Free Republic

Since October 7, one of the most inconvenient facts in the entire debate has become impossible to ignore: Hamas does not merely tolerate Palestinian civilian suffering—it exploits it, it wants it. Many observers who were previously unaware of this (longstanding Arab "Palestinian" leaderships) reality were confronted with it in 2024 when reporting revealed internal communications from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. According to the reporting, Sinwar viewed mounting Palestinian casualties and destruction not as a strategic failure, but as a strategic success. The more devastating the war became for Gaza, the greater the international pressure on Israel, the greater the diplomatic...

Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately. As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week. In a piece that has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that...

Israel is guilty of the same crimes Hamas carried out on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an opinion piece published by the New York Times on Sunday. Israeli soldiers are accused of inflicting sexual violence on Palestinian prisoners, and even of “dogs being coached to rape prisoners.” These accusations are as ridiculous as the conspiracy theories that are regularly spread in Muslim countries. Jews have been accused of training sharks to attack Muslims on beaches, training eagles to act as spies, and operating “Israeli-made robot dolphins.” Yet unlike some of these accusations, this claim is appearing not in Iranian state-run...

Like many leftists living in social media bubbles, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof is obsessed with Israel. And because he has a risible understanding of the Middle East, he’s also highly susceptible to believing unhinged conspiracies aimed at the country. This week, however, in a pseudo-journalistic piece headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” the columnist excavates conspiracies so unhinged that no marginally reputable media outlet has ever touched them. Even the New York Times relegates it to its op-ed section, since the piece breaks every rule of objective journalism. But even columnists have an obligation...

Full depravity of Hamas during October 7 revealed for the first time: New report details how terrorists performed unimaginable horrors upon Israeli families. Among the mutilated and butchered bodies of young women slaughtered on October 7, it was their colourful, polished nails that many of the morgue staff remember Bright, beautiful, shiny, pink manicures glistening amid the pervasive 'grey and green' of death were often the only reminder of who these girls had been just hours earlier. Because Hamas-led terrorists had not just executed these women. They had 'deliberately and systematically' defiled them, as the most comprehensive account of the...

And even Kristof himself admits that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” -- though that does not stop him from going on about it for almost 4,000 words. It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views on the Middle East conflict, we should all be able to agree that dogs cannot be trained to rape human beings. Yet this is exactly what a New York Times “opinion” piece posing as an in-depth journalistic investigation, perhaps to avoid any real journalistic accountability, published on Monday claims, based on anonymous testimonies and a report by a well-known anti-Israel...

They know that their amplification of totally insane blood libels plays a role in the attacks on synagogues, the stabbings, and the shootings. And they do it anyway. Do Nicholas Kristof and his employers at the New York Times want to see more attacks on Israeli civilians and on innocent Jews around the world? They sure act like that’s exactly what they want to see. Kristof committed a crime against journalism in his latest attack on Israel. Without bothering to verify a single source, he spread a blood libel guaranteed to be used to justify more attacks on Jews. At...

Every year, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof ends the year providing a useful and compelling summary of good news from the past year to counteract the general journalistic theme of bad news dominating the headlines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kristof refused to offer that annual summary this year. His reactionary political ethic regarding the President of the United States prevented this work. In his own words: "I’ve done these “best year ever” columns annually, irritating Eeyores. But now I just can’t. The year 2025 was a setback for humanity -- and unfortunately, the United States is a reason for the retreat.”...

Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any...

I recently found some interesting articles about anthrax, the domestic theory, and Hatfill that gave me some new ideas to consider. Foremostly, I found that the first comments espousing the domestic theory often arose in the context of a war on Iraq, or finishing the war, depending on how you look at it. For years the government tried to build the consensus to getting rid of Saddam. Before and immediately after 9/11 Bush made it clear he wanted to complete the job. Interestingly the first voice after 9/11 against finishing off Iraq and dissuading consideration that the anthrax was Iraqi...

As Democrats make their case to voters around the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the bluest parts of the country — cities on the West Coast — are a mess. Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction? I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. ...the truth is that too...

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated that if you simply drop food aid into Gaza, it will be stolen by Hamas. Kristof stated, “So, one reason for the tragedy yesterday was that Israel apparently did not want to have food aid delivered through UNRWA, the U.N. organization that it has made a lot of allegations against and that may well have had twelve people participate in the October 7 attacks. It has also been reluctant to work with traditional aid agencies. And so, it apparently had contractors protected by Israeli tanks...

She's b-a-a-a-ck! Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She's the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media's consent, manipulated coverage of last fall's anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks. On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense...

While the risk of escalation can't be ruled out, it must be balanced against the risks of allowing this conflict to drag on as Ukrainians and Russians are killed daily. Putin will negotiate seriously when he sees no military path forward — and that may happen if his hold on Crimea becomes untenable.

Former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who left the liberal newspaper after 37 years to run for Oregon governor only to be ruled ineligible, has vowed to challenge the "politically motivated" decision and predicted he would still win the election. "A failing political establishment in Oregon has chosen to protect itself, rather than give voters a choice. We will challenge this decision in court, and we are confident we will prevail, because the law is on our side," Kristof tweeted on Thursday following Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s announcement that the former liberal columnist failed to meet the...

Bill Maher got into a fiery debate over the recent Israel-Gaza conflict on Friday night and took aim at the 'liberal media' over its news coverage before turning on progressives including supermodel Bella Hadid. 'One of the frustrations I had while I was off is that I was watching this war go on in Israel … and it was frustrating to me because there was no one on liberal media to defend Israel, really,' Maher, 65, began. He was referring to a recent COVID-19 diagnosis that forced him off the air last week. 'We've become this country now that we're...

Some House Democrats have urged cable companies to cancel Fox News, Newsmax TV, and One America News Network ahead of a Wednesday hearing on extremism in the press.In 1801, Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States. In his Inaugural Address, he urged our fledgling nation to stand strong against those who would restrict the right to free speech. He even described those “who would wish to dissolve this Union” as “monuments of safety with which the error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” As president, Jefferson was an ardent defender...

It’s easy to see why the American Left loved Sami al-Arian. Leftists hate Israel, too. Longtime FrontPage readers will remember Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who for years was a darling of the Leftist intelligentsia. IPT News reported Monday that he has resurfaced, but that the stalwart old Jew-hater hasn’t changed: while he has reined in his rhetoric a bit and speaks in a more civilized manner, he is still calling for Israel’s destruction, which would result in the murder of millions of Jews. Back in 1991, during a speech in Chicago, al-Arian screamed: “The Quran...

By their reckoning, white evangelicals have become reckless plague-bearers with no regard for the poor and oppressed, and their cruelty rightly earns them the world’s opprobrium.So much for peace on earth and goodwill to men. America’s legacy media elites used the Sunday before Christmas for extra Christian-bashing, with white evangelicals the preferred targets. Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Luo complained that “white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election,” and that “churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviewed leftist pastor Jim Wallis, with the...

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof uses poor thinking about abortion to misunderstand why for many Christians it is a paramount issue. In his recent New York Times op-ed, “Er, Can I Ask a Few Questions About Abortion?” Nicholas Kristof makes a case against Christian pro-lifers. He writes that many Christians “support Trump, despite reservations about him, because their be-all issue is the unborn.”No Christian cares only about abortion as if other issues like religious liberty, taxes, and foreign policy don’t matter. But many Christians hold that abortion can disqualify a candidate. I think most people have issues that are...