Free Republic

By Monday, interestingly enough, the Russian invasion of Syria was receding as a topic of public concern. Apparently there no longer seemed anything explosive in the tidings of Vladimir Putin's slam-bang entry into that remote theater of conflict. This was notwithstanding those Russian airstrikes against the anti-Assad rebels whom the United States, supposedly, has been encouraging. When President Obama went before the TV cameras late last week, it was chiefly to flog anyone unable to fall in with the Absolute Necessity of Common-Sense Gun Control. "Russian planes, what Russian planes?" our Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader might as well have said....

A new report confirms more White House woes with our ally Israel. A Politico exclusive reveals that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid confronted White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on two occasions to ask President Obama to reject a UN resolution that would grant Palestine statehood. Both times, Obama gave him the silent treatment. While Reid has previously shown his support for Israel, his latest request may not exactly have been for the Middle Eastern country’s best interests. The timing suggested he was trying to secure passage for the Iran Deal: The requests from Reid came as he was...

As we approach Rosh Hashana, the people of Israel need to recognize how lucky we are. True, today, we find ourselves largely alone, set apart from our traditional partners in the Western world. But standing alone isn’t always the worst option. Today it is certainly not the worst option. Over the past several years, we have witnessed the growing radicalization and fragmentation of the societies of neighboring lands. Sunnis fight Shi’ites and one another. Minority populations are slaughtered, enslaved and oppressed. Regimes fall, rise and fall again. Today, every Arab society is either in danger or at war. And in...

In a vote of 269-162, the House of Representatives rejected the approval of the White House’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Every Republican except one voted against it, while they managed to get 25 Democrats on board as well. House votes 269-162 with one Present against approving the Iran nuclear deal pic.twitter.com/cluWKTroPQ— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) September 11, 2015 Today's vote may prove to be just a temporary setback for the Obama administration. Thursday night, the Senate voted to reject a GOP-led disapproval resolution. Even if it had passed, the president has enough votes to use his veto power. Several House members have...

The Democratic Party has been weak-minded on defense for decades, but with the Iran capitulation, they've achieved a new threshold of cowardice and treachery. While it's true that an honorable handful of Democrats have resisted the president's pressure, the overwhelming majority have chosen to go over the cliff with Barack Obama, a president who never met an enemy he didn't wish to conciliate or an ally he didn't seek to betray. Democrats have long tended toward appeasement of aggressors. Throughout the Cold War, they scared themselves (and everyone else) silly conjuring specters of nuclear holocaust. Then-Sen. John Kerry was one...

The recent and ongoing actions of the Iranian leadership could easily lead you to believe they don’t want the U.S. Congress to approve the nuclear deal. It may seem counterintuitive, but there are a number of plausible reasons this might make sense to the Iranians. First, the Iranians attained almost every concession they wanted in negotiations such as removing sanctions and a clear path to removal of the embargo on conventional weapons and even ballistic missiles when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was approved by the United Nations Security Council. The line at the Iranian Minister of Commerce’s...

American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test. If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day. If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. On the face of it,...

In President Barack Obama’s defense of his nuclear deal with Iran Wednesday, he said there are only two types of people who will oppose his deal – Republican partisans and Israel- firsters – that is, traitors. At American University, Obama castigated Republican lawmakers as the moral equivalent of Iranian jihadists saying, “Those [Iranian] hard-liners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal... are making common cause with the Republican Caucus.” He then turned his attention to Israel. Obama explained that whether or not you believe the deal endangers Israel boils down to whom you trust more...

As a US senator and a candidate for president a decade ago, John Kerry couldn't bring himself to worry overmuch about Islamic terrorism. Today, as a secretary of state trying to sell a nuclear accord that would lift economic sanctions from the world's leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, he still can't. During his run for the White House in 2004, Kerry insisted that the danger from global jihadists should be viewed as primarily an "intelligence gathering, law enforcement, public diplomacy effort," not a military conflict. "We have to get back to the place we were," he told an interviewer...

We say that evil is dark. But this metaphor is imprecise. Evil is actually intensely bright, so painfully bright that people look away from it. Many even deny its existence. Why? Because once people acknowledge evil's existence, they know they have to confront it. And most people prefer not to confront evil. That is what led to World War II. Many in the West denied the darkness of Nazism. They looked the other way when that evil could have been stopped and then appeased it as it became stronger. We are reliving 1938. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went to...

