Free Republic

Like many of Egypt’s towns and cities, Port Said is bustling. Donkey-carts weave through traffic on roads, while westerners – once the focus of local hostility – move about undisturbed. Sitting at the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, many call Port Said Egypt’s most beautiful city. It is also a popular tourist destination for cruise ships, which roll in and out, unloading their passengers at Egypt’s second largest port. Here, the visitors watch as cargo vessels line up to enter the canal – a 150km stretch of water that links the Red and Mediterranean seas, cutting out the long...

This month marks the 43rd anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. We have been fed some false information about this war. For starters, Israel did not strike first unlike in the 1967 Six day war when Israel was forced to launch a pre-emptive strike as her enemies amassed on her borders and as the UN stood aside and allowed them to do so. The Arabs shot first  On the night of September 25, King Hussein secretly flew to Tel Aviv to warn Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir of an impending Syrian attack. Throughout September, Israel received eleven more warnings...

Egypt’s former defense minister and presidential candidate, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is Jewish, according to Egyptian journalist Saber Mashhour. Mashhour’s comments were posted to the internet on April 20 and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). He claimed that Al-Sisi grew up next to Israel’s former Chief of Staff and Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan. […] Al-Sisi and former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, he claimed, are “one and the same. Both were raised in Khoronfish, in the Jewish Quarter.” …

On the second day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s defense minister Moshe Dayan told prime minister Golda Meir to consider making preparations for the use of nuclear weapons, according to an interview with a ministerial aide now being published for the first time. With Israel taken completely by surprise, Syrian tanks streaking across the Golan Heights and the IDF’s armored divisions in the south losing ground, Dayan returned from the northern front for a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office visibly shaken, and suggested readying the nuclear option, claims Arnon Azaryahu, an aide to another minister in the...

Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to warn that the Egyptian and Syrian armies were about to attack Israel. Elazar urged a preemptive strike; six years earlier, in the Six-Day War, Israel’s preemptive strike had proved highly effective. But Meir and Dayan, who were under...

In the safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Jews and Israel are remembered fondly,if increasingly vaguely. "THEY CALL That lack of restraint?" the former Iraqi army officer exclaimed, while watching the BBC’s coverage of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on satellite TV last winter. "If this demonstration were held in Baghdad, there’d be 10,000 bodies in the street," said the Arab from Baghdad who now teaches in Iraqi Kurdistan. Almost 4 million people live in the safe haven of northern Iraq. A de facto autonomous region, it has been administered by the Kurds since 1991 when Saddam Hussein withdrew his administration in ...

Popular conservative politician Sarah Palin understands the importance of the Temple Mount to the Jewish people, according to MK Danny Danon (Likud), who accompanied her on a visit to the Kotel Sunday. Danon told Arutz Sheva's Hebrew-language service: "When we toured near the Kotel and in the tunnels near the Holy of Holies, she told me clear things without hesitating. She understands the importance of the place for the Jewish People and even asked me 'Why do you keep apologizing to the Muslims all the time?'" "I explained to her the mistakes made by [then-Defense Minister] Moshe Dayan in 1967...

Tonight starts Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. It celebrates the day in 1967 that the IDF returned the Old Jerusalem to Jewish hands. Jews were denied access to the Holy sites in the Old City Jerusalem since 1948, when Jordan took it over during the War of Independence. In the intervening 19 years the Jordanians waged systematic destruction, desecration and looting of Jewish sites. Since that day in 1967, the Muslims have been trying to reclaim Jerusalem's Holy Sites, not because of any 'religious ties" but to de-legitimize the Jewish claims to the city. The sad part of today's struggle is...

Yom Kippur War Volunteers - 30 Years On As I write the diary below, the first time retracing steps taken thirty years ago in Israel in October 1973, memories begin to pour back along with the anxiety and tears that we all experienced at the time. For many of us, the scars of war will never heal. Nor should they. - Joel Leyden Due in part to faulty intelligence and arrogance, Israel was unprepared for a Syrian / Egyptian surprise attack. The Yom Kippur War took the lives of 2,688 Israeli troops. Jerusalem---October 2003...Sitting in the relative safety of a...

Thirty years ago, on September 5, 1972, a group of men were sighted scaling a six-foot wire fence on Kuzoczinskidamm, about 50 yards from the sleeping quarters of Israel's athletes in Munich's Olympic village. The intruders were first noticed around 4 a.m., but it wasn't until half an hour later that one of them inserted a pass-key into the lock of the door leading to the vestibule of Apartment 1 at 31 Connollystrasse. For the next 25 minutes the eight fedayeen ("men of sacrifice," as they called themselves), battled the Israeli athletes inside 31 Connollystrasse, a complex that also housed...