Free Republic

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he will be waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Turkish capital this week to conduct face-to-face talks about the more than three-year war. -snip- Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv he will be in Ankara on Thursday to conduct the negotiations. He plans to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the two will wait for Putin to arrive, he said. Zelenskyy said if Putin chooses Istanbul to hold the meeting, then both leaders will travel there.

The Turkish ministry of foreign affairs has condemned the killing of Hamas political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh in an attack in Tehran and offered condolences to the Palestinian people. In a statement released on X, the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs, Hakan Fidan stated, “We condemn the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Chief of the Hamas Political Bureau, in a heinous attack in Tehran.” “We express our condolences to the Palestinian people, hundreds of thousands of whom, like Haniyeh, have been martyred to live peacefully in their homeland under the roof of their state,” he added. -snip- Unacceptable political murder: Russia...

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov today strongly condemned the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political bureau of the Palestinian group Hamas, in a drone strike on his residence in Tehran, saying it undermines prospects of ending the conflict in Gaza. At a press briefing in Moscow, Peskov stated that the attack was detrimental to peace efforts in the region and risked destabilising the situation. “We strongly condemn this attack, which resulted in Mr. Haniyeh’s death. Such actions undermine attempts to establish peace in the region and could significantly destabilise an already tense situation,” he emphasised. In a separate...

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism. Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other -- for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America...

One of the many beliefs — i.e., non-empirically based doctrines — of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason and reason leads to the moral good. Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more...

Outside of politics, sports, and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, or French, or Austrians, or even Brits can you name? Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard pressed to come up with many, more often any, names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe has virtually fallen off the radar screen. This is particularly meaningful given how different the answer would have been had you asked anyone the same question between just 80 and 120 years ago — and...

Dennis and Sue were married December 31 by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at his synagogue, Kehillat Ma'arav, in Santa Monica, California. The former Susan Reed, known to all as Sue, was raised in the Los Angeles area...

We are constantly reminded about the destructive consequences of religion -- intolerance, hatred, division, inquisitions, persecutions of "heretics," holy wars. Though far from the whole story, they are, nevertheless, true. There have been many awful consequences of religion. What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism -- the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies....

We are constantly reminded about the destructive consequences of religion -- intolerance, hatred, division, inquisitions, persecutions of "heretics," holy wars. Though far from the whole story, they are, nevertheless, true. There have been many awful consequences of religion. What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism -- the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies....

In just the last few months, three books attacking belief It is not due to their eloquence, originality or persuasiveness that these books have become best sellers. I believe other factors are at work. And they are: First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute. How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today...

A question I pose to atheists and others who argue that religion is irrelevant to