Free Republic

PARIS — As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed in relatively clear skies, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international...

The papers of record continue to whistle in the dark. The day after Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, still doggedly refer to Fast and Furious as a "botched" operation. snip We don't refer to 9/11 as a botched attempt by Muslims to land planes at JFK and Dulles. Let's work on getting the MSM to retire this word.

On March 13 the Orlando Sentinel published a map of the Twin Lakes community where Trayvon Martin was shot, but no one else seems to have reproduced it. Yet it's impossible to reconstruct the incident without referring to it. George Zimmerman reports at the beginning of his 911 call that he's on Retreat View Circle, at 111, near the clubhouse, a block from the main entrance to the community, which is off Oregon Avenue. According to the Sentinel's map, the home Trayvon Martin was staying in was further down on Retreat View Circle. (You'll need to check maps.google to get...

snip Now comes the part of the story that has been scrupulously avoided by the national media. Zimmerman's concern about a young black male stranger has been represented as pure racism... This is the assumption that frames the entire narrative spun by the media. The corollary is that across the nation, young black males, especially those who choose to wear hoodies, are being targeted by white vigilantes. The Rambos are armed and dangerous, and it's open season on young black males... At the very beginning of his 911 call, Zimmerman tells the operator that there have been a lot of...

This year marks the 800th anniversary of the Children's Crusade. The celebration began early. There are some intriguing parallels, and contrasts, with OWS as it sputters into the new year. In the spring and summer of 1212, crowds of young people gathered around two charismatic boys: a shepherd from near Chartres called Stephen and a twelve-year-old from Cologne, Nicholas. Stephen claimed that he had received a letter from Jesus, delivered in person, and Nicholas reported a conversation with an angel. The boys had been told to lead a Crusade to the Holy Land. (snip) Tea-Partiers want to protect children; Occupiers...

snip Here is the historian W.H. Lecky: No fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation[.] ... The great majority of the democracies of the world are now frankly protectionist, and even in free-trade countries the multiplication of laws regulating, restricting, and interfering with industry in all its departments is one of the most marked characteristics of our time... The expansion of the authority and the multiplication of the functions of the State in other fields, and especially in the field of social regulation, is an equally apparent accompaniment of modern democracy. This increase...

Today is the anniversary of the first election in history in which a nation's leader was selected by universal male suffrage. On December 10, 1848, Frenchmen went to the polls for the first time in fifty-six years. For a third time, a revolution had overthrown the king, and for the second time, a republic was proclaimed. But the French voters blew it. The surprise winner was a seedy forty-year-old adventurer who had lived in exile in Switzerland and England, except for two ignominious coup attempts. He ran on a vaguely socialistic platform of hope and change -- his first book...

Dear Sasha: I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit an op-ed to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we must respectfully decline. On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of the "paper of record" has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan's admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no one is entitled to their own facts. A case in point was your decision last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: "It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood...

In October 1914, over 5 million Belgians faced starvation. The German Army had invaded on August 4 and swept across the country in three weeks. Revisionist historians would later snicker about "atrocities" invented by the British, but the Kaiser's troops executed over 5,500 Belgians, women and children as well as men, though there was no civilian resistance to the invasion. Over 2 million refugees fled to Holland, France, and Britain. The Germans requisitioned all grain, flour, livestock, fruit, and vegetables. They seized the railroads, canals, all motor vehicles, and telegraph and telephone lines, and removed machinery from factories. The economy...

There is an illegal occupation that has gone on for decades in the Middle East and it's not being enforced by the IDF. In August 1974, Turkey seized nearly 37% of the then-independent Cyprus. The pretext for the invasion was the protection of Turkish Cypriots, who made up about 18% of the island's population. On July 15, EOKA B, a Cypriot paramilitary organization supporting union with Greece, backed by the junta in Athens, overthrew the government of Archbishop Makarios. But the coup failed. Makarios survived and his thuggish replacement was ousted after eight days in office, when the regime of...

