Free Republic

When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left.To non-Jewish friends who have reached out, thank you. It is simply the human thing to do. To friends who dare justify what has happened, you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language. To the Palestinians: you have lost all moral authority to claim victimhood. I will never advocate for you again. To my family, friends in Israel, and Jews around the world hurting right now,...

JAKARTA, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Indonesia's environment minister has dismissed as "inappropriate and unfair" a global plan to end deforestation by 2030, days after her country, home to a third of the world's rainforests, was among more than 100 that made the zero-deforestation pledge. The agreement late on Monday at the COP26 climate talks is at odds with Indonesia's development plans and the global goals should be fine-tuned, said minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar... ...Siti said definitions of deforestation differ widely, so imposing European standards onto Indonesia was unfair...

The modern West’s freefall into the abyss of feelings, entertainment, mindlessness, lawlessness, and thoughtless immoral behavior was largely learned in the academic halls of the 1800’s, with the lion’s share of such attitudes coming out of Germany that fostered an unwarranted amount of skepticism toward the historical truths of the Bible. In particular, the German Enlightenment disregarded the Jewish foundations of the Bible. They sought to separate biblical history from both Jews and Christians because they saw the Bible not only as too superstitious with too many miracles, but also and closely connected, as too limiting, exclusionary, and particularistic ....

(snip) Pseudo-idealism is a term coined by the Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith to describe apparently charitable behavior that on scrutiny is revealed as selfish, because the giver is engaging in it only so that he or she can feel good about him- or herself. It is a characteristic commonly found among the left, and it constitutes what the author Geoffrey Wheatcroft recognized as the left's inherent dishonesty. (snip)

<p>This is perhaps the most elaborate and graphic of all the murder videos posted online by IS.</p> <p>Much of it is taken up with a recent history lesson on Iraq and Syria as seen through the eyes of the jihadists. But the latter part shows a mass beheading of Syrian prisoners in revolting, lingering detail.</p>

Many in America’s freedom movement still hope that the Libertarian Party will one day become a power on the political scene to challenge the Democrat-Republican monolith. But in 42 years it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. There are some very distinct reasons why the LP and all other alternative / independent parties fail. This essay will examine them. Let’s take, for example, the top independent parties out there: the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party. Even though each of them haveappeared at times to be a start toward genuine political reform, they repeatedly fail because they have structured...

President likes to refer to us as grown children and is quick to boast that because of his ObamaCare plan we can stay on our parents’ health insurance plans until we’re 26. But this is a generation that remembers typing papers on word processors and tearing the edges off dot matrix paper. We weren’t the first on the information super highway but once we got a license, we took over the road. Facebook has tracked every day of our lives since college and Twitter turned us into citizen reporters. We also have degrees – some of us multiple degrees- but...

Before I left for Libya to cover Moammar Gadhafi's flight from Tripoli and its aftermath, my roommate in Cairo remarked that I didn't look excited to be going. "I'm not sure what else I can learn about war," I said. I wanted to believe the narrative I had been getting from news coverage of the Libyan revolution - that this revolution was spotless, clean, was a replacement for the murderous dictatorship that came before. But too many years of war disabuses any rational observer of such romanticism. I had covered the war in Iraq and the violence in Lebanon and...

For too long, it has been common knowledge in our society that leftist political philosophies contain within them the ingredients for an ideal state of affairs in the world. The perceived “humanism” and liberalism (in the classic sense) of the leftists emerged from the stark contrast between their ideas and that of the “establishment.” History is riddled with examples of how the “establishment” has wronged mankind, held back the spirit of progress, and led to countless atrocities. From religious wars to despotic rule to exploitative capitalism during the Industrial Revolution, the Old Order seemed to keep us all in a...

Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button. Until yesterday's formal announcement of the administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn't prevent all wars -- but wars remained local. Yesterday, we threw away a significant part of history's most successful deterrent. This looks like an act of reckless vanity on the part of the administration, but let's allow that this...

"We're All Realists Now." No. Pragmatists maybe, but not "realists." Barack Obama's election as U.S. president delighted many people, especially the self-described foreign-policy "realists" who accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of denying reality in favor of dangerous idealism. Obama has praised the realpolitik of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. And a White House official recently told the Wall Street Journal, "[Obama] has really kind of clicked with that old-school, end-of-the-Cold-War wise-men generation." The elder Bush's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, called Obama's election a rejection of the younger Bush "in favor of realism." Of course foreign policy should be...

Where do you stand on this pre trib, mid trib or post trib and why.

Sean Penn has experienced backlash for talking openly about his political beliefs, but sees such discussion as more respectable than promoting movies. "There's baggage attached to coming out publicly on stuff, but there's baggage - in my view, more damaging baggage - to goin' and (appearing) ... on Jay Leno's show, philosophizing about 'Uncle Buck' or whatever you're hawkin'," the Oscar-winning actor tells Esquire magazine in its September issue, on newsstands Wednesday. Penn, 46, has bitterly criticized President Bush, toured Iraq to observe the war there and helped rescue workers with door-to-door searches for survivors after Hurricane Katrina swamped New...

President Bush's ambitious vision of global democratic reform has begun to dominate the administration's foreign affairs agenda, in some cases pushing aside urgent international issues. So far, the president's plan has been driven mainly by high-level rhetoric, symbolic gestures and a handful of modestly funded development programs. But collectively, this mix has started to shift the focus in relations with key nations. In the four months since Bush unveiled the approach in his second inaugural address, nearly every meeting with foreign officials and many of the changes taking place within the Bush administration, including several key appointments, has reflected the...

To Effectively Spread Democracy, We Must Balance Values and Geopolitical ChallengesExtraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush's Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of "idealists" over "realists" in the...

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial appears in the February 14, 2005, issue of National Review. President Bush's foreign policy has been, roughly, neoconservative in its aggressively idealistic expression and realist in its practical application. At no time has the dichotomy been more evident than during his inaugural speech and its immediate aftermath. The speech was beautiful, achingly idealistic, and at times almost totally unrestrained in its ambitious sweep. Of course, its grander pronouncements were not meant to set forth day-to-day policy. When has an inaugural address, the prose-poem of American politics, ever served that function? But the misunderstanding of the press...

I swear I saw an elephant galumphing around the BBC studio last month, when the final item came up on the early evening news bulletin. But the newsreader appeared not to notice it. The report was about some extraordinary photographs, taken with the latest ultrasound scanner, showing foetuses in the early stage of development in the womb. At 12 weeks they could be seen stretching and kicking. At 14-15 weeks, they were sucking their thumbs and yawning. By 18 weeks they were opening and shutting their eyes and by 26 weeks, they were scratching their noses, smiling and crying. Somebody...

<p>Arnold Schwarzenegger believes in miracles. It's hard to fault him for that, given how far he has come. The son of Graz, Austria, who willed himself to become a world-champion body builder and a world-famous actor, stood on the steps of California's Capitol Monday and took the oath as governor of the nation's most populous state, home to the world's sixth-largest economy.</p>

"When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it. "Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything. "I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933:...

If all one had seen of the world's youth were the pelvis-thrusters on MTV and the pubescent darlings of Teen Beat, one might wonder whether they had just arrived from hell in a handbasket. Images of Britney Spears, Eminem and black-hooded protesters rampaging through the streets of the world's capitals may be cause for concern, but the publicity tends to be grabbed by young people in rebellion against authority. Anna Halpine and her fellow members of the World Youth Alliance (WYA) are pursuing a very different path. Rather than parade before the television cameras with amorphous grievances that were clichés...