Free Republic

Scores of people in Istanbul held funeral prayers on Friday to honor Cherif and Said Kouachi, the gun-toting brothers who killed 12 people last week in Paris. Some 160 people — all of them men — shouted "God is great!" They held a banner showing former al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden's picture on one side, and the Kouachi brothers superimposed over the Parisian skyline on the other.

The cabinet agreed on Wednesday to push for a new law aimed at stopping people from leaving Germany to fight for Islamist movements in the Middle East. Potential jihadists affected by the law would have their ID card confiscated for up to three years and replaced with a new one that does not allow them to travel outside Germany. The original draft law was to confiscate the regular ID cards for only 18 months. The law already allows authorities to confiscate the passports of people suspected of having terrorist connections, but many German citizens who have gone to fight for...

Russia cut gas exports to Europe by 60 per cent today, plunging the continent into an energy crisis 'within hours' as a dispute with Ukraine escalated. This morning, gas companies in Ukraine said that Russia had completely cut off their supply. Six countries reported a complete shut-off of Russian gas shipped via Ukraine today, in a sharp escalation of a struggle over energy that threatens Europe as winter sets in. Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Croatia and Turkey all reported a halt in gas shipments from Russia through Ukraine. Croatia said it was temporarily reducing supplies to industrial customers while Bulgaria...

Qadhafi liked to surround himself with women (whereas Erdogan seems to prefer the opposite, ordering the fairer sex “know their place” and stay at home); and third, Erdogan’s multi-billion dollar embezzlement schemes make the madman of Libya seem, well, a bit modest and unambitious. ... Perhaps no leader was more hypocritical than Erdogan to send a representative, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, to show up in Paris and march in solidarity against the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. Here’s why: 1.No sooner did Davutoglu return home, than Erdogan's Brownshirts raided newspapers planning to reprint the Charlie Hebdo issue and blocked websites...

Although the lights of of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin were extinguished to shame a PEGIDA demonstration last week, they were burning brightly yesterday as German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined a rally of Muslim inhabitants of Berlin. The rally, organised in part to show solidarity with those killed in Paris, and in part to signal opposition to the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA), featured Muslim community leaders, sung Islamic prayers, and a raft of top German politicians. Although the turnout was significantly smaller than recent PEGIDA protests, German leaders flocked to be seen at the event....

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has called the latest front cover of Charlie Hebdo an “act of war” against Muslims. The magazine features Mohammed crying and holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign, with the headline roughly translating to “Everything is forgiven”. But Choudary was unimpressed with the offering from the remaining staff at Charlie Hebdo claiming it was “ridiculing” Mohammed. He said the magazine was attacking the Muslim leader’s personality, and that publishing it was “extremely serious”. This is the second intervention by Choudary since Islamic terrorists launched the devastating machine gun attack on Charlie Hebdo that left 17 dead and...

Police raided the printing press of Turkish daily Cumhuriyet on Jan. 14, as it prepared to distribute a four-page selection of Charlie HebdoÂ’s post-attack issue in an act of solidarity with the French satirical weekly. The police also took extreme security measures ahead of the scheduled publication of the supplement. Police cars were sent to the printer of the daily in Istanbul early on Jan. 14 and halted trucks to prevent the distribution of the Jan. 14 edition. The distribution was eventually allowed after the prosecution made sure that cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad were not included in the selection....

Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...

It was less than 48 hours ago when TurkeyÂ’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by ISIS-supporting extremists. Then, almost the moment he got back, things changed, and as the FT politely paraphrases what transpired, the "countryÂ’s president struck a much more confrontational tone." That's one way of putting it. Another is that the former PM and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of NATO-member Turkey did the unthinkable: accused the west, and French citizens in particular, of staging the Charlie Hebdo murder in order to blame Muslims, even...

Bulgaria plans to extradite a Frenchman suspected of knowing or having been in touch with one of the two Islamist militants who shot dead 12 people at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s offices last week, prosecutors said on Monday. Using a European arrest warrant alleging that he had abducted his 3-year-old son and was likely to take him to Syria, Bulgarian police arrested Fritz-Joly Joachin, 29, on January 1st at a border checkpoint when he tried to cross into Turkey.

