Free Republic

Truth Be Told: The Palestinian Preoccupation   By David SolwayFrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, December 15, 2008 With respect to the ongoing imbroglio in the Holy Land, one may plausibly wonder whether bad history may not be rewriting itself. When Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, put the Palestinian rebellion of 1936 on partial hold following the British promise of a Royal Commission, no effort was made to disarm his guerrillas and the period of relative calm was exploited by the Mufti to train, reorganize, unify and rearm his forces. Nothing much changes in the Middle East and what was...

A prison’s new chapel will not contain a crucifix to avoid offending Muslim inmates, it emerged today. Bosses at HMP Lewes have been told the traditional Christian symbol, featuring Jesus nailed to a cross, must not be used in the Grade-II listed Victorian jail’s ‘multi-faith space’. The room - part of a £1million new block - has been split in two, with one half featuring heated foot baths so Muslim worshippers can wash their feet before prayer. But the other side, dedicated to Christian prayer, contains just a simple wooden cross and portable alter - both of which can be...

The shoes had hardly left the hand of the Iraqi who tossed them at President Bush during the Baghdad press conference yesterday when the leftwing blogosphere began cheering him as some sort of hero. The incredible success of the Surge in Iraq has been very frustrating for the left. Along with Joe Biden they claimed that the Surge could never work. Problem was that it worked. That is why they have been so silent recently on the topic of the Iraq. The complete turnaround there has been much too embarrassing for them to mention Iraq very much...until now. The shoes...

Thirty-five Taliban fighters have been killed in an operation to "clean up" areas controlled by the militants in a rebel-infested southern Afghan province, a military official said Sunday.General Muhaidin Ghori, army commander for southern Afghanistan, said the militants had been killed in an ongoing joint NATO and Afghan security forces operation launched on Thursday in Helmand province."We cleared Nad Ali district of Taliban presence," the general said, adding the 35 dead Taliban included three rebel commanders."There was no casualty for NATO and Afghan forces. Check-points have been set up in the area and we will not leave until government control...

In today's column, the New York Times' Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, examines the paper's use (or non-use) of the words "terrorist" and "terrorism." It's a revealing exercise: "WHEN 10 young men in an inflatable lifeboat came ashore in Mumbai last month and went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children, they were initially described in The Times by many labels." "They were "militants," "gunmen," "attackers" and "assailants." Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city's largest train station, five-star hotels, a Jewish center, a cafe and a hospital...

I was scanning your site, like I do often, and I noticed on the issue of piracy some short comments about using firearms to ward off pirates. One good source of info on modern piracy that many who own yachts may not have ever read is an American magazine called, "Soldier of Fortune". "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, founded and edited by a retired US Army special forces colonel, is known as the only publication to have had a reporter on the ground the entire time during the Russian war in Afghanistan. This magazine is of extreme interest to the yachting...

The British Broadcasting Corporation, a state-sponsored but independently run, media organization has attracted sharp criticism for having "double-standards" in its coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks. Most times the BBC reporters referred to the terrorists who attacked Mumbai as "gunmen" or "militants". Well-known thinker and editor-in-chief of Covert magazine, MJ Akbar has taken up the issue seriously. Since November 27, Akbar has refused to appear on BBC to speak about the Mumbai attacks. Many British politicians have also taken up the issue with the BBC management. Steve Pound, who represents Ealing North, has issued a strong statement against BBC's biased...

The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial...

Petition To The Washington Post To Express Reader Dissatisfaction With The Post's Inaccurate and Slanted Coverage of the Arab Israeli Conflict To: Katharine Weymouth and Marcus Brauchli, The Washington Post EyeOnThePost, Inc. is sponsoring this petition to let the Washington Post know of wide-spread dissatisfaction in the Community with its coverage of the Arab-Israel conflict.Readers' Petition:The Washington Post's coverage of the conflict between Israel and Its Arab neighbors in the Middle East is unfair and biased. The Post's opinionated and agenda driven reporting is characterized by: portrayal of events taken out of historical and current political context, use of sources...

Though most Harvard students have not been directly touched by the tragedy in Mumbai, how our community reacts to the events remains critically important. In so doing, let us not be afraid to acknowledge what these attacks represent: Modern Islam has a problem, and it is that shockingly large numbers of today’s Muslims favor a domination of those who espouse Western principles. Whenever terrorist attacks such as these are carried out (such generalizations can be made because they occur so frequently), pundits predictably exclaim that we must not allow hatred for Islam to fester, but rather, we must remind ourselves...

The country's media has reportedly condemned the film in part because of a fight sequence in which Rourke's character, Randy 'the Ram' Robinson, battles an opponent dubbed the Ayatollah. During the fight, the Ayatollah, played by actor and former professional wrestler Ernest "the Cat" Miller, waves an Iranian flag before ramming the pole under his opponent's neck. Rourke's character then grabs the flag and snaps the pole over his knee before tossing it into the crowd. Newspapers and websites in Iran say the Darren Aronofsky-directed film is just the latest manifestation of Western prejudice towards Iran in Hollywood films. Last...

Barely a month before the 9/11 terror attacks, two Pakistani nuclear scientists, said to be close to disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, met up with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and offered to supply him with atomic weapons, according to a newly released book Chaudiri Abdul Majeed and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who held a series of senior posts in Pakistani nuke programme, went to Taliban headquarters in Kandahar in mid-August 2001 and spent three days with bin Laden who was keen on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the book says. In fact, Mahmood was said to be more close to Khan,...

As the world knows now, a particularly juvenile Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at George Bush in Baghdad Sunday. Bush characteristically made light of the situation. If there’s one thing many can agree on about the president, it’s that he doesn’t take insults too personally, at least in public. Good thing too, considering all the abuse that has been heaped on him in recent years. I can’t imagine I would have behaved the same way. With my temper, I would probably have picked up the shoe and gone after the dopey journo myself. Well, maybe I wouldn’t have. The clod...

MUMBAI: The Muslims of terror-plagued Mumbai know the drill. First there is bloodshed. Then come the whispers, the accusing stares, the scarcely veiled hostility. "They are going to say that all Muslims do this," restaurateur Naved Akhtar Mirza said, after gunmen, apparently Islamic extremists, stormed India's financial capital last month, shooting up a train station and killing hostages at two hotels and a Jewish center. To their relief, no violence against Muslims has erupted, despite simmering tensions and several previous episodes of sectarian strife. Community leaders hope that a grudging sense of tolerance, if not harmony, will continue to prevail...

Iraqi war veteran Kevin Murray is suing the US government for bailing out AIG . The reason being that AIG supports sharia financing which in turn promotes Islam. Mr. Murray is claiming that our government is breaking the First Amendment by endorsing a religion. I applaud this man and this will be very interesting to watch.

A British prison has decided not to include a crucifix in the décor of its new chapel for fear of offending Muslim inmates. The ‘multi-faith space’ at HMP Lewes is divided in two sections, according to the Daily Mail. One half-features heated footbaths for Muslim worshipers; the other side, dedicated to Christian prayer, features a removable altar and a plain wooden cross – also removable. Plans to include the traditional Christian crucifix were erased from the chapel’s blueprints on the advice of a Muslim imam, the Daily Mail reported.

You'd think that since the liberal media believes in the importance of global awareness, that their coverage of the riots in Greece would be as extensive as the coverage of a local disaster such as 9/11. However, as usual, the liberal left demonstrates that it does not walk its own talk. And why exactly does it brazenly bear such hypocrisy? It is because the left is either lying, stupid or both.

Barack Obama has been toying with the idea of dialogue with the Islamic world for two years now - but he has yet to approach the idea of actually saying anything meaningful. At one point, his advisers talked of convening a White House summit with Muslim leaders. When that scheme was exposed as fanciful, they recommended that he attend the Islamic Summit Conference, convened once every three years. But that, too, has turned out to be problematic - so now they talking of plans for "a major address in an Islamic capital." But what does Obama wish to say in...

Barack Obama has been toying with the idea of dialogue with the Islamic world for two years now - but he has yet to approach the idea of actually saying anything meaningful. At one point, his advisers talked of convening a White House summit with Muslim leaders. When that scheme was exposed as fanciful, they recommended that he attend the Islamic Summit Conference, convened once every three years. But that, too, has turned out to be problematic - so now they talking of plans for "a major address in an Islamic capital." But what does Obama wish to say in...

A group of about 200 Turkish intellectuals on Monday issued an apology on the Internet for the World War I-era massacres of Armenians in Turkey. The group of prominent academics, journalists, writers and artists avoided using the contentious term ``genocide'' in the apology, using the less explosive ``Great Catastrophe'' instead. But the apology is a sign that many in Turkey are ready to break a long-held taboo against acknowledging Turkish culpability for the deaths. Historians estimate that, in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks in what is widely regarded...