Free Republic

Senator Rand Paul is calling for a declaration of war against the Islamic State, a move that promises to shake up the debate over the military campaign in Iraq and Syria as President Obama prepares to ask Congress to grant him formal authority to use force. Mr. Paul, a likely presidential candidate who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s most cautious voices on military intervention, offered a very circumscribed definition of war in his proposal, which he outlined in an interview on Saturday. He would, for instance, limit the duration of military action to one year and significantly...

Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity? While the video might firm up the faith of fanatics, would it not evoke rage and revulsion across the Islamic world? After all, this was a Sunni Muslim, in a cage, being burned alive. As of now, this cruel killing seems to have backfired. Jordan is uniting behind King Abdullah's determination to exact "earth-shattering" retribution. Which raises again the questions: Why did ISIS do it? What did they hope to...

TurkeyÂ’s Erdogan To Obama: WhereÂ’s Outrage About Chapel Hill Shootings? By Adam Taylor February 13 Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks at the Foreign Ministry in Mexico City on Feb. 12. In the wake of a shooting in Chapel Hill, N.C., that left three young American Muslims dead, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made an unusual public criticism of American domestic policy Thursday, specifically challenging President Obama. "If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don't make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you," ErdoÄŸan said during a state visit to Mexico on Thursday, according...

A senior FBI official has admitted the United States is finding it virtually impossible to screen out terrorists that could be hiding among the thousands of Syrian “refugees” heading soon to American cities. The U.S. simply does not have the resources to stop Islamic radicals in Syria from slipping into the country through the State Department’s refugee-resettlement program, said Michael Steinbach, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter terrorism unit. Separating legitimate refugees from terrorists was difficult enough in Iraq, where the U.S. had a large occupation force. Even then, the U.S. government’s vetting process missed “dozens” of Iraqi jihadists...

Turkey has long enshrined the secular ideals of founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, particularly in an education system that until recently banned Islamic headscarves in schools and made schoolchildren begin the day reciting an oath of allegiance to Ataturk's legacy. Now proponents of Turkey's secular traditions claim President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a new path, building a more Islam-focused education system to realize his stated goal of raising "pious generations."

Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Democratic presidential candidates in 2016 should embrace President Obama’s economic policies and “run on what we have done” instead of running away from the administration. “In my view, those seeking to lead the nation should protect and defend and run, yes run, on what we’ve done and own what we have done,” Mr. Biden said in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa. “Stand for what we have done. Acknowledge what we have done. And be judged on what we have done, if we have any chance for continued resurgence in 2016.” He added, “Some...

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has proposed to Cuba the construction of a mosque on the Caribbean island during a visit to Havana, pushing ahead with a plan apparently inspired by his belief that Muslims discovered the Americas. After talks with Cuban President Raul Castro, Erdogan said on Wednesday he had sought approval for Turkey to build the place of worship in Havana that would be based on the model of a mosque in the Ortakoy district on the European shore of the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul. Erdogan also told reporters the Cuban government had agreed with Saudi Arabia on a...

Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said that if Greece failed to get a new debt agreement with the euro zone, it could always look elsewhere for help. "What we want is a deal. But if there is no deal - hopefully (there will be) - and if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source," he told Greek television show that ran in to early Tuesday. "It could the United States at best, it could be Russia,...

Ambassador David Hale said the equipment includes more than 70 M198 howitzers and over 26 million rounds of ammunition and artillery "of all shapes and sizes, including heavy artillery." Islamic extremists have launched several attacks on Lebanese troops over the past months in areas near the Syrian border, killing and wounding scores of troops. The most serious attack occurred in August, when members of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front and the Islamic State group captured two dozen Lebanese soldiers. They have killed four of them and still hold the rest. Lebanese and American officials attended a handover ceremony Sunday at Beirut's...

Cyprus will offer Russia military facilities on its soil, President Nicos Anastasiades said on Friday. In an interview with a local newspaper, Anastasiades said that a pact strengthening defense relations between the two countries will be signed when he visits Moscow on Feb. 25. "There is an old (defense) agreement which is to be renewed as it is. At the same time, some additional facilities will be provided just like we do with other countries - France and Germany for example," Anastasiades said. Cyprus is currently providing facilities to French planes, such as refueling and maintenance at an air force...

Greece’s new Prime Minister reportedly assures the Israeli ambassador that Greek-Israeli relations will not change following his election. Greece’s new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, has assured the Israeli ambassador to Athens that Greek-Israeli relations will not change following his election, Kol Yisrael radio reported on Friday. According to the report, Tsipras met this week with the Ambassador, Irit Ben-Abba, and made clear to her that his government is determined to combat anti-Semitism in Greece and that it will continue to prosecute the leaders of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. The meeting comes amid concerns among Greek Jews that the election...

