Free Republic

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision Friday to convert Hagia Sophia, the foremost cathedral in Christendom for nearly 1,000 years, to a mosque has been condemned the world over, but it has also garnered applause from at least one Christian theologian, the liberal Anglican Giles Fraser, who joins the multitudes of other Christian leaders who believe that appeasement and self-abnegation, even unto utter self-destruction, is the way forward for the Church.

ALMA says the never-before-published sites are deep in the heart of residential areas in Beirut, next to hospitals, KFC restaurants, schools and more There are at least 28 missile launching sites belonging to Hezbollah in civilian areas in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, a new report by ALMA Research and Education Center has found. The report found that the never-before-published sites concentrated mainly in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Beirut are related to the launch, storage, and production of the group’s Fateh 110/M600 medium-range missiles and are “the same as those subject to the Hezbollah missile precision-guided missile project (PGM’s).” “The world...

On Sunday, Pope Francis broke his silence regarding the decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to convert Hagia Sophia, the foremost cathedral in the Christian world for nearly a thousand years, to a mosque. If you blinked, however, you might have missed it. “I think of Hagia Sophia,” the Pope said, “and I am very saddened.” It was quite clear why he didn’t choose to say more: virtually anything he added would have landed him in troubles that he doesn’t want to have. The Pope’s tardy statement, such as it is, manifests a studied ambiguity. What exactly is he...

Breaking News: President Trump commuting the sentence of Roger Stone...... How about "revenue raisers" or in plain language "higher taxes" to deal with tax revenue shortfalls and recovery from the coronavirus situation? Government officials across the country beginning to broach the subject. Among them New Jersey's Governor Phil Murphy..... A Kentucky judge's order putting a cloud over Democrat Governor Andy Beshear's mask (muzzle) order..... "Over the past several week I have been asked repeatedly about what the Town of Eagar plans to do about Covid-19, masks, visitors, riots etc. It is somewhat alarming how many expect and almost invite a...

Turkey's President Erdogan has formally converted the former Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque to drum up support for his Islamic-rooted party... The move came hours after Turkey's highest administrative court issued a landmark ruling that unanimously annulled the 1934 cabinet decision to renovate the site into a museum. It meant the green light was given for Erdogan to restore the UNESCO World Heritage site's previous status as a mosque, reopening it to Muslim worship. Erdogan, a devout Muslim, is scheduled to deliver an address to the nation later today and has frequently used the Hagia Sophia issue... Nationalist and...

Vatican silent as verdict triggers geopolitical tremorsISTANBUL (ChurchMilitant.com) - In a historic verdict, Turkey's top court has returned the world's greatest Byzantine basilica to its previous status as a mosque after it abolished President Atatürk's 1934 decision to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum. Turkey's highest administrative court, the Council of State, reached a unanimous verdict declaring that president Kemal Atatürk's cabinet had no right to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum as part of his secularist reforms and has rendered the decision unlawful. The court is expected to deliver its judgment Friday, but Turkish journalist Mehmet Ardıç, a close...

Since the beginning of its intervention in Syria in September 2015, Russia has not only sought to keep in place its most faithful Arab ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. It has also wanted to regain the regional and global influence that it lost since the fall of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has sought to use the turmoil in the Middle East to erase international norms and advances in international humanitarian law made since the second world war. In fact, creating the humanitarian disaster that has turned almost 6m Syrians into refugees has not been a byproduct of the Russian...

In a “resounding” intervention with multidimensional nuances on the issue of Hagia Sophia, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow called not to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque. In a statement, Patriarch Kirill stressed his deep concern over the calls of certain Turkish politicians to reconsider the status of Hagia Sophia as a museum, “one of the greatest monuments of Christian culture.” He highlighted that there have been different, sometimes rather difficult periods in the history of relations between Rus’ and Constantinople. But “the Russian people responded in the past and respond now with bitterness and indignation to any attempt to degrade...

Audio recordings of the horrifying conversations between the 15-man Saudi hit squad and their victim, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has been revealed to the public for the first time by the Turkish daily Sabah. The conversations recorded prior to and during the Oct. 2, 2018 murder of the dissident journalist at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate were obtained by Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) right after the gruesome incident, and were shared with related Turkish authorities carrying out an investigation into the incident, as well as with international officials and institutions. One of the recordings of the conversations between Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb,...

GENEVA (18 June 2018) – UN human rights experts* have made a fresh call to Iran to annul the death sentence imposed on Iranian Kurd Ramin Hossein Panahi, amid reports that he will be executed after the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The execution of Mr. Panahi was previously set for 3 May, but was postponed. It is understood that a request for a judicial review was rejected by the Iranian Supreme Court in late May, and the sentence against him was then referred to the office responsible for carrying it out.“The Iranian authorities must now halt the...

