Free Republic

Turkish intelligence captured an IS member assigned to carry out suicide attacks in Turkey and Europe, as authorities warned of possible New Year's Eve attack plots. Ten suspects were detained for financing the network. Turkey's national intelligence agency MITcaptured Mehmet Gören, a senior IS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) member assigned to carry out suicide attacks targeting civilians in Turkey, Europe, Pakistan and Afghanistan, security sources said Tuesday. Gören, operating under the codename "Yahya", was apprehended in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and brought to Turkey following intelligence operations, according to sources. The operation thwarted attack plans targeting Turkey and exposed the organisation's recruitment network....

Christians were a majority until the 1980s; today they are roughly one-third, living under growing pressure from a Muslim majority. Pilgrims attend Mass at the Maronite monastery of St. Maron, which houses the shrine of Saint Charbel, in the mountain village of Annaya on November 12, 2025. JOSEPH EID / AFP. Christians in Lebanon have declined from a demographic majority to a minority. Lebanon was majority-Christian starting from the first century (when Christianity was introduced by figures such as St. Peter and St. Paul) until the mid-20th century. Mount Lebanon, which remains the Christian heartland of the country, is frequently...

Of all the wars I have covered over the past 50 years, this is one of the fiercest and, to be sure, the most forgotten. “Do you know,” says Suliman, former attaché at the Sudanese embassy in France, who joined the army as soon as the fighting began, in April 2023, and will accompany me for a large part of my reporting, “that this war—the fourth the country has known since its independence—has already produced 12 million displaced people and 150,000 civilian victims?” We are in the arrivals hall of Port Sudan International Airport, 20 kilometers south of the city,...

In late October 2025, a violent altercation in Podgorica’s Zabjelo neighborhood ignited a firestorm of public outrage across Montenegro, exposing deep-seated anxieties over rapid Turkish migration. On the night of October 25, a 25-year-old local resident, identified only as M.J., was brutally stabbed—suffering seven wounds—during a verbal dispute outside a bar in the working-class district. Police investigations quickly pointed to involvement by three Azerbaijani nationals and one Turkish citizen, leading to the arrest of two suspects and the detention of 45 other Turkish and Azerbaijani individuals for questioning on residency status and potential links to the violence. Eight were slated...

The Australian state of New South Wales is proposing to ban public displays of Islamic State group flags or extremist symbols after a mass shooting driven by antisemitism killed 15 people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Under draft laws to be debated by the state Parliament, publicly displaying the IS flag or symbols from other extremist groups will be offenses punishable by up to two years in prison and fines. The state’s premier, Chris Minns, also said chants of “globalize the intifada” will be banned and police would be given greater powers to demand protesters remove face coverings at demonstrations. “Hate...

In early November, Sajid Akram, 50, and his bricklayer son Naveed, 24, travelled from Australia to the Philippines. Their destination was Davao, a city in Mindanao, the second-largest of the Philippines’ many thousands of islands — and a region in which the notorious terror organisation Islamic State is regrouping. Here, the Akrams spent four weeks receiving military-style training. When they returned to Australia, the pair perpetrated the worst terrorist massacre in the nation’s history — murdering 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, turning what should have been a day of bright, joyful warmth into a day of...

Police have arrested two people "for racially aggravated public order offences" after they allegedly "shouted slogans involving calls for intifada" at a pro-Palestinian protest in central London. Five people in total were arrested, including one for obstructing the arrests of people shouting slogans and two more for public order offences, one of which was "racially aggravated", the Metropolitan Police said. The arrests came hours after the Met and Greater Manchester Police said they would arrest people holding placards and chanting the phrase "globalise the intifada" - an Arabic word for uprising.

A Florida Islamic cleric named Dr. Fadi Yousef Kablawi gave a sermon earlier this month declaring that the US deserves divine punishment from Allah and has only been spared because of devout Muslims living in the country. He also called President Trump “human garbage” and asserted that the dirtiest Somali’s feet are cleaner than his face, while claiming Secretary of State Marco Rubio is “gay,” and that the mere prospect of a caliphate gives him nightmares. A Florida Islamic cleric named Dr. Fadi Yousef Kablawi gave a sermon earlier this month declaring that the US deserves divine punishment from Allah...

“They don’t move from the Arab world to Europe. They move the Arab world to Europe.” So said Professor Mordechai Kedar when he spoke to me for an extended interview as part of my podcast series. That episode was published the very day the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, was attacked. The massacre only confirmed his words. Migration, as he described it, does not merely transfer people from one place to another. It carries cultures, ideologies, and systems of meaning with it, and those systems do not remain inert; they spread and even flourish. Kedar’s claim is...

Paris insists that the decision to cancel its New Year’s Eve open-air concert on the Champs-Élysées is merely a matter of crowd control. Officials speak of logistics, unpredictability and prudence. Yet few observers truly believe this is the whole story. The reality, uncomfortable though it may be, is that Europe’s great capitals are quietly recalibrating public life in response to a persistent and ideologically driven threat — one that has now asserted itself far beyond Europe’s borders. Seen in this light, Paris’s muted New Year feels less like administrative caution and more like an admission of reality – Europe’s Muslim...

