Free Republic

We are in a time of the first ever mass conversions of Muslims,” Father Mitch Pacwa SJ told me in a phone interview. “God is doing a mighty work among them.” Pacwa said that mass conversions are happening even in very fundamentalist countries. There is rapidly growing number of conversions especially on the edges of the Muslim world in the western and southern parts of Africa, he said. “Africa is now growing predominantly Christian despite crackdowns,” Pacwa said. Some of the noteworthy countries he mentioned include Iran, reported to have 3 million Christians, and Indonesia with reports of 2 million...

From escaping Iran through the mountains as a Muslim refugee, to surviving domestic abuse and imprisonment in a Turkish prison, to carving out a life in Sweden, Annahita Parsan’s story is the stuff of a Hollywood movie. Parsan, a convert from Islam to Christianity and mother of two, has emerged as one of the most prominent religious figures in Europe, both because of her unlikely geographic and spiritual pilgrimage and her decision to reach out to Muslims with the gospel -- at great personal risk. *snip* On the heels of bringing a daughter she named Roksana into the world and...

A former Planned Parenthood health center director says her main goal is not to make abortion illegal or even to defund Planned Parenthood, but, instead to make the entire idea of abortion “unthinkable.” Abby Johnson, now a national pro-life leader, tells Breitbart News that, as the March for Life approaches Friday, it is understandable many pro-life activists are focused on eliminating taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. “But, if I’m totally honest, my main goal is not to defund Planned Parenthood,” Johnson said during an interview. “My main goal is not even to make abortion illegal. My goal is to make...

It’s true that CNN and the New York Times, among other liberal outlets, have rightly been called out for their failure to report accurately on the protests in Iran. But there’s something that not even the conservative media is telling you today, an important backstory that might be playing a role in this rising protest movement.As for the leftwing media, Caroline Glick noted in her article in the Jerusalem Post that, “Given the earth shattering potential of the protests it is extraordinary to see the liberal media in the US and Europe struggle to downplay their significance.” And here in...

The FBI on Friday night raided the Sterling, Virginia, home of a Muslim convert, Sean Andrew Duncan, who, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case, stated that he attempted to join ISIS in Syria and shared bomb-making instructions with a woman currently in international custody. Sterling, about 20 miles from Washington, D.C., is home to a large Muslim community. According to an Instagram post by Duncan, he converted to Islam at age 17 and moved to the area from Pittsburgh this past June. When reports emerged Friday night that an FBI raid was ongoing, there was no indication...

AP: FBI Sent Hamas Money in Clinton Days JOHN SOLOMON Associated Press WASHINGTON - While President Clinton was trying to broker an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the FBI was secretly funneling money to suspected Hamas figures to see if the militant group would use it for terrorist attacks, according to interviews and court documents. The counterterrorism operation in 1998 and 1999 was run out of the FBI's Phoenix office in cooperation with Israeli intelligence and was approved by Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI officials told The Associated Press. Several thousand dollars in U.S. money was sent to suspected...

The British-born jihadi bride who was married to the most senior American member of ISIS has spoken out, revealing her new life as a suburban mom in Dallas. Tania Georgelas, 33, detailed her radicalization, her dream for her children to become terrorists and the ultimate split with her jihadi husband in a new interview with The Atlantic, released Friday. 'Our dreams were to have land of our own, raise a family and train them be assassins or whatever, soldiers, and then eventually go join the jihad,' she said of her ex-husband John Georgelas, an American-born convert to Islam who has risen to...

Not exactly cut in stone, but apparently ISIS says the shooter converted to Islam months ago. Per WMAL in Wash. DC.

This morning, the Islamic State’s semi-official news agency, Amaq, took credit for the Las Vegas massacre, which killed 58 and wounded another 515. The likely killer, identified by police as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, was not known to be a supporter of the Islamic State, or indeed a Muslim of any type. For now, the only evidence that the Islamic State was involved is its own assurance—first a press release announcing that a “soldier of the Islamic State” executed the concertgoers, and a follow-up for the baffled, explaining that he converted to Islam months ago. The FBI has...

Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén released a statement on Hungary’s official government website saying: “Right from the beginning, we have differentiated between economic migrants and genuine asylum-seekers.” “Taking in persecuted Christians is our moral and constitutional duty all at once,” he added.

Christianity is making a comeback in Europe – and it’s mostly thanks to Muslims, say experts in Islam and faith leaders. A soaring number of Muslims, many of them refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are converting to Christianity, breathing new life into Europe’s once floundering Christian churches. The Muslims are flocking to various Christian denominations, experts said, including becoming Protestants, evangelical or Catholic. As many parts of Europe are becoming more secular and houses of worship are seeing congregants leave in droves, it is Muslim converts who are reviving struggling Christian churches

Dr. Danusha V. Goska was a lifelong liberal who “could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist.” Her fantastic column, “Top Ten Reasons I Am No Longer a Leftist,” details how and why her philosophies changed. How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace...

Michael D’Andrea goes by many names. To those in the CIA, he’s the Undertaker, the Dark Prince, Ayatollah Mike. To Hollywood, he’s the Wolf, immortalized in Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. To the general public, he is nobody, as he is still undercover, a man who has spent 38 years toiling at the CIA, his dutiful service resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. He is stubbled and gaunt, with a preference for dark suits, his colleagues say, and he has a bad smoking habit and a bad attitude. {..snip..}

"....... Arthurs told police he was a white supremacist until his recent conversion to Islam, according to the arrest affidavit. He said that in “some time” before the murders, Russell participated in no-Nazi online chat rooms where he “threatened to kill people and bomb infrastructure,” according to the FBI report." .

Most of us know the story of the 21 Coptic Christians from Egypt who held fast to their faith and were beheaded by ISIS in February, 2015. But did you know that only 20 of them were actually Copts from Egypt? Did you know that one of the martyrs was from Chad, and he had not been a Christian prior to the day of his beheading? This story was previously reported. But I had not heard it before this week, when I attended the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians hosted by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. A Coptic...

Archbishop Thomas Luke Msusa's fascinating story of faith, conversion and vocation VATICAN CITY — Forty-eight prelates from Africa are currently in Rome for the Synod on the Family. In speaking with the bishops of Africa about the synod, sometimes surprising and beautiful stories emerge about their countries, their culture, and even their own family lives. One such story is that of Archbishop Thomas Luke Msusa of the Blantyre archdiocese in Malawi, who is a convert from Islam to Catholicism. Archbishop Msusa, 53, serves as vice-chairman of the eight-country association of member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa. He was ordained a...

Teaching about Islam taught me many things. I enjoyed being a priest helping the people for some years. However, deep inside I was not happy and I felt that there was something not right. Fortunately, and it is God’s will, some events and coincidences in my life led me to Islam. I used to think of Egypt as a country of Pyramids, camels, sand and palm trees. I actually took a charter flight to Hurghada. Shocked to find it similar to some European beaches, I took the first bus to Cairo where I spent the most wonderful week in my...

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.” The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the...

Information is slowly trickling out that links the Ft. Lauderdale Airport shooter to radical Islam while the official story from authorities is that the gunman is a mentally ill, Hispanic Army veteran named Esteban Santiago that became unhinged after a tour in Iraq. Only one mainstream media outlet mentions the possibility of Santiago’s “jihadist identity,” burying it in a piece about New York possibly being his initial target. A paragraph deep in the story mentions that investigators recovered Santiago’s computer from a pawn shop and the FBI is examining it to determine whether he created a “jihadist identity for himself...

One night Stojan asked the man in black and white in his frightening dream as to his identity. "My name is Thomas Aquinas," he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn't recognize the Dominican saint's name. Stojan asked the nightly visitor, "Who are these children?" "They are the ones you killed with your abortions," St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble. Stojan awoke in shock and fear. He decided he would refuse to participate in any more abortions.