Free Republic

A New York federal judge has denied the Trump administration’s bid to dismiss the legal challenge brought by Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist who was detained by immigration enforcement agents earlier this month, and has ordered the case transferred to New Jersey. Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities. He was transferred first to New Jersey and then to Louisiana, where he is currently detained. The Trump administration sought his deportation but two...

A Pakistani national was arrested in Canada this week for allegedly plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish center in New York City on the anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants against Israeli civilians. Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, also known as Shahzeb Jadoon, was charged with attempting to provide material support and resources to the terrorist organization ISIS, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). “The defendant is alleged to have planned a terrorist attack in New York City around October 7th of this year with the stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS,...

A Pakistani man wanted by the FBI will be extradited to New York from Canada to face trial on terrorism charges. Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, is accused of plotting an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at a Brooklyn Jewish center on Oct. 7. The Justice Department did not disclose the exact location he was targeting. At an extradition hearing in Montreal Thursday, the young man also known as “Shahzeb Jadoon,” agreed not to fight his handover to US federal authorities. Khan entered Canada on a student visa in May 2023, though it’s unclear whether he actually attended school at all. By November...

Columbia University’s radical protest leaders, including Khalil, aren’t just anti-Israel — they want America to fall and are taking steps to make it happen. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are demanding the release of Columbia University student and pro-Hamas protester Mahmoud Khalil. While House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is accusing the Trump administration of “authoritarianism,” the Democrats are about to be embarrassed. Khalil is a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, one of more than 150 pro-terrorism groups I identified in my comprehensive study for the Capital Research Center, “Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement.”...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office acknowledged Saturday that the premier’s intelligence officer had received an Israel Defense Forces memo detailing suspicious Hamas activity three hours before the terror group’s October 7, 2023, invasion and onslaught, and didn’t pass it on. The premier’s office argued that this was justified given what it said was the document’s non-urgent framing. The admission came in response to a Channel 12 report that said the IDF had drafted a document setting out the numerous worrying signs of Hamas activity in Gaza that night and sent it out to the intelligence officers of seven key Israeli...

As Townhall has been covering, the bodies of four victims taken hostage and then murdered by Hamas were returned to Israel on Thursday morning. In addition to parading their coffins around, which included the youngest hostages, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were 9-months-old and 4-years-old when taken hostage, Hamas also added propaganda to their coffins. The young children were taken hostage with their mother, Shiri Bibas on October 7, 2023. While her body was supposed to be sent back with her sons and another hostage, Oded Lifshitz, who was 83-years-old when he was murdered, the IDF has revealed some disturbing...

A Hamas official has announced that the terror group will return the bodies of four Israeli hostages on Thursday, among them the Bibas family. Hamas is also due to release six living hostages on Saturday. The return of the bodies of Shiri, Kfir and Ariel Bibas would mark a tragic end to 16 months of activism, protest and prayer on behalf of the family, who more than anyone else became symbols of the Israeli hostages’ plight. Kfir and Ariel’s father, Shiri’s husband Yarden, was also taken hostage and held separately. He was released earlier this month. An image of Shiri...

Pam Bondi launches Joint Task Force October 7 (JTF 10-7) to prosecute Hamas operatives, disrupt terror financing and combat antisemitic crimes in US; task force will work with FBI, Treasury and Israel to pursue criminal charges, extraditions and sanctions

Middle Eastern countries are entirely right to oppose President Trump's plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and resettle the Palestinians in nearby countries. I don't say this out of any sympathy for the Gazans. They have more than proven that they have no business running a state, no less a state next to Israel--a country that the vast majority of Palestinians want to see wiped off the face of the Earth. Trump on Egyptians and Jordanians needing to take in Gazans as refugees (despite their long opposition to it): "I would like to see Jordan and Egypt take some of...

Government spokesperson David Mencer tells reporters that the list of hostages provided last night by Hamas for the 33 hostages who are being released over 6 weeks contains 25 living hostages and 8 dead hostages.. Eight of the 33 people on the list provided by the Hamas terrorist organization of the Israeli hostages who are being freed during the six-week ceasefire are dead, ... The families have been informed of the situation of their relatives ... Israel received the list of hostages last night, a week into the ceasefire. 25 of the hostages are alive, including the seven women who...

