Free Republic

Murders have dropped by up to 20% in some major US cities — including the Big Apple — so far this year, according to a new report. New York City has seen a 15% dip in killings in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, the Wall Street Journal said. The five boroughs had 88 murders in that time period, a significant dip over the 104 in 2023, the outlet said.

Did the current administration “collude” with Russia? So far no evidence at all has emerged to support that hypothesis, but Politico’s Josh Meyer digs deep into another curious set of circumstances in the Obama White House and its own operations with a foreign power. Perhaps the media will start asking whether the previous administration colluded with Iran to let terrorists and drug dealers go free in order to score one of the worst deals ever in international relations. Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation...

Dr. David Neiman explores the historicity of the Biblical accounts of Joseph and the Exodus from Egypt. Joseph rises to the position of "Tzafnat Pa'aneakh" after successfully helping the Pharaoh of Egypt with his economic plans. Under Joseph's guidance all land became the property of Pharaoh. A new Pharaoh comes to power who does not favor the Israelites. They are enslaved and forced to build the storage cities of Pithom and Ramses. These cities were arsenals for the armies of Egypt. Under Seti I and Ramses the II, Egypt was on the warpath. Ramses II was defeated at the battle...

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” Asher helped establish and...

Forget olive oil. Israel’s offshore drilling is about to make it the Middle East’s next energy exporter. It wasn’t long ago that Israel’s oil and gas industry was the territory of wishful thinkers like John Brown, a born-again Christian from Texas who saw a map to oil gushers in readings of the Bible. In the 1980s, I interviewed his site manager, also a born-again Christian, who told me that the Lord had bequeathed oil to his chosen people. In a cluttered cabin in the hills of central Israel, the rangy Texan leafed through his copy of the Bible and read...

Palestinian Authority resident terrorist Wael Salaman Mohammed el-Arjeh, of Hevron, has been convicted of two counts of murder in the deaths of Asher and Yonatan Palmer. He will be sentenced in the upcoming days. Arjeh is facing life in prison. Arjeh took part in an attack in which large stones were hurled at the Palmers’ car. A stone hit Asher Palmer, who was driving, in the face. The injured Palmer lost control of the car, possibly after losing consciousness, resulting in a crash in which both he and baby Yonatan were killed. Yonatan was two days shy of his first...

Tramping from Kiryat Arba to Hebron today, my ride told me that every Friday morning at 9:30 a.m., near the entrance to Kiryat Arba, and at the shoulder of Highway 60 across from the Delek gas station, adjacent to which Asher Palmer's car was overturned by an Arab terrorist's murderous attack, there will be a Torah class (I believe in English). The IDF will be present and attending to security. All interested parties who are here in Israel are invited to attend.

"Pakistani Christian on Run from Taliban Death Threat Islamic extremist sermonizing leads to altercation at barbershop in South Waziristan." SNIPPET: "LAHORE, Pakistan, November 27 (CDN) — A young Christian man is in hiding in Pakistan from Taliban militants who seek to kill him for “blasphemy” because he defended his faith. In February Jehanzaib Asher, 22, was working in a barbershop his family jointly owns with his cousin in Wana, South Waziristan – a Taliban stronghold in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan’s northwest – when the Islamic militants showed up to try to convert him to Islam." SNIPPET: "He...

Some hundred haredim were demonstrating outside the Jerusalem police headquarters on Passover eve against the arrest of Yisrael Asher Valis, who was accused of beating his three-month-old son to death. According to the demonstrators, Valis is innocent and has been "humiliated" by the police and the press. The death of the baby on Monday led a leading haredi rabbi to accuse the police and the justice authorities of concocting a Pessah eve blood libel. Rabbi Yitzhak Weiss, halachic authority and spiritual leader for Jerusalem's virulently anti-Zionist Eda Haredit community, said the indictment of the yeshiva student was "identical to the...