Free Republic

Another day, another plot twist to the 'Awan Brothers,' story. Daily Caller reporter Luke Rosiak discovered Thursday that the Awan brothers' next court date, scheduled for January 8th, 2018, disappeared from the calendar. "Strange: The next #AwanBrothers court date was supposed to be January 8 (after being postponed twice) but it is not showing on the court's calendar as of now," tweeted Rosiak on Thursday. News of the disappearing court date comes amid a report suggesting Imran Awan ran a car dealership that may have fronted as an overseas money laundering operation. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller reports: "On...

Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil suffered criticism from his fellow ministers over a television interview in which he was shown saying that Lebanon did not have an ideological problem with Israel and was not against it having security. The comments were all the more unusual as they were made to the al-Mayadin television channel, a central Hezbollah mouthpiece. A former government minister called on Bassil to resign and he was also sharply criticized in the Lebanese parliament.. Bassil's office later claimed that al-Mayadin had distorted his comments but could not explain how or what his real intention had been...

The US Department of Justice will investigate claims that the Obama administration shielded the Lebanon-based Shi’ite terrorist group Hezbollah from criminal prosecution for its drug-trafficking and gun-running operations, as part of an effort to curry favor with Hezbollah’s patron, Iran. Last week, Politico released an investigative report citing Drug Enforcement Administration and former Treasury Department officials who claimed that the previous administration blocked the prosecution of Hezbollah officials known to be involved in the smuggling of illegal narcotics and weapons – including chemical weapons – in an effort to bring Hezbollah’s patron state, Iran, to the negotiating table. In 2015,...

Yesh Atid chairman and former Finance Minister Yair Lapid urged former President Barack Obama to return the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009, if an investigative report regarding his administration’s behavior towards the Hezbollah terror group is correct. Speaking with party members on Monday, Lapid responded to a report released by Politico early Monday morning which claims that the Obama administration systematically shielded the Hezbollah terrorist organization from prosecution, blunting the efforts of the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack-down on Hezbollah’s global drug trade and money laundering rackets. “If the report is correct,” Lapid told party members at...

Did the current administration “collude” with Russia? So far no evidence at all has emerged to support that hypothesis, but Politico’s Josh Meyer digs deep into another curious set of circumstances in the Obama White House and its own operations with a foreign power. Perhaps the media will start asking whether the previous administration colluded with Iran to let terrorists and drug dealers go free in order to score one of the worst deals ever in international relations. Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation...

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday blasted U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “We feel that we are facing Balfour Declaration 2,” Nasrallah said. “When we understand the dangers involved in this decision, it will prompt everyone to act and take responsibility — and not to obey the voices that will be heard in the coming days. I expect that we will hear voices in the Arab and Islamic world that will say that what happened is meaningless.” […] Nasrallah claimed that, with Trump’s declaration, “he humiliated a billion and a half Muslims,...

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday blasted U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. "We feel that we are facing Balfour Declaration 2," Nasrallah said...." "We all know that the Israeli enemy and the leaders of this entity do not respect international resolutions. This is proven. They do not even respect the agreements they signed. Their interest is the most important for them, they do not care what the Arab countries, Islamic states, European countries, Canada and Latin America say," added the Hezbollah leader. "For those who are interested in a peace agreement, Trump...

The number of “Palestinian refugees” in Lebanon has decreased significantly over the past few years and many are leaving for other countries to try to improve their situation. In an interview with the Hamas newspaper Palestine on Thursday, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon Ali Baraka said that some 260,000 “Palestinian refugees” had left the refugee camps in Lebanon to various countries in recent years because of the difficult security and economic conditions. According to him, the figures he cited are based on a poll conducted by the Lebanese authorities and which indicates that there is a deliberate action to bring about...

1. Ahmad Abu Adass In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home. It was there, after a prayer session,...

The Hezbollah terrorist group, which is backed by Iran, on Friday condemned the van attack in Barcelona that killed at least 13 people. Thursday’s attack was claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS) group. In a statement issued in Beirut and quoted by The Associated Press, Hezbollah said the attack must be a renewed incentive to eliminate ISIS "whose ideology is based on hate." The statement said that "targeting innocent civilians and killing them is part of a satanic plot being carried out by those terrorists, which aims at tarnishing the concept of jihad (holy war) and sullying the image of...