Here’s a hard and ugly truth that many people don’t want to admit because they don’t want to face the inevitable consequences or take the necessary actions in response to it. There’s a huge part of the Western elite that hates its own people so much that it will happily subject them to sexual slavery by the semi-human Third World monsters it imports as part of a process of replacing its own citizens. What is it with the delight that our alleged betters take in the torture of their own? This is a problem across Western civilization, or what was...

The respected Islamic official’s critique argued that the damage inflicted on Gaza, as a result of Hamas’s attacks, was a breach of Islamic law. Professor Dr. Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Islamic University of Gaza, issued a fatwa against Hamas for their October 7 attacks, the BBC reported on Friday. Fatwa is an Islamic religious decree made by a recognized Islamic jurist, Faqih, as a response to a question asked by a judge or government. The document accused Hamas of “violating Islamic principles governing jihad.” Dayah added, “If the pillars, causes,...

Forty U.S. Army soldiers who were in Israel as the advance team for what they thought was a routine training exercise last October 7 suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war, unarmed, and being forced to beg reluctant Pentagon officials to send an Air Force plane to extract them. ---SNIP--- With his men in mortal danger, the U.S. team leader requested permission to open the arms locker so they could retrieve their firearms but was denied at the US Central Command level and “denied and/or ignored” at a level above that, according to a military intelligence analyst with...

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is calling out President Joe Biden’s “horrific” and “hostile” policies for empowering Iran and its terror proxies, noting how they contributed to the savage October 7 attacks on Israel. In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News on Monday — the one-year mark of the unprecedented October 7 massacre — ZOA President Morton Klein, who has led the nation’s oldest pro-Israel group for more than thirty years, issued a fiery statement outlining what he described as the underlying causes of the brutal Hamas assault on Israelis. These causes, he noted, range from U.S. policy failures...

As we prepared yesterday afternoon for this conversation, the war that Iran has outsourced to its proxies for the last year finally became a war being waged by Iran itself, as it launched over 100 ballistic missiles towards Israel. Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled into bomb shelters, while missiles rained down on their homes, with a handful making direct impact. As of this recording, two people were injured, and one person was killed—that person was a Palestinian man in Jericho. Just before that onslaught, at least two terrorists opened fire at a train station in Jaffa, Israel, killing at least...

‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question. How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do...

Federal authorities issued a warning ahead of the one-year October 7 anniversary when Hamas terrorists launched attacks on Israel and killed thousands of innocent lives. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and National Counterterrorism Center posted a federal intelligence bulletin warning of potential violence "as well as any further significant escalations" in the Israel-Hamas war that "may be a motivating factor for violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators to engage in violence or threaten public safety.” According to the bulletin, authorities expect aggression nationwide that may motivate people to engage in hate crimes and provoke violence. It also warns that...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said he worries that “Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza.” And “it is certainly a possibility that the Israeli government is not going to sign any diplomatic agreement prior to the American election as a means, potentially, to try to influence the result.” Murphy said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu is pursuing multiple objectives all at once, I don’t doubt that he cares about the security of Israel, but he seems to be guided, on many...

A poll released Monday by the Jewish Democratic Council of America claims that Vice President Kamala Harris will win over two-thirds of the Jewish vote, while former President Donald Trump will only win one in four Jewish votes, suggesting Democrats have not lost Jewish support. There has been speculation that Jewish voters might shift Republican, due to perceptions that the Biden-Harris administration had handled Israel poorly, and the fact that they have presided during a shocking rise in antisemitism. Jewish voters are typically too small in number to make much of a difference in presidential elections, though they may have...

Hamas on Tuesday named Yahya Sinwar, its top official in Gaza who masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, as its new leader in a dramatic sign of the power of the Palestinian militant group’s hardline wing after his predecessor was killed in a presumed Israeli strike in Iran. The selection of Sinwar, a secretive figure close to Iran who worked for years to build up Hamas’ military strength, was a defiant signal that the group is prepared to keep fighting after 10 months of destruction from Israel’s campaign in Gaza and after the assassination of Sinwar’s predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh....