Free Republic

A report in Israel’s Israel Hayom says that President Donald Trump is “disappointed” in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has decided to make his next moves in the Middle East without him. The report, published in Hebrew and citing two sources close to Trump, would seem to corroborate the observation that Trump has cut Netanyahu out of his decision-making process on major policy steps. Last month, Trump surprised Netanyahu by announcing that the U.S. would begin “direct” talks with the Iranian regime over a new nuclear deal. And this week, he surprised Israel again by announcing that the U.S....

President Donald Trump has begun his war against Democrat-dominated, left-wing California, according to the New York Times, enacting six policies against the state in the space of just 24 hours last week.The Trump administration waited to take on Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), initially, because of the devastation of the January 7 wildfires in Los Angeles.However, that did not stop Newsom from spending $50 million to fight Trump, even while asking for federal aid.The Times reports on what happened next — on Thursday, March 26:The U.S. Education Department announced early in the West Coast morning that it would challenge a major...

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an order on Saturday that will expedite the shipment of $4 billion in military aid to Israel — a direct and deliberate contrast to President Joe Biden’s policy of withholding some arms. In a press statement, Rubio said:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video Sunday thanking President Donald Trump profusely for his help in what seemed a pointed and deliberate contrast to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s behavior. There were other reasons for the address: as Breitbart News reported, Trump had just expedited the delivery of $4 billion in arms (in contrast to President Joe Biden), and had offered a proposal for extending the Gaza ceasefire. But the subtext was unmistakable. On Friday, Zelensky confronted the President and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office itself, in a display that offended many Americans and that struck...

resident Donald Trump’s concerns about South Africa’s recent legislation on expropriation were vindicated Wednesday when news emerged of new legislation to allow land to be redistributed along racial lines. The Freedom Front Plus, a small right-wing party in the South African parliament that represents a primarily Afrikaans-speaking constituency, warned that the new proposal would seek to bring land ownership patterns — currently dominated by whites — into line with the demographic reality of a black majority in South Africa. In a statement, the party said: The Department of Land Reform and Rural Development today announced to the relevant parliamentary Portfolio...

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the nation's oldest pro-Israel organization, spoke out Wednesday against a coalition of left-wing Jewish groups that protested against President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement.On Monday, a coalition of 88 left-wing Jewish organizations released an open letter to President Trump in which they objected to his ongoing pursuit of criminal illegal aliens through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)...The Zionist Organization of America strongly criticizes the mostly far-left wing Jewish groups who sent a letter to President Trump opposing deporting unvetted criminal aliens even though this morally necessary action protects Americans and American Jews from potential acts...

The Iranian regime has given the government of Lebanon the go-ahead to reach a ceasefire with Israel on behalf of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terror group that began the war in October 2023 but has since been beaten badly. The Jerusalem Post reported Friday: Iran will support any decision taken by the Lebanese government and Lebanon’s “resistance” in current talks on a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Ali Larijani, senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said on Friday. “We are not looking to sabotage anything. We are after a solution to the problems,” Larijani said after meeting Lebanese caretaker Prime...

President-elect Donald Trump promised Thursday to end all restrictions and delays on arms deliveries to Israel on his first day in office, according to Amit Segal, a reporter for Israel’s Channel 12 News and Yedioth Ahronot newspaper. The Biden-Harris administration withheld precision bombs from Israel in May in response to Israel’s decision to enter Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, against the White House’s explicit demands. Israel ultimately secured Gaza’s border with Egypt and killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who had been attempting to escape through Rafah. Though the administration later released those weapons, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) alleged that...

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the first black woman elected to the job, is facing defeat after early returns showed Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie with a commanding lead in the 2024 election. Politico reported: Early returns show her trailing far behind Daniel Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder, who far outspent the incumbent using his personal wealth and blamed Breed for the city’s problems with homelessness, brazen theft and drug overdoses. He leads with 56 percent of the vote using the city’s ranked-choice voting system, while Breed has 44 percent. It’s a dismal showing for Breed, a moderate...

Campaign seasons rarely provide opportunities to discuss issues, but the last week of the 2024 election has yielded a surprisingly enlightened discussion — on the left — about who is to blame for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first comments came from Van Jones, the veteran left-wing community organizer who is a strident partisan on cable news panels but also one of the few people who will speak honestly about the Democrats’ weaknesses as well. Jones appeared on Jonah Platt’s new podcast, Being Jewish, to discuss the relationships between blacks and Jews. At one point, he made the rare but...

