Free Republic

Walking U.N. Perhaps Sen. John Kerry does have an advantage after all over President Bush in understanding the complex political issues of the Middle East. New research by Burke's Peerage reveals that Mr. Kerry is the only presidential candidate in U.S. history who has genealogical descent from Muslims, Jews and Christians. "Senator Kerry ... is a virtual walking United Nations," says Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's. Mr. Kerry is kinsman of the Shi'ite shahs of Persia (the most famous was Shah Abbas I, who reigned from 1587 to 1629), as well as the Muslim kings of Tunisia, all of...

The Islamic State Widens its Bridgehead in North AfricaPosted By Ari Lieberman On December 3, 2014 @ 12:05 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments As ISIS continues its brutal occupation of large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, effectively blurring the border between those two pseudo nations, a new, if not more menacing threat is emerging in North Africa where the Islamic State is looking to plant its cancerous roots.In Egypt, the Sinai based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, an Islamist organization responsible for dozens of terror attacks throughout the country announced on its Twitter account that it had...

President Obama has opened a new front in his hard line against the incoming Republican Congress by releasing more detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, against lawmakers' objections. The Pentagon announced Thursday that four al Qaeda fighters from Yemen, including a senior figure who facilitated travel to Afghanistan for Arab extremists, and a Tunisian extremist would be transferred to Slovakia and Georgia. The transfers leave 143 detainees at Guantanamo, which Obama has vowed to close. Republican lawmakers, who have been pressing the administration to stop releasing detainees amid reports that some former prisoners had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and...

A veteran State Department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn, according to U.S. officials. The FBI searched the Northwest Washington home of Robin L. Raphel last month, and her State Department office was also examined and sealed, officials said. Raphel, a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles, was placed on administrative leave last month, and her contract with the State Department was allowed to expire this week. Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying...

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French "came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way." Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday's midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it. Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration's record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus...

ISIL fighters in Syria forced children as young as 14 to watch videos of beheadings and beat them with cables during six months of captivity, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in late May abducted more than 150 Kurdish boys from the town of Kobane, now a focal point of ISIL’s offensive aimed at consolidating its presence in northern Syria. The children had been returning home after taking school exams in the city of Aleppo. ISIL subsequently freed all the captives, the last 25 being released on Oct. 29. ISIL has...

CAIRO — The Arab League warned Sunday that Israel has reached a “red line” after fresh clashes in Jerusalem, urging international pressure to stop what it branded “violations” in the holy city. Clashes around the flashpoint Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound — the third holiest site in Islam and Judaism’s holiest — prompted Israel on Thursday to close the site for a day. The Temple Mount and adjacent neighborhoods have seen months of violence, with the mosque compound a rallying point for Palestinian resistance to perceived Jewish attempts to take control of it...

(Reuters) - Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.The extent of the contacts between the militants is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates...

counterrevolutions against Islamist rule in Egypt and Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood fell hard and fast in Egypt. In Tunisia it’s been more of a slow drawn out fight ... now the Arab Spring wellspring has fallen. A few days ago the New York Times was predicting that the Islamist Ennahda party would rebound and portraying them as the victims. So much for that. ... Ennahda isn’t as done as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, it could still climb back, but this is a severe blow to the political Islamists and their Western backers who hoped to propel them to power through...

TUNIS — The secular party Nidaa Tounes has won the largest number of seats in Tunisia’s parliamentary election, defeating its main rival, the Islamist party Ennahda, according to an independent count of results across the country. Nidaa Tounes has won 83 seats with roughly 38 percent of the popular vote, to Ennahda’s 68 seats, representing about 31 percent of the vote, the Turkish news agency Anadolu reported after tabulating its own count of 214 of the 217 parliamentary seats. Officials from the both parties said that although premature, the count matched their information.

Millions take part in elections to new parliament even as cradle of Arab Spring remains divided over post-2011 path... Sunday’s general election is the first under the North African country's new constitution and the second since the 2011 uprising that overthrew the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. Turnout defied most opinion polls, which had projected a decline in popular participation in the election of a 217-member legislature with a five-year term... One of the places where turnout was perceptibly high in Oued Ellil, on the outskirts of the capital Tunis, where a siege and gun battle left five...