Ankara (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday blasted Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu for "daring" to attend an anti-terror solidarity march in Paris, accusing him of leading "state terrorism" against the Palestinians. The comments, at a press conference in Ankara with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, were the latest verbal assault against Netanyahu by Erdogan under whose rule Turkey's relations with Israel have steadily deteriorated. He said he could "hardly understand how he (Netanyahu) dared to go" to Sunday's massive march in the French capital and urged him to "give an account for the children, women you massacred."

Every month there is an incident, like taking property of Hindu people or forced conversion of Hindu girls. ... Minority Hindus have complained of increasing harassment and discrimination in Muslim-dominated Pakistan in recent years, including the destruction or desecration of their places of worship. ... Hindus complain that girls are forcibly converted to Islam, there is no legal recognition for Hindu marriages, and Hindus are discriminated against when it comes to access to government jobs or schooling. ... During partition in 1947, the violent separation of Pakistan and India into separate countries, hundreds of thousands of Hindus decided to migrate...

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday hailed the unprecedented rally against terror in Paris as a strong message to the world, but added he would expect a similar reaction to attacks on Muslims and “Islamophobia”, according to AFP. Davutoglu joined dozens of other world leaders at the march in Paris to mourn the victims of the three days of terror by Islamists that began with the slaughter of 12 people at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. “It is a message to the whole world that everyone must confront the threat of terror,” Davutoglu was quoted as having...

(CNN)French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country, a French police source who attended a briefing Saturday told CNN Terror Analyst Samuel Laurent. Ahmedy Coulibaly, a suspect killed Friday during a deadly Kosher market hostage siege, had made several phone calls about targeting police officers in France. The alert came as the lone remaining suspect wanted in connection with a terrorism spree -- Hayat Boumeddiene -- entered Turkey on January 2,...

ISTANBUL (AP) — A Turkish intelligence official says authorities believe the common law wife of one of the gunmen behind the attacks in France came through Turkey days before and may have crossed into Syria. The official told The Associated Press on Saturday a woman by the same name of the common law wife of Amedy Coulibaly flew to Istanbul on Jan. 2. The official said the woman resembled a widely distributed photo of the woman, Hayat Boumeddiene. The official said she landed at Sabiha Gokcen, which is Istanbul's secondary airport, stayed two nights in Istanbul before traveling to Sanliurfa...

School closures ordered by the Islamic State militant group have resulted in an estimated 670,000 children in Syria being deprived of an education ... The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that has seized territory in Syria and Iraq, began shutting schools in areas in eastern Syria in November. The closures were ordered pending a religious revision of the curriculum. ... Between 1.3 million and 1.6 million Syrian children have been prevented from attending school as a result of the now five-year civil war, which has killed more than 200,000 and displaced half the country’s population ... In September, students...

Looks like the diplomatic efforts of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi may have paid off. Khaled Mashaal, who ran the recent Hamas war on Israel from the safety of Doha where he has long kept his organization’s worldwide headquarters, got kicked out of Qatar altogether — along with the Muslim Brotherhood. CNN reports that the expelled officials will likely end up in Turkey: Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal and members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been expelled from Qatar, a Hamas-run news agency reported Tuesday. The officials are most likely headed to Turkey, the report said.The move comes after...

Francis met Syriac Christians during his recent visit to Turkey (CNS) Turkish government gives go-ahead to Syriac church in IstanbulTurkey’s government has given the go ahead for the building of the first new church in the country for nearly a century.The Syriac Orthodox church will be built in Yeşilköy on the outskirts of Istanbul, in an area which already has Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches.The announcement was made last Friday, after Turkey’s prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu met Turkey’s religious leaders.He told Turkish media: “It is the first [new church] since the creation of the republic [in 1923]. Churches...

Ankara (AFP) - Turkey's Islamic-rooted government has authorised the building of the first church in the country in nearly a century, officials said Saturday. The church is for the tiny Syriac community in Turkey and will be built in the Istanbul suburb of Yesilkoy on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, which already has Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches. The announcement came after Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met Turkey's religious leaders in Istanbul on Friday and said no faith that has lived in the country could be regarded as foreign. "It is the first (new church) since the...

Former President Shimon Peres addressed the upcoming elections in March for the first time publicly on Saturday, hinting that he would like to see a replacement for current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. "These elections are crucial," Peres said. "We have an opportunity to make the best out of the situation we find ourselves in. Some things have changed for the worse and need to be fixed, but there are good things and we should take advantage of them." One issue Peres said had improved was Israel's relationship with the "moderate" Arab world. "The position of the Arab world has changed,...