John Kerry will be on a tight leash with a late-November deadline approaching for an agreement. Kerry, European Union negotiator Catherine...

Jen Psaki says Biden was 'running point on Iraq' in apparent attempt to shift blame from Obama for ISIS debacle. At the daily State Department briefing on Friday, the blame-game over the Obama policy catastrophes of Iraq and Syria seems to have gone super-nova, when Jen Psaki, the State Department Spokesperson, appeared to insulate President Barack Obama, and directly indict Vice President Joe Biden over the debacle, by claiming the 2009-2011 Iraq total withdrawal “was the Vice President’s portfolio.” In a peppery questioning of Spokesperson Psaki by a reporter, the reporter constantly interjected “So it’s his [Biden’s] fault,” and Psaki...

Yep, that's definitely it. The railgun, hailed as the future of the United States Navy, sounds exactly like this. No joking here at all.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday used his annual message to Hajj pilgrims heading to Mecca to insult Israel and call for its "annihilation." The speech comes ahead of Eid al-Adha on Friday, the Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham's "sacrifice of Ishmael" in an appropriation of the original Torah story, and like his speech for Eid al-Fitr in July was replete with unfounded barbs hurled against the Jewish state. "The conspiring enemy is aiming to stoke the fire of a civil strife among Muslims, to misdirect the motivation for resistance and jihad and to secure the Zionist regime and...

An Army intelligence bulletin is warning U.S. military personnel to be vigilant after Islamic State militants called on supporters to scour social media for addresses of their family members – and to “show up [at their homes] and slaughter them."

An armed employee who was trying to shut down water filtration equipment at a northwest suburban water reclamation plant has been taken into custody. 911 callers reported an armed man, possibly with a hostage, trying to shut down equipment just before noon at the Fox River Water Reclamation District at 875 Dana Dr. in Elgin, according to Elgin police. Officers found the man, armed with a handgun, near the building and attempted to negotiate with him, police said. The man refused to surrender and officers used a rubber bullet, similar to a bean bag round, to incapacitate him. The man...

So the five Afghan soldiers who went missing from two separate U.S. military bases are now all accounted for and apparently headed back to their home country. Feel safer now? Don’t. The Pentagon, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security would like this story to be over and done.... Here are my nagging questions about another hushed-up national-security incident the White House would prefer to whitewash: Why were officials so quick to tell the public that these men were not a threat to the public? ... Where exactly were the Afghan soldiers who ditched Quantico found and with whom? ......

What does it take before we're allowed to call domestic Islamic terrorism what it is? When James Foley was beheaded by a Muslim somewhere in the "Levant" the Obama administration called it a "terrorist attack against our country." They called it a "barbaric act."When a woman is beheaded by a Muslim in Oklahoma the Obama administration calls it "workplace violence." It seems that the alleged killer, a convert to Islam, was merely carrying out the dictates of the Quran. Muslims are commanded to fight unbelievers until they are either dead, converted to Islam, or in a permanent state of subjugation...

The US State Department said Monday in a press conference that it disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's assertion during his UN speech on Monday that "ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree." "Obviously, we’ve designated both as terrorist organizations, but ISIL poses a different threat to Western interests and to the United States," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. "And that’s just a fact." Later on in the speech, Netanyahu said that Iran is still a great threat to Israel's existence. He also warned that Iran is not actually willing to give up nuclear weapons but...

The Obama administration looks set to go weak in the knees in life-or-death negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. From the start, the United States and its allies have pressed the mullahs to disable all but about 1,500 of their centrifuges. The logic: With that many machines in operation, should Tehran flip the switch to begin enriching weapons-grade nuclear material, the process of amassing enough uranium for an atom bomb would take a year. Cold comfort, but better than nothing. All the while, Iran has insisted that it needs all 9,400 of its spinning centrifuges, which, of course, ha ha, it...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the UN general assembly on Monday in New York and warned the crowd of the threat of radical militant Islam. He said that the Arab world, for the first time, was beginning to recognize the benefit in aligning themselves with Israel and seeing they have a common enemy. He also said that he is willing to make a "historic compromise" with the Palestinians. The prime minister spoke in his speech of the correlation between Hamas and ISIS, saying the two are "branches from the same poisonous tree." He warned that the escalation of the radical...

Arjen Robben has warned Bayern Munich to prepare psychologically for when they meet CSKA Moscow behind closed doors on Tuesday. The German champions play their Russian counterparts in the UEFA Champions League Group E clash at the Arena Khimki. However, no supporters will be in attendance as CSKA were sanctioned by UEFA in February after fans displayed "a range of racist and far-right symbols" in a Champions League match with Viktoria Plzen last December. The decision has riled Bayern chairman Karl Heinz-Rummenigge, who voiced his frustration that Bayern fans are unable to attend.

[video at link] The mother and sister of Jah'Keem Yisrael, as he refers to himself, suspect in the grisly beheading of a woman in Moore, Oklahoma last week, have released a video via Facebook Sunday responding to the charges against him. "I know what they're saying that he done. But I'm going tell you this. That's not my son." In the video, the women express their regret and sympathy for the victims, their belief that Nolen was raised properly and with respect for God and man, and suggest that "there's two sides to every story" and that, so far only...