Two Middle East immigrants in the United States have been arrested in connection with terrorist activities after the FBI found out their chilling ties to the terrorist organization known as Hezbollah. This is a wake-up call to every American. According to a news release from United States Attorney’s Office, District of New York, “Ali Kourani and Samer El Debek, a/k/a ‘Samer Eldebek,’ were arrested on Thursday, June 1, 2017, on charges related to their alleged activities on behalf of Hizballah[sic], a designated foreign terrorist organization. “ Kourani was reportedly living in the Bronx in New York, while Eldebek was living...

Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...

Syrian Accountability Act to Combat Terrorism By Jim Hauser Talon News December 18, 2003WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Last week, President Bush signed into law H.R. 1828, the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003. The legislation calls on the president to impose sanctions on Syria to discourage support for international terrorist groups and the occupation of Lebanon.The bill demands that Syria end support for terrorism; halt the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) along with medium- and long-range missiles; and withdraw the roughly 20,000 troops it has deployed in Lebanon.It also calls on Syria to "enter into...

President Obama held an Oval Office meeting with Middle Eastern-based Arab Christians on 9/11, one member of whom is a loud and proud supporter of the terrorist group Hezbollah. The day before, members of the same group, holding a conference under the name In Defense of Christians, booed and shouted down keynote speaker Senator Ted Cruz ”It’s surprising White House staffers allowed Maronite Patriarch Bashara Rai to meet with the President in the first place. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah supporting cleric isn’t shy about his views. “Everyone says why is Hezbollah carrying arms?” said Rai...

Knesset Member Azmi Bishara in Lebanon: We are original inhabitants of Palestine, not ‘those who came from Poland, Russia; says Israelis should leave, take their democracy with them Israel is the 20th century's greatest robbery, carried out in broad daylight, Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara (National Democratic Assembly) told a Lebanese audience last week during a speech at an Arab book fair in Beirut. "I will never recognize Zionism even if all Arabs do," he said. "I will never concede Palestine. The battle is still long." Bishara, who recently launched his campaign for an additional term in the Knesset, left...

The arrest (which has since been reduced to house arrest) of Iz a-Din Badran, the parliamentary aide of Balad MK Azmi Bishara, due to suspicions that he organized trips by Israeli Arabs to Syria without a permit, testifies to the hardheartedness of the Israeli security system, which does not distinguish between issues of a human-humanitarian nature and issues of security and politics. Israeli citizens whom Badran is suspected of helping traveled to Syria in order to meet family members that they had not seen for 57 years. Most of these citizens are elderly people who became separated from their family...

(IsraelNN.com) Security services suspect that former MK Azmi Bishara, a fugitive living abroad accused of providing aid to Hizbullah, is intent on recruiting agents for the Lebanese terrorist group among Israeli Arabs. In recent days, agents of the General Security Services (GSS) invited activist members of the Balad party from Wadi Ara to the agency's offices and warned them against contact with Bishara. Balad was led by Bishara until his flight from the country in 2007. A member of the Arab Coordinating Committee, Ashraf Kortam, was also questioned by security services about his relationship with Bishara. He was asked to...

Woman Expected To Plead Guilty To Disclosing Unauthorized Info To Hezbollah Sympathizers (CBS) A woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst is expected to plead guilty to charges she disclosed unauthorized information to people outside the government, CBS News has learned. Sources say the woman, from Lebanon, entered the United States on a student visa and earned citizenship through a sham marriage. While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage and no evidence that she was working as a spy, she is accused of passing information to sympathizers of Hezbollah, a group the...

Nada Nadim Prouty, a 37-year-old Lebanese national and resident of Vienna, Va., pleaded guilty today in the Eastern District of Michigan to charges of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, which she later used to gain employment at the FBI and CIA; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizballah; and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

War On Terror: The head of U.S. Southern Command has warned lawmakers that IS is radicalizing converts and other Muslims in Latin America and could train and send them north via human traffickers. Gen. John Kelly issued his warning in a hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee on defense appropriations for fiscal 2016. He's concerned that in addition to the Iranian terrorist puppet Hezbollah being active in Latin America, the Islamic State is promoting and recruiting for jihad against the United States in the region. "Last year, IS adherents posted discussions on social media calling for the infiltration...