Every year huge crowds gather in Paris at the Champs-Élysées to ring in the new year with fireworks and concerts. Much like the New Year’s Eve parties in Times Square in New York City, the joyous festivities are a key link in the chain of worldwide celebrations of the year to come. No more. New Year’s has been canceled in Paris. The New Year’s Eve concert was pre-recorded with actors pretending to be the audience. The fireworks will appear on TV. And there will be no one to count the countdown because the Champs-Élysées has become France’s latest ‘no-go’zone’. Ten...

Wikipedia debating if attack targeting Jews at Sydney Chanukah event was ‘terror’. Deborah Lipstadt, scholar and former U.S. envoy on Jew-hatred, said that if the online encyclopedia was downplaying the attack that was unsurprising and it was “being true to itself.” (Dec. 16, 2025 / JNS) The attack, in which gunmen thought to be a father and son shot and killed 15 people at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, is widely described as a terror attack. But editors on Wikipedia are debating whether that phrase is appropriate or it should just be called a “shooting.”...

This Muslim Christmas market terrorist plot should not be confused with the previous French Christmas market terror alert that led to the shutdown of the New Year’s Eve celebration or the 5 Muslims busted in the German Christmas market terror plot. This one took place in Poland. But they’re all reading from the same Koran though. Polish authorities said on Tuesday that they had arrested a 19-year-old university student on suspicion of plotting an attack on a Christmas market and seeking contact with the self-styled “Islamic State” terrorist group. A spokesman for Polish special services, Jacek Dobrzynski, said that the...

0:00 Teaser 0:45 Introduction 1:11 Vision for the UK 6:50 The Path to Extremism and Gang Violence 14:50 Bangladesh, the US Future, and UK Mentality 17:05 Women’s Safety in Modern Britain 19:17 Voting, Freedom, and the Attack on Christmas 22:36 Personal Persecution and Legal Dilemmas 24:50 Rising Chaos 27:36 Why Remigration Is Needed 31:12 Waking Up the Nation 34:30 Crime, Robberies, and Failing Democracy 38:00 Muslim Immigration 41:43 Interfaith Challenges and Why Conservatism Works 45:19 Friedman Files 45:55 Money Trails, Warning Signs, and Hope from America 48:57 Elon Musk, Visits Abroad, and Tucker Carlson’s Blind Spot 56:42 Clash with Christianity...

A senior counterterrorism official has told the ABC Naveed and Sajid Akram underwent military-style training in the southern Philippines last month. The Philippines has been a hotspot for Islamist militants since the early 1990s, when terrorist training camps previously on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border were re-established in southern Mindanao. The father and son returned to Australia late last month, just weeks before the Bondi Beach massacre. Father-son gunmen Sajid and Naveed Akram travelled to the Philippines to receive "military-style training" in the month before they killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, security sources have confirmed. The revelation...

After another massacre, Jews are reminded of a truth our enemies never grasp: History belongs to those who refuse to disappear. Like so many Jews, I was woken up in the early morning today to news of the massacre in Bondi Beach, Australia. Like so many Jews, I personally knew people who were hurt in the attack. And like so many Jews, I grieved for the victims and raged as public officials who cheered on the policies that made the attack possible rushed to publish sanctimonious denunciations, as if they had failed to understand that the shooting was precisely what...

Civilizational erasure, as it relates to Europe, has been in the news lately, with the renewed and scaled up predations of Islam once again commanding center stage. Islam’s resurgence has been a full century in the making, enabled in large part by Western ignorance and enforced taboos against discussing Islam’s highly relevant 1,400-year history of mass bloodshed and conquest. Indeed, that history is whitewashed by Western academics, whether pseudo-historians like the late Edward Said or execrable and ahistorical oikophobes like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia, Google, and artificial intelligence also play outsized roles in the academic and historical whitewash....

live videos from the disruption at the open-air concert. Transcript linked below video.

Australia's domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, examined one of the Bondi Beach gunmen six years ago over his close ties to a Sydney-based Islamic State (IS) terrorism cell, the ABC understands. Naveed Akram, 24, and his father, Sajid Akram, 50, killed 15 people on Sunday evening when they opened fire on the Chanukah by the Sea event celebrating the first day of the Jewish festival. Naveed Akram is in hospital under police guard after his father was shot dead in an exchange of gunfire with police on Sunday. Heavily-armed police on Sunday night raided their home in Bonnyrigg, in south-west Sydney,...

Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old fruit shop owner, confronted one of the attackers during the Bondi Beach shooting that left 12 dead. The father of two wrested the rifle from the shooter and pointed it back at him, saving lives in the process. The man who heroically tackled and disarmed one of the Bondi Beach attackers has been as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43 year-old fruit shop owner. Ahmed who can be seen in a video dressed in a white tee-shirt approached one of the shooters who was holding a rifle, tackling him, and grabbing his weapon, an act that...