[Tehran] is in a difficult position because it labeled the explosion an accident, but it is now facing a deluge of foreign media reports seeking to conclude that the explosion was perpetrated by a state or group. This is what Iran's regime is reading: Major media from The New York Times to The Washington Post and local media such as Kuwait's Al-Jarida have all sought to assert that Israel was involved in the mysterious July 2 explosion at a warehouse in the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility... [t]hat could set back the program for months or a year. Iran, however, is...

July 7 (UPI) -- New York regulators announced Tuesday a $150 million penalty on Deutsche Bank tied to suspicious transactions involving Jeffrey Epstein and two foreign banks, Danske Estonia and FBME Bank. Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay $150 million as a result of "significant compliance failures," Linda Lacewell, superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, said in a statement. These failures were related to its banking relationships with Epstein and the two foreign banks. The statement said the settlement marks the first enforcement action by a regulator against a financial institution for dealings with registered sex...

Moscow, July 6, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church has spoken against transformation of the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul, which currently has the museum status, into a mosque. "There must be no return to the Medieval Period. We live in a multipolar world, a multi-confessional world, and feelings of believers must be respected," head of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Hilarion said in the Church and the World program of the television channel Rossiya 24. He admitted that modern Turkey had a predominantly Muslim population but said "there is no deficit of mosques" in Istanbul,...

At pro-Palestinian Black Lives Matter rallies in New York and Washington, chants were heard calling for “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!” Several hundred protesters attended the July 1 demonstration in Brooklyn dubbed as a “Day of Rage” event, set to coincide with the earliest date Israel could begin its plans to apply Israeli law over parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Speakers issued inflammatory rallying cries that ran the gamut from anti-Semitic and anti-American to just plain absurd. One pro-North Korea activist called for the end of the...

Turkey appears to have lost some of its army men and MIM-23 Hawk air defense systems as Libyan National Army (LNA) warplanes struck al-Watiya airbase on Sunday night. The airbase was recaptured from renegade commander Khalifa Haftar’s grip by Libya’s Turkey-backed and internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in May. Official confirmation from the Turkish Ministry of Defense is awaited. Hawk Missile System (MIM-23) The MIM-23 Homing-All-the-Way-Killer (HAWK) missile system is a medium-range, surface-to-air guided missile system designed for air defense. The supersonic Hawk is effective against low-to-medium altitude (100 to 38,000 feet) aircraft and some short-range ballistic missiles....

Arif Aslan, a correspondent for the Voice of America (VOA) Kurdish service, was arrested today in the eastern Turkish province of Van. He was following a democracy march started by the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Speaking to Gazete Duvar, Aslan’s lawyer, Cahit Durmaz, said he was arrested due to a previous conviction dating back to 2016-2017 and was expected to be released on parole after around two weeks in prison. Aslan was previously arrested on March 31, 2017, reportedly for photographing the barriers put in front of the municipal building in Van after the Turkish government appointed a caretaker...

#3,841 I think this vid gives a good overview of what happened. It starts with some crazy woman saying ANY SUV THAT COMES NEAR US YOU NEED TO SHOOT THEM SHOOT ALL THE SUVS IT COULD BE ALL OF THEM etc etc At 0: 45 you hear screaming tires and at around 1:00 the jeep crashes and gunshots start. I marked the place where the jeep crashes. On the pic the crash already occurred. Rumor is that there was a shootout before with another group. That's why the crazy woman yells to shoot any suv that comes near. 14 and...

In this Friday, Oct. 26, 2018 file photo, released by Oman News Agency, Oman's Sultan Qaboos, left, receives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Muscat, Oman. (Oman News Agency via AP, File) The “last decade,� notes James Sinkinson in a perceptive article, has seen a “sea change� in Israel’s ties with “key Arab states.� And that last decade is also the one in which Benjamin Netanyahu (again, after a stint in the 1990s) has been Israel’s prime minister — specifically since March 2009.True, conditions for enhanced Arab-Israeli ties have been propitious — particularly the behavior of regional bully Iran, a...

BEIRUT, LEBANON (3:20 P.M.) – The semi-official Syrian newspaper, Al-Watan, published the first scenes of the destruction left by the Israeli strikes in the Hama countryside this morning. The photos published by the Syrian newspaper on its official Facebook page show the great destruction caused by the raids on some installations, buildings and structures in the Al-Salamiyah District of Hama. The Syrian newspaper did not state the name of these buildings, the location, or the total number of losses from these strikes. At approximately 12:45 A.M. (local time) last night, the Israeli Air Force fired several missiles at the eastern...

As Turkey touts its humanitarian aid deliveries to Syria's Idlib, critics weigh the six truckloads of supplies against its thousands of tons of allegedly looted Syrian grain. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported that on Monday, two Turkish charities had sent six trucks carrying humanitarian aid to the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwest Syria. “Truckloads of supplies including flour, clothing and dry food [donated] by the Adana Dosteller and Eskisehir Gunisigi charities entered Idlib through the Yayladagi border crossing in Turkey’s southern Hatay province. The aid will be distributed among families living in tents in Idlib,” Anadolu reported. Turkey’s...