Free Republic

AFTER MORE than two decades in exile in London, the leader of Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement intends to return to his home country tomorrow to resurrect his party so that it can play a role in what he calls a “new era of democracy”. “We hope the era of monopoly and despotism is now over, to be replaced by a new era of pluralism, free from any exclusion or persecution. [Our] priority is to work, alongside others, to establish a genuine democratic system in Tunisia, built on a real separation of powers, accountability and democracy,” Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

In fact Dahou Meskine along with sixteen other people were arrested on Monday and Tuesday for allegedly financing Islamic terrorism. The most probable organization that benefited from this money is the Algerian terrorist group GSPC. In fact, investigators found out that hundreds of thousands of Euros were funneled through some organizations and corporations owned by Meskine and his son to dubious NGOs. Nonetheles one of the persons in charge of the investigation acknowledged today to the daily Liberation that it will be tough to prove that this was done solely to finance terrorism. But what's even more troubling is the...