Free Republic

While Britons celebrated the royal wedding last Friday, one of Iran’s greatest intellectuals willingly fell to his death from the sixth-floor balcony of his Tehran apartment. Siamak Pourzand, aged 80, had held out long enough against the Islamic Republic..... Pourzand was an already prominent cultural commentator and foreign correspondent long before Ayatollah Khomeini boarded a plane from Paris, full of big ideas, in 1979.... Secular and cosmopolitan to the core, Pourzand had no time for the guardianship of the sadists and made a point of saying so, especially in the late 1990s when he began writing for various opposition newspapers...

Originally posted Sept. 29, 2003; reposted June 18, 2004 Senior investigators and analysts in the U.S. government have concluded that Iraq acted as a state sponsor of terrorism against Americans and logistically supported the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - confirming news reports that until now have emerged only in bits and pieces. A senior government official responsible for investigating terrorism tells Insight that while Saddam Hussein may not have had details of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance, he "gave assistance for whatever al-Qaeda came up with." That assistance, confirmed independently, came in a variety of...

Journalist and author Fareed Zakaria has made some grave accusations against those who oppose the building of the Islamic center near Ground Zero, and has predicated his own approval of the project on the moderateness of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Zakaria wrote that Abdul Rauf “has said one or two things about American foreign policy that strike me as overly critical — but it’s stuff you could read on The Huffington Post any day.” Yes, indeed — you are likely to read similar “stuff” on the Huffington Post, since Rauf has written there. But how can that possibly constitute a...

The Two Faces of Feisal RaufWhat's wrong with What's Right With Islam. This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.The problems with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam begin with the title. As Andrew McCarthy noted on National Review Online, the book, whose full title is now What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, was previously called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America; before that, it was published in Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of...

The Islamic Republic Is Not Iran By Amil Iman We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in, in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess. The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the...

Having been in transit during the start of the Iranian election protests, I've taken a little time to come up to speed on the issue. Scanning English-language (UK) papers in airports, I will say that my initial reaction to the euphoria I saw breaking out all over the West -- especially the US? -- to the obtusely labeled "green" revolution was, Why should we be so happy about Mousavi? When I learned that Mousavi was Mullah Rafsanjani's boy, that A-jad was Mullah Khameini's boy, my wonder deepened, as in: What's the diff? When I read John Bolton's piece at Politico...

Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was set up shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution to defend the country's Islamic system, and to provide a counterweight to the regular armed forces. It has since become a major military, political and economic force in Iran, with close ties to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former member.

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced mah-MOOD ah-mah-dih-nee-ZHAD) was born Oct. 28, 1956, three years after the CIA-sponsored coup that installed the pro-Western leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran's leader. A Shiite Muslim, he and his wife, a professor, have two sons and a daughter. 2. When he was an infant, Ahmadinejad's family moved from the village of Aradan to Tehran. It was at this point that the family changed its name from Saborjhian, which translates to "thread painter" (the lowliest job in Iran's traditional carpet-weaving industry), to the more religious Ahmadinejad ("race of Muhammad" or "virtuous race"). 3. Ahmadinejad is...

Khomeini figured: Why import the false ideologies of a failing civilization? Doesn't it make more sense to export Islamism to the dying West? And, for a guy dismissed by most of us as crazy, Khomeini made a lot of sense. The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way. One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he...

Former President Carter blasts Bush 11 minutes ago Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's "quite disturbing" faith-based initiative funding. "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in...

Twice now, in my lifetime, a Democrat Congress has stabbed an American army in the back – bringing to mind President Roosevelt’s famous phrase that described the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor – “a day that will live in infamy”. After voting to authorize the use of force for regime change in Iraq, these cowards and turncoats pretend they never said what they said, that they never did what they did, and, to the disgust of all American patriots, that they “support the troops”. I never thought I would again feel the shame I felt in 1975 – the...

Last weekend, in a now famous interview with Chris Wallace, former President Clinton lied and spun about his non-record fighting terrorism. This weekend we saw a parade of Democrats crying “foul” when their record is exposed. Let’s again look at the facts.

Saudi Wealth Fuels Global Jihadism Posted Oct. 27, 2003 By Kenneth R. Timmerman Generations of Muslims in the Middle East have been raised on the anti-Western, anti-Semitic theologies of Ayatollah Khomeini and in the Saudi Wahhabi system of madrassas (religious schools). This foundation set the stage for the rise of Osama bin Laden. Doaa 'Amer is a professional TV anchor who hosts Muslim Woman Magazine on IQRAA TV, a satellite channel broadcasting throughout the Arab world. As she tells it, her job is to educate the next generation of children to be "true Muslims." Readers accustomed to hearing Islam described...

AMERICANS will certainly have 9/11 in mind when they vote today. But they should keep another date in mind, too — one almost exactly a quarter-century ago: Nov. 4, 1979. A clear path runs to 9/11 from the day of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages. The 1979 embassy attack came at a time when the administration of President Jimmy Carter was trying to prop up the new Khomeinist regime in Tehran. Carter had decided to support Khomeini in the context of the so-called "Green Belt" strategy developed by National Security...

In his recent visit to Washington, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told his American interlocutors that the European Union's initiative on Iran was heading for an impasse.... The Europeans have never been able to see any of the real decision-makers (known as tasmimgiran) in Tehran let alone engage them in negotiation. Rouhani and other facade officials, who talk to the Europeans, may honestly believe that Iran is not up to mischief if only because they do not know what is going on. Only those in the camarilla around "The Supreme Guide" have the full picture. The doors of that camarilla,...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

For most Americans, February 14 was Valentine's Day, the most insipid holiday on the calendar. The date deserves to be better known for another reason. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader and revolutionary dictator of Iran, pronounced a fatwa (an Islamic legal judgment) against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. It said: It is not outlandish to think of the World Trade Center towers as The Satanic Verses, magnified immeasurably but not beyond all recognition. "In the name of Him, the Highest. There is only one God, to whom we shall all return. I inform all zealous...

PARIS, 1 September 2004 — The Muslim world has a new hero. He is Hicham El-Gerroudj, the Moroccan running champion who bagged two gold medals at this year’s summer Olympics in Athens last week. For several days images of his heroic exploits, punctuated by smiles and tears of joy, have provided something of a relief from the Arab televisions’ normal fare. El-Gerroudj’s triumph, however, cannot hide the fact that, for the world’s 57 majority Muslim nations, this was probably the worst Olympics ever. To start with, the Muslim nations, who together account for some 1.2 billion people, almost a fifth...

City Journal Our Islamic Fifth Column Farrukh Dhondy Autumn 2001 My first name gives rise to confusion. It’s a common Muslim name, so people I meet, or who read my byline, assume that I am of the faith. Most recently, in response to a column I write for an Indian paper, in which I confessed to having met a few terrorists in my time and attempted to analyze their limited grasp of the world, I received a lot of hate mail. Some of the e-mailers clearly thought I was a Muslim apostate and reminded me that the penalty for that...

The charm of Iowa and New Hampshire: Canadian air masses; black ice and small towns; armies of journalists,clubby and obtuse; projections that do not project, experts who do not know; and finally, the candidates and their campaigns, multimillion-dollar insta-corporations careening to destruction, or surviving for another shot at becoming the Most Powerful People in the World. All of this is based on the say-so of yokels who were lucky enough to erect their peculiar political institutions on the equivalent of the Comstock Load, the system we wish Afghanistan and Iraq to emulate. At the end of his book Five Days...