President Joe Biden trashed Trump supporters as “garbage” in a rant on Tuesday evening that sparked outrage and sent Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign into damage control mode. But they were no surprise: not only has he often used violent language toward Trump — he suggested drowning the former president earlier on Tuesday — but Biden has also trashed millions of Trump supporters, to the media’s and the Democrats’ cheers. This time, finally, it had a cost.

Donald Trump is on the cusp of an improbable comeback victory in the 2024 presidential election because the American people would not let him fail. The campaign and its staff worked incredibly hard, and from the outside, the 2024 effort seemed to be the most well-organized, and professional, of Trump’s three attempts at the presidency. Yet there were moments when Trump seemed to falter, and when he was lifted up by people who decided, on their own, that they would not let him lose. Take, for example, the song “Fighter,” written by Breitbart News’ own Jon Kahn and recorded in...

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), one of the most prominent pro-Israel politicians in America, accepted the endorsement of several Arab American leaders for former President Donald Trump in New York City on Thursday. Zeldin, who is Jewish, accepted the endorsement on behalf of Trump himself, who is campaigning in the swing states ahead of Tuesday’s election. The scene was almost surreal: Zeldin, one of the most prominent Zionists on Capitol Hill, standing shoulder to shoulder with Arab and Muslim leaders who may have rather different views on Israel. But the Trump campaign appears to be pulling off one of the...

“Free Gaza” was found marked on incendiary devices used to burn ballot drop boxes in Washington state earlier this week, according to news reports, suggesting for the first time that the arson may have had a political motive.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said Tuesday that Israel will not give Hezbollah a break from attack, as Israeli Air Force (IAF) warplanes launched a third wave of attacks in Lebanon. The Times of Israel reported Halevi’s remarks: “Hezbollah must not be given a break. [We must] keep working with all our might.” It also reported that the IAF had dropped 2,000 munitions on Hezbollah in the previous 24 hours. The Israeli offensive, officially named Operation Northern Arrows, appears to have two separate tactics. On the one hand, Israel is carrying out targeted strikes...

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution Wednesday that effectively bars Israel from self-defense in any of the territory it captured in a defensive war in 1967, including in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. The resolution refers to a ruling earlier this year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — led by a judge from Lebanon, which is in a state of war with Israel — in which it declared Israel’s presence in Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and eastern Jerusalem to be illegal under international law. (Israel angrily rejected the ruling, with Prime Minister...

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declared victory Thursday in the battle of Rafah, having destroyed Hamas’s four battalions there over the course of four months. It was a battle that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. president, told Israel not to fight, warning of the consequences for civilians there, and even threatening to withhold U.S. weapons. “I have studied the maps,” Harris said, declaring that it was impossible to attack Rafah without hurting civilians. srael, believing it would lose the war without taking Rafah, entered anyway.

Pro-Palestinian students rejoiced on August 29, 2024, when San Francisco State University (SFSU) announced it would divest from three arms manufacturers because they allegedly fail to meet "human rights standards."NBC Bay Area reported that the three companies are Lockheed Martin, Palantir Technologies, and Leonardo.The divestment decision followed weeks of protest from pro-Palestinian students. The students "camped out and protested for three weeks in a nationwide call for universities to disclose and divest from what they categorized as companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the war in Gaza.Caterpillar — a heavy equipment manufacturer, not an arms manufacturer —...

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Monday that 90% of the Hezbollah rockets that were intercepted Sunday were fired from civilian areas in southern Lebanon, a further violation of international law by the Iran-backed terror group. In a statement, the IDF said: Early Sunday morning, following the detection of preparations by Hezbollah to launch missiles and rockets aimed toward the north and the center of the State of Israel, the IDF struck Hezbollah targets that posed an immediate threat. During the strike, about 230 launches and 20 aerial targets were identified crossing into Israeli territory. The Hezbollah terrorist organization places...

CLAIM: Trump said: “Many more people died during his administration of COVID than during my administration.” VERDICT: MOSTLY TRUE, though Biden was president for longer during the pandemic, which distorts comparisons. President Donald Trump told Elon Musk during an interview on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday that more people had died from the coronavirus under President Joe Biden than had died under his administration. That is true. “There were roughly 460,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 up through the end of January 2021, the month when Mr. Biden took over. Mr. Biden has overseen roughly 800,000 deaths since,” the Washington Times...