Free Republic

Iran is now free to buy a range of previously restricted weapons, its government announced Sunday, hailing a "momentous day" as a 13-year-old U.N. arms embargo on the country was lifted as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — and against vociferous opposition from Washington. The government in Tehran insists that any weapons purchases would be "based on its defensive needs," as allowed under the multilateral deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018. .. That could mean selling weapons to its proxies, analysts say, including militant and political group Hezbollah, designated by the U.S. as a terrorist...

US President Donald Trump announced Monday that Sudan would be removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in exchange for paying compensation to families of American terror victims. "GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to U.S. terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan!" Trump wrote on Twitter. The Sudanese government has sought to be de-listed as a state sponsor of terror since former President...

According to an Asharq TV report, Chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat has been pronounced dead after receiving treatment for coronavirus at Hadassah Medical Center. No official confirmation has been released by the medical center. .....

Isn’t there something incongruous about a human rights organization providing a platform to a journalist who has whitewashed human rights abuses? Next week, an online event organized by the human rights group “3 Generations” will feature New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, who sparked an international furor in 2009 when he visited Iran and announced that the oppressed Jews there were not really so oppressed, after all. Cohen’s assertion that Iranian Jews were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility” was met with scorn across the political spectrum. Jeffrey Goldberg, in The Atlantic, called him “credulous.” The Anti-Defamation League...

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh — On the front line, the stench is overwhelming. The remains of fighters have been lying there for weeks. In the trenches, there is fear. The Armenians are defenseless against the Azerbaijani drones that hover overhead and kill at will. At the military graveyard, bulldozers have scraped away a hillside. It is already lined with two rows of new graves, along with soon-to-be-filled, freshly dug, rectangular holes. The three-week-old conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over a disputed territory in the Caucasus Mountains, where Europe meets Asia, has settled into a brutal war of attrition, soldiers and civilians said...

Excerpted and adapted from The Next Jihad: Stop the Christian Genocide in Africa. A BOY walk past the Apostolic church in Bodo, Nigeria (photo credit: REUTERS) Michael Nnadi lived in Nigeria—Africa’s largest country and at once its wealthiest and poorest. Nigeria boasts the world’s 10th largest oil reserves yet 50% of its population lives in extreme poverty. It has the largest Christian population on the continent, but half of its 200 million people are Muslims. The neighboring countries, like Nigeria itself, are all fighting terrorist insurgencies. Nigeria should be the best fit to address it, but the country’s Muslim president...

My interview with scholar, activist, author, and “heretic” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. [Pre-order Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, 'Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights': HERE.] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born, Dutch-American scholar, former politician, author and activist, is also one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. She is known for her critiques of Islam, and her intransigent devotion to freedom of speech. She is the author of numerous books. Her latest is Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. Hirsi Ali is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder of the AHA Foundation which...

Fadi Kablawi spews venom against Jews, Hindus, Christians, gays and fellow Muslims. Joe Kaufman, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is Chairman of the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative and the 2014, 2016 and 2018 Republican Nominee for U.S. House of Representatives (Florida-CD23). Fadi Kablawi (Qablawi), head imam of the North Miami Islamic Center (NMIC) and FBI ‘person of interest,’ is a radical Muslim’s radical. His targets comprise of Jews, Christians, homosexuals, women, Hindus and Muslims, even his fellow radical Muslims. This past July, he made the claim that Jews are behind all the corruption on Earth. He did so, during one of his Friday khutbas (sermons), in front of his congregation, which includes young and impressionable...

A joint American-Israeli delegation landed in Bahrain Sunday, where officials will be signing a number of bilateral agreements following an announcement last month to normalize relations. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser, Meir Ben-Shabbat, led the delegation that flew out of Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Sunday morning. Ben-Shabbat said ahead of departure the visit will ‘translate plans to actions and concrete agreements’ with the signing of a range of deals involving finance, investment, trade, tourism, communications, technology and agriculture.

A force to be reckoned with Posted on 9 August 2010 in Defence The Egyptian Air Force (EAF) or Al Quwwat Al Jawwiya Il Misriya, is one of the largest air arms in the region and is also one of the longest established. Formed in 1930 as the Egyptian Army Air Force, it became fully independent in 1937. Initially it had close links with the British Royal Air Force and was primarily equipped with British-supplied aircraft. Spitfires gave way to Meteors and Vampires before the 1952 revolution, after which the new president, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, turned to the Soviet...

Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), has a pro-Israel reputation and, in a recent interview with Shalom television, even identified himself as "a Zionist," but it is open to question what the late Menachem Begin would have to say about that designation for the Delaware senator. According to reports in the Jerusalem Post by Moshe Zak and another in Time magazine, Messrs Biden and Begin had a serious confrontation in the summer of 1982 in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the issue of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. According to Mr. Zak, a former editor of...

When Israel’s Prime Minister Told Joe Biden: I Am Not A Jew With Trembling KneesPosted By Ronn Torossian On April 2, 2015 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments While the Obama Administration continues their pressure on Israel, for at least Joe Biden, it is not the first time that there has been animosity with an Israeli leader.  The reality is that while some of the names change, this conflict is about Israel’s refusal to surrender to a Palestinian Arab enemy who seeks to destroy the Jewish nation.The United States is wrong to pressure Israel – yet,...

INSIGHT-Has Iran ended Israel's Begin Doctrine? By Dan Williams JERUSALEM Nov 7 (Reuters) - Menachem Begin did not pull his punches. In 1981, as work neared completion on an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israel believed would produce plutonium for warheads, the Israeli prime minister dispatched eight F-16 bombers to destroy the plant. Begin later said that the raid was proof his country would "under no circumstances allow the enemy to develop weapons of mass-destruction against our people". The event defined a strategy that became known as the "Begin Doctrine" and is best summed up by the phrase "the best defence...

In a conversation with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after a sharp confrontation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of the settlements, Begin defined himself as “a proud Jew who does not tremble with fear” when speaking with foreign statesmen. During that committee hearing, at the height of the Lebanon War, Sen. John Biden (Delaware) had attacked Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria and threatened that if Israel did not immediately cease this activity, the US would have to cut economic aid to Israel. When the senator raised his voice and banged twice on the table with his...

Twenty-five years ago, the leaders of Israel and Egypt – Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat – signed a treaty that ended decades of warfare. The treaty and its implementation are far from perfect, but the framework of peace has been preserved despite differences between Cairo and Jerusalem. Advertisement In the intervening decades, a great deal has been written about this singular accomplishment. Unfortunately, some of these accounts are misleading or based on myths. As a result, the "Camp David formula," to which former president Jimmy Carter attributes the success of the negotiations, is often seen as the key to a...

On the 90th anniversary of Menachem Begin's birth - a fond recollection of Shabbat in his company The weather in Jerusalem was unusually warm and naturally breezy that Shabbat afternoon, adding spice to the smell of poplar and pine that always fills Rehavia in high summer. Under a blue sky streaked with tangerine wisps of cirrus that heralded the onset of sunset, tourists, soldiers, yeshiva boys, neighbors, and even casual passers by, lined up at the prime minister's gate waiting their turn to enter. Menachem and Aliza Begin were hosting an open house, a tradition they had maintained for the...

One of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch's last interviews before his death on Friday came in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire. The most interesting part of the Q&A came when he was asked who was what living person he "most despise[s]." ... Which living person do you most despise? Former president Jimmy Carter.

This Friday marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Menachem Begin. He died of a broken heart on March 9, 1992, vilified as a warmonger by the Left and cast off by right-wing purists after he traded the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. The purists also berated Begin for his 1978 Camp David offer of five years of limited self-government to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, to be followed by final-status negotiations between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian negotiating team - a proposal the Arabs rejected. Begin would have been...

Menachem Begin is today widely regarded as one of the most effective and far-sighted statesmen in Israeli history. At one end of the political spectrum, he is fondly remembered for surrendering the entire Sinai peninsula to Egypt and uprooting Israeli communities there. At the other end of the spectrum, he is hailed for taking strong action against PLO terrorists and Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. But when he was first elected prime minister in 1977, Begin was the object of an unprecedented frenzy of hatred from the international news media. He was called a terrorist, a fascist, a lunatic. To explain...

A recent study conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 67% of American Jewish respondents planned to vote for Joe Biden and 30% for President Trump. Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed claimed to be pro-Israel and 64% said Israel is an important election issue. Most ranked Biden higher on U.S.-Israel relations, the handling of anti-Semitism, and ensuring the security of the Jewish community. The survey results are surprising, given Trump’s stellar record on Jews and Israel. American Jews must reconsider, for Biden’s record and positions on critical topics belie these perceptions. Record on IsraelBiden’s record should dispel any notions...