Last year, my book Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle To Take America Back 2009-2041, predicted a liberal sellout of Israel. The prediction was wrong only in terms of who led the betrayal. In reality it was Barack Obama, while in the book it is President Hillary Clinton. The following scenario is adapted from that chapter. All of the military and other information is based on open sources. On a warm September day in 2015, the United States Senate failed to override Obama’s veto of the measure rejecting his Iranian nuclear agreement. Every one of the 54 Republicans voted against the agreement,...

We awoke Tuesday morning to learn that history had indeed repeated itself. The lessons of Neville Chamberlain’s failed diplomatic effort were not studied nor learned by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The claims of “peace in our time” are empty if dependent upon the goodwill of despots, dictators, theocrats, and autocrats – of which the Iranian regime can be classified. There are those who seek to compare this agreement to President Reagan’s with the Soviet Union. There is a major difference. The Soviet Union was not a theocracy run by clerics who embrace the necessity of...

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler's new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up...

"What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. ... We can give them training, we can give them equipment; we obviously can't give them the will to fight." Thus did Defense Secretary Ash Carter identify the root cause of the rout of the Iraqi army in Ramadi. Disgusted U.S. military officers say the 1,000 ISIS fighters who overran Ramadi were outnumbered by the defenders 10 to 1. Why did the Iraqi army run? And what motivated the fighters of ISIS to attack a city whose defenders so vastly outnumbered them? According to battle reports,...

That's the real message, isn't it? Whether it's the young man or woman who chooses to join one of our military branches or anyone who decides to protect us from harm locally as police or sheriffs or deputies, it's becoming increasingly clear that wearing a uniform makes you a target in today's America. This isn't about the relatively few police officers who knowingly do wrong. Nor is it about past military incursions. The issue at hand is a growing sentiment among an increasing number of Americans that anyone in a uniform is not to be trusted or given a...

"We have police. They arrest girls or women for having bad hijab or not being covered enough. But it's not that we live with the police in our head. You know?" Those famous last words were pronounced by Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian journalist, in an interview alongside her husband, Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian -- who is a dual Iranian-American citizen raised in California -- for CNN's "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown" in 2014. Bourdain offered that the Iranians he met were super-friendly people with a strong sense of hospitality. Rezaian now has police in his head. Six weeks after the...

House Foreign Relations Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) recently briefed members of the Israel Allies Caucus on Capitol Hill. He spoke to supporters about Iran. Leading off with a question from decades ago: "What distinguishes the United States' nuclear missile arsenal from that of the Soviet Union?" That question was asked of President John F. Kennedy. And that young President answered succinctly: Attitude. Exactly right. The attitude of the United States is not one of dominance and aggression, whereas that of the USSR was undeniably so. President Kennedy had only to point to the Berlin Wall--a ugly spike driven through the heart of...

Other than about a billion things, I'm feeling pretty upbeat about the current state of our nation under the leadership of those whose worldview and priorities I simply cannot fathom. I would prefer not to be negative -- even less so to be pessimistic and, still less, cynical -- but current trends warrant serious concern. In the end, it's not negative, pessimistic or cynical to point out egregious conditions, especially if your aim is to alert your fellow citizens to the gravity of the problems and help ignite conditions that would put in place a plan to reverse this insanity....

Jeb Bush began a talk the other day by addressing the issue of his brother George, noted architect of the Iraq war, and he did not shrink from the challenge. "I can't deny the fact that I love my family," announced Jeb. So if you suspected that the Bush Thanksgivings in Kennebunkport resemble "August: Osage County" -- with lots of screaming, sobbing and clawing -- you probably feel pretty silly right now. On a more pertinent question -- whether the war was a wise idea -- the answer is not so clear. The former governor of Florida first said that,...

Ever since 9/11, whenever Americans seem especially polarized over a controversial issue, you’ll hear pundits recall how united we’d became in the aftermath of that vicious attack. Why, they ask, can’t we be like that again?A big part of the reason, frankly, is a lack of leadership at the top level. The tone set by President Obama and his team as they deal with world affairs hardly inspires confidence, either at home or abroad. And left unchecked, their lack of true resolve can lead to some very serious repercussions.Take our situation with Iran. Some of The Heritage Foundation’s top experts...