Reprinted from RedState.com. When conservatives consider the casualties of Obama’s national security policies, their attention is drawn quite naturally to Benghazi. In this shameful episode, the Obama Administration sacrificed an ambassador and three American heroes to protect a deceptive presidential campaign message in which Obama claimed that the war against al-Qaeda was over and won (“Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda is on the run”). The facts are these: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American heroes were sent into an al-Qaeda stomping ground that the British and other diplomatic consulates had already evacuated; they were denied the security they...

On Obama's watch, the regional balance of influence and power has shifted even further away from the United States and toward Iran and its allies. The Islamic Republic has continued to deepen its alliances with Syria and Turkey and expand its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. And, now, the Obama administration stands by helplessly as new openings for Tehran to reset the regional balance in its favor emerge in Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and perhaps elsewhere. If these "pro-American" Arab political orders currently being challenged or upended by significant protest movements become at all more representative of their populations,...

A group of over 50 European Parliament members has nominated a controversial Egyptian activist for the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, despite his having advocated the assassination of Israelis and political leaders in Egypt and called for an end to the State of Israel. Alaa Abdel Fattah, 32, an Egyptian blogger and political activist, has been arrested numerous times by Egyptian authorities since the eruption of a popular revolution in the country in early 2011. Abdel Fattah, who boasts 626,000 followers on Twitter and 156,000 on Facebook, was released on bail September 15 after being charged with organizing...

President Obama on Wednesday delivered a speech at the United Nations filled with his usual soaring rhetoric of global collectivism and the importance of “international norms.” But the president also displayed a shocking naivete about global affairs, religion, Islam — a Pollyannaish interpretation on the state of the world and America’s role in it. Although Mr. Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize just eight months into office, the president made his annual trip to the ineffectual world council to deliver a call to war. “Ladies and gentlemen, we come together at a crossroads between war and peace, between disorder and...

A radical Tunisian sheik who has called for the murder of U.S. troops abroad and was banned from the United States for supporting the terror group Hamas is scheduled to headline an event on Tuesday at Yale University focusing ... Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the head of Tunisia’s controversial Islamist Ennahda Movement. ... Al-Ghannouchi’s upcoming appearance at the Ivy League school could become controversial given the sheik’s longtime support for radical terror groups and his past calls for Muslims to wage “unceasing war against the Americans.” ... he praised Palestinian terrorism as “wonderful” and said that he admires rockets fired at...

US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet foreign ministers from around the world in Paris on Monday to discuss how to defeat Islamic State (IS) militants. French President Francois Hollande said the beheading of a British aid worker showed the world must act against IS. About 40 countries, including 10 Arab states, have signed up to a coalition to help fight IS in Iraq and Syria. Several Arab countries have offered to take part in air strikes on IS fighters in Iraq, US officials say. Mr Kerry says he is "extremely encouraged" by promises of military assistance to tackle...

Obama's Cairo Speach: A self-deluded fool gave it, a man determined to avoid confronting the enemies of mankind until an Islamic-inspired genocide required it “A greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum” The speaker had what one might imagine, given his background, a better insight into Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East than others who had preceded him. He said he was seeking “a new beginning” that was “based on mutual interests and mutual respect” because his nation and those in the Middle East shared “common principles—principles of justice and progress, tolerance and dignity of all...

A Tunisian soldier was killed after militants tried to storm an army base early on Sunday in the town of Sbitla near the Algerian border, the Tunisian government said on Sunday. Militant assaults on the Tunisian army have become more frequent in recent months. Since April, thousands of troops have been deployed to the mountainous Chaambi region on the border with Algeria where fighters fleeing a French military intervention in Mali last year have taken refuge. At least 15 soldiers have been killed in attacks on military checkpoints in the area.

'Some say that it is a miracle, while others are calling it a curse': Tunisian journalistTunisians are enjoying escaping the heat of summer by swimming in the mystery lake. (Pic @ Instagram) Nobody knows how, when or why… yet. The fact is, a lake has mysteriously appeared suddenly in the middle of Tunisian desert. No scientific explanation has been forthcoming as yet for for ‘Gafsa Beach’, discovered by shepherds three weeks ago. Authorities have issued a warning, according to a report in the Independent, that the water, which started off a crystalline blue and has since turned a murky green...