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Israeli officials have repeatedly voiced concerns over the growing Iranian presence on its borders and the smuggling of sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah from Tehran to Lebanon via Syria. Russia has committed to removing Iranian-backed forces from the border of the Golan Heights as part of a cease-fire agreement in southern Syria signed with the United States and Jordan, a senior State Department official said on Sunday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested, meanwhile, that Israel would keep up its military strikes to prevent any cross-border attacks from Syria, telling the cabinet on Sunday: “We will take a very firm stance against...

How the grandparents of today’s Christian victims of ISIS were Editor’s Note: The following review was written by Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The book reviewed is Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, a History (published by the Oxford University Press, 2016), by Joseph Yacoub, an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Catholic University of Lyon. A significantly shorter version of this review first appeared in the Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2017. This important contribution to genocide studies documents how the world’s oldest Christian communities—variously referred to as Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans,...

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Iran’s nuclear deal is “not negotiable”, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bassam Ghassemi said Saturday in response to remarks by French president Emmanuel Macron. Macron called for vigilance towards Tehran over its ballistic missile program and regional activities in an interview published Wednesday by the Emirati daily Al-Ittihad. “We have told French leaders on several occasions that the Iran nuclear deal is not negotiable, and that no other issues can be included in the text” of the 2015 agreement, state news agency IRNA quoted Ghassemi as saying. France, the foreign ministry speaker said, is “fully aware of our country’s intangible position...

Reports are surfacing about a stabbing attack at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. We are going to go ahead and speculate that this is a case of knife jihad. There are a few reasons for this:

It’s a looming heavyweight prizefight that nobody wants to see come off. But should escalating tensions between bitter regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia break out into open conflict, Riyadh’s formidable military arsenal would quickly overwhelm Iranian forces in a conventional war, while Tehran would hold the advantage against any Saudi forces in a proxy guerrilla war, analysts say. The animosity between the two main pillars of power in the Middle East has escalated over the past week, when Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry ordered all Saudi nationals to immediately evacuate Lebanon. The move was presumably targeted at the growing power...

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday spoke at a Fatah assembly in Gaza, commemoration 13 years since arch-terrorist and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat died. In his speech, broadcast on television, Abbas said "no one" cares more about Gaza's people than he does, and promised that there would be "no [Palestinian] state without Gaza, or a state only in Gaza." However, he also said the PA would support a "one-state solution" with "full equality of rights for all its citizens" if the two-state solution proved impossible. It is not clear what a "one-state" solution means...

One of the obstacles to rational discussion of guns in America is the profound ignorance about guns on the part of many pushing for tighter controls. Take Al Sharpton on his MSNBC show this morning. Debating the subject with Liberty University Professor Daniel Howell in the context of the Sutherland Springs church massacre, Sharpton decried the availability of automatic and “semi-automatic weapons.” A bit later, Sharpton suggested that “we should outlaw automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson says she wants answers following revelations a South Florida soldier killed in Niger may have been captured and executed. The congresswoman released a statement saying, “On Tuesday, November 7th, I received a classified briefing on the attack in Niger during which Sgt. La David Johnson and three other members of his unit were ambushed and killed. I am not at liberty to discuss the details of what I was told... Did his death occur while he was engaged in combat against the Islamist militans or did they capture and execute him? Has an autopsy been done, and...

A French mayor and dozens of other MPs and elected councilors from around the Paris region sang the Marseillaise on Friday as they marched towards around 200 Muslim worshipers in a bid to stop them praying in the street. The standoff, which was caught in several video clips, took place in the Paris suburb of Clichy on Friday afternoon. The local right-wing mayor, Rémi Muzeau, led the march after growing infuriated by the presence of hundreds of Muslim worshipers praying on the town’s market square every Friday for the past nine months. Images relayed from the scene near Clichy Town...