Jordan said Thursday it had launched air strikes against the Islamic State group, after vowing a harsh response to the burning alive of one of its fighter pilots. "The Jordanian air force launched raids against positions of the Islamic State group," said a government official, who did not want to be named. Meanwhile the gruesome death of Moaz al-Kasasbeh drew a torrent of condemnation across the world. Hashtags to express grief over Kasasbeh's death have taken over Twitter only hours after the news broke out on Tuesday, Al Arabiya News reported Wednesday.

NORFOLK Ayaan Hirsi Ali stood before a slide of the caged Jordanian pilot about to be set afire by Islamic State group extremists. That, she said at Chrysler Hall on Tuesday night, will be the norm if they are not defeated. "You are going to see people beheaded, their hands and legs cut off, the mass enslavement of women," warned Hirsi Ali, a sharp critic of Muslim leaders and radicals and an advocate of women's rights. "We have had over a long period of time... even before the Reagan administration, so many warning signs that we have ignored," Hirsi Ali...

A Dutch journalist based in southeastern Turkey has been officially indicted by Turkish prosecutors for spreading "terrorist propaganda" on social media. ... "The document refers to tweets and Facebook posts as well as her weekly column on Diken.com.tr, an independent Turkish news website," she said. The Prosecutor's office charges Geerdink with spreading propaganda for the outlawed armed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) group that has been fighting against the Turkish state since mid-1980s. She is facing one to five years in prison. ...

Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he isn't a sultan - rather he wishes to be like the Queen in a constitutional monarchy - but his actions suggest otherwise. He lives in the world's biggest residential palace that cost £384 million . ... Erdogan's White Palace .. boasts 1,000 rooms and has a total floor area of 3.1 million square feet. This makes it four times the size of Versailles, home of the lavish Louis XIV, the “Sun King” of France. ... the "quixotic architectural style seems to cross the Ottoman and Seljuk traditions with that of a modern Chinese railway station"....

A full 20 percent of the Turkish public approves of the use of violence in the name of Islam, though a majority of the public does not approve, a survey conducted in January by the Ankara-based MetroPOLL Strategic and Social Research Center has revealed. MetroPOLL's survey revealed that the majority of Turks believe Charlie Hebdo insulted Prophet Muhammad with its controversial cartoons. Almost 20 percent of the respondents said the magazine's staff deserved to be killed. To a question about the real victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack, only 21.7 percent of the people said they were the 12 people...

When Hasan Erol and other parents learned that their children’s school would be converted to specialise in Islamic education, they hit the streets. Yeşilbahar Middle School is among five in Istanbul’s staunchly secular district of Kadıköy to have been earmarked for conversion into imam-hatips, religious schools in which 20% to one-third of hours are dedicated to Sunni Islamic study. “They want to transform this area into something else,” says Erol, whose 13-year-old son goes to the school. “They want to make it more conservative by bringing imam-hatips here.” Yeşilbahar was spared. Authorities relented in the face of protests and a...

The absence of strong Western leadership against the Boko Haram terror state has created an opportunity Iran seems ready to exploit. The Premium Times of Nigeria reports that Iran is stepping forward to offer assistance to the African Union against the savage caliphate spilling out of northern Nigeria into Cameroon and menacing the entire region: ... Abdollohian said the activities of the Boko Haram militants and that of Al-Shabaab in the Somalia were similar to that of Al-Qaeda and the ISIS and other terrorist groups in the Middle East. ... Iran was willing to share its experiences on terrorist activities...

Despite living in the world's biggest residential palace that cost £384 million, Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists he is not seeking to be a sultan, but more like the British Queen. The Turkish president referred to the UK as an example for Turkey to follow as he explained that changes to the role of the president would not alter the Turkish republic's democracy... Mr Erdogan's comments, reported in Hurriyet Daily News, included an attack on those who said Turkey was becoming like a monarchy and that he aspired to be like an Ottoman sultan despite other countries also having presidents... Padishah...

Greece's new nationalist defense minister prompted Greece's perennial rival Turkey to scramble jets on Friday, just days after he took office, by flying over uninhabited islets off the Turkish coast that nearly triggered a war in 1996. Turkish fighter jets entered Greek airspace and were intercepted by Greek jets as Defence Minister Panos Kammenos and military chiefs flew by helicopter to the islet of Imia to drop wreaths in memory of three Greek officers killed nearby in a helicopter crash 19 years ago, the Greek Defence Ministry said. Kammenos heads the small, right-wing, Eurosceptical Independent Greeks party, and the episode...