Free Republic

Pete Hegseth’s ink is making quite a stink. The heavily tattooed secretary of defense was photographed Tuesday working out with Navy SEALs in Hawaii, with the images shared on X. “Kicked off the day alongside the warriors of SDVT-1 at @JointBasePHH. These SEALs are the tip of the spear, masters of stealth, endurance, and lethality. America’s enemies fear them—our allies trust them. Proud to spend time with America’s best,” Hegseth wrote. Then came a closer inspection from Scott Adams, who posted his research on X. “Interesting: Hegseth now bears a bold new tattoo—’Kafir,’ the Arabic word for infidel, inked on...

On this day in 1095 Pope Urban II made a speech.The setting was the Council of Clermont in France.Urban, indeed all of Europe, was alarmed at the aggression of the Turks in the East, who had taken the Holy Land and were invading the Eastern Roman Empire. Urban therefore addressed the Council asking them to help their Christian brethren in the East. As Robert the Monk recorded, Urban put it, apparently, this way: “Deus vult!… God wills it!”Thus began the First Crusade.In another version of Urban’s history-shaping speech recorded by one Fulcher of Chartres, Urban also addressed corruption in the...

... The problem with this quotation isn't the inaccuracy of the Emperor's observation but the opening it provides to allow Islamic apologists to take us back once more to the days of desperate and deadly Muslim-Christian competition in the late Middle Ages. For instance, Anas Altikriti, writing in the British leftist journal "The Guardian" under the headline "An Insufficient Apology" seized the opportunity to remind his readers that "whilst the Catholic church was cementing the barbarism of Europe's dark ages," the Muslims were "busy writing literature, philosophy, art, architecture, medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra and music." He goes on in...