About 100 French politicians have marched on a street in a Paris suburb in protest at Muslims holding Friday prayers in public. The politicians, wearing tricolour sashes of office and singing the national anthem, disrupted about 200 worshippers on a street in Clichy. Police kept the two groups apart but some scuffles broke out. Critics say the prayers are an unacceptable use of public space in France's strictly secular system. The worshippers, however, say they have nowhere else to go since the town hall took over the room they used for prayers back in March. France has about five million...

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday said he did not rule out new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program. According to the Russian Sputnik news agency, Macron said Iran’s ballistic missile program was “very worrying” and said additional measures against the Islamic Republic should be included in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which should not be canceled. Meanwhile, in a separate interview with Time magazine published Thursday and quoted by AFP, Macron warned that U.S. pressure to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal could push Tehran into deciding to build its own nuclear weapons. “If you want to stop...

The European Union is moving to lift barriers to the rapid deployment of the 28 nations’ armies to confront aggressors within Europe or abroad. Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc, unveiling the plan Friday, said that “we need to be able to react effectively to internal and external crisis situations.” The aim is to upgrade infrastructure like bridges, roads and runways that can’t handle heavy military equipment and cut customs and administrative red tape, which cause delays, higher costs and leave Europe vulnerable to attack. …

Saudi Arabia launched military strikes against Yemen’s defense ministry in the capital city of Sana’a in the latest escalation in the conflict between the two Arab nations, witnesses told the French news agency AFP. It wasn’t immediately clear if the attacks were air or missile strikes, but they came following reports that Iran had manufactured the ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels toward the Saudi capital a week ago. Remnants of the missile bore “Iranian markings,” the top US Air Force official in the Mideast said Friday, backing the kingdom’s earlier allegations. Saudi Arabia long has accused Iran of...

A Lebanese friend called this reporter over the weekend with the question, “What do you think of the resignation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri?”  The short response to the friend was “check out where he made his announcement – in Saudi Arabia.”  It is clear that Riyadh had something to do with Hariri’s decision to resign as Prime Minister, and it comes only a year into his current post.  Qatari based Al-Jazeera-TV reported (November 5th, 2017) that “The snap resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri over the weekend reflects a push by Saudi Arabia to openly confront Iran,...

American sovereignty and security dismantled under the guise of “diversity.” On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 New York City suffered a deadly terror attack on a well-known and heavily used bike path in lower Manhattan, just blocks from what, in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11, had come to be known as “Ground Zero.” The perpetrator of this heinous savage attack is a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who reportedly legally immigrated to the United States in 2010 subsequent to winning the Diversity Visa Lottery. Consequently, attention immediately turned to the Diversity Visa Program that annually enables...

The lead song in the mix is revealing, as well as the titles of the later selections, which I haven't listened through, but the titles are enough. Woody Guthrie, it seems, knew all about Trump even though he died while Donald was in knee pants.

A Minnesota man serving 20 years of supervised release for conspiring to join the Islamic State has been released from his federal halfway house. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis granted 21-year-old Abdullahi Mohamud Yusuf’s release to his family Thursday. While at the halfway house, Yusuf received counseling, mentoring and an award for being a role model to other residents. […] Yusuf was among nine Minnesota men sentenced last year for conspiring to join the militant group in Syria. …

Airport screeners working for the “badly” run Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reportedly failed to detect weapons more than 70 percent of the time in undercover tests — but that massive failure rate is actually an improvement from a similar test two years ago. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock knives, guns and explosives through airport checkpoints earlier this year, and succeeded far more often than they failed. But at least airport security is improving— slightly. When investigators did the same thing two years earlier, TSA equipment and personnel failed 95 percent of the time, prompting major changes in the...

BEIRUT -- Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants withdrew Thursday from their last stronghold in Syria, a strategic town near the border with Iraq, following a government offensive that has effectively left the extremist group's fighters dispersed in villages and small towns in the desert. The Syrian military declared the town liberated after intense battles that killed a large number of militants, including leaders. The military said they were still chasing other ISIS militants in different directions in the desert. "The liberation of Boukamal is of great importance because it is a declaration of the fall of this...