The focus on the Penn State scandal has been almost entirely on the dramatic events of 2002, when graduate assistant Mike McQueary barged in on the rape of "Victim 2." In fact it was decisions in 1998 and 1999 that revealed the university's priorities, and turned what would have been a tragedy for Jerry Sandusky into a tragedy for Joe Paterno. On July 1, 1999, Sandusky, then fifty-five, announced that he was retiring as defensive coordinator at the end of the season. "It was a decision that shocked Penn State fans, coaches and players alike," wrote the Daily Collegian. There...

Goliath Davis III, whose rise to the top of his hometown Police Department and City Hall made him the city's most influential African-American official, was fired by Mayor Bill Foster this week. Davis said the mayor wanted him out because he did not attend Tuesday's funeral for the third officer killed in the city in 28 days. Yet the former police chief did go to the funeral of the convict who killed the first two officers.

JERUSALEM – At a time when peace talks with the Palestinians are stalled over Jewish settlements, the Israeli government plans to send schoolchildren on field trips to a disputed holy site in one of the West Bank's most volatile flash points. Education Minister Gideon Saar says the visits to Hebron, burial site of the biblical patriarch Abraham and home to some of Israel's most radical settlers, are part of a plan to acquaint Israeli youngsters with their heritage. "It is a place of emotional, religious and historical power," Saar, a leading member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party, told...

When I was 14, Warren Buffett wrote me a letter. It was a response to one I’d sent him, pitching an investment idea. For a kid interested in learning stocks, Buffett was a great role model. His investing style — diligent security analysis, finding competent management, patience — was immediately appealing. Buffett was kind enough to respond to my letter, thanking me for it and inviting me to his company’s annual meeting. I was hooked. Today, Buffett remains famous for investing The Right Way. He even has a television cartoon in the works, which will groom the next generation of...

1. On September 12, 2001 and in the days that followed, how long did you imagine it would be before America experienced another terrorist attack on its soil? 2. Have you heard of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He conceived and planned the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden is a figurehead. Khalid was captured by Pakistani security forces in Rawalpindi in 2003. The year before, the Pakis captured Ramzi Binalshibh, who was the middle-man between Kahlid and the hijackers. Have you heard of him? By 2004, two-thirds of Al-Qaeda’s leadership was in jail or dead. This raises two additional questions: 3. Why do...

It was this latter incarnation of "neomedievalism" that proffered a cache of analogies about the "medieval" nature of contemporary non-state actors, including terrorists, which subsequently influenced the reasoning behind the legal judgments expressed by the authors of the torture memos as they set about demonizing the Taliban and al Qaeda...

"How can you talk about bombing a country when you won't even talk to them?" said Clark. "It's outrageous. We're the United States of America; we don't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the military option is off the table -- but diplomacy is not what Jim Baker says it is. It's not, What will it take for you boys to support us on Iraq? It's sitting down for a couple of days and talking about our families and our hopes, and building relationships. When we asked him what made him so sure the Bush administration was...

Wall Street's political cash favors Democrats 11:20 ET, Fri 6 Oct 2006 [-] Text [+] By Tim McLaughlin ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - Wall Street has shifted its allegiance in the 2006 election cycle by donating more to Democrats than Republicans who have been the investment banks' usual benefactors, U.S. Federal Election Commission data show. Five leading firms Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bear Stearns Companies Inc.,Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. have contributed $6.2 million so far to candidates before the November elections, with about 52 percent going to Democrats. "People give ideological money and they...

Iraq The Times December 26, 2005 Iraqi worshippers risk their lives to celebrate Christmas in church From Stephen Farrell in Baghdad IRAQIS gathered for Christmas behind Kalashnikovs yesterday. Midnight Mass was cancelled because of bombing fears and curfews, but the country’s rapidly dwindling Christian minority turned out in their thousands for early morning services. Protected under Saddam, Christians once numbered between 600,000 and 700,000 in Iraq, but church officials say that about half have now fled, especially from the south, where militias linked to Iraq’s ruling parties have waged a three-year campaign to Islamise the country at gunpoint. The worst...