Free Republic

resident Barak Obama didn't intend to make the Battle of Yarmuk (636 A.D.) a 2015 news item. However, his bizarrely incomplete sketch of the Crusades, delivered last week at a national prayer breakfast, did just that. The president's media defenders contend he intended to make a justifiable point: Throughout history, people have corrupted religious faith to self-serving, murderous ends. That, however, is an oft-repeated truth -- something everyone already knows. But our president, while repeating something we already know, equated medieval Christian crusaders with 21st-century Islamic State terrorists. See, man? They both committed atrocities. Obama started solid, dubbing the Islamic...

Even before last week's terrorist attacks in Paris, the French prime minister was concerned about the continued viability of Jewish life in France. In an interview with The Atlantic prior to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres, Manuel Valls made a grim prediction:"If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure."His misgivings were far from groundless. An exodus of French Jews is already underway and accelerating rapidly. In 2012, there were just over 1,900 immigrants to Israel from France. The following year nearly 3,400 French Jews emigrated; in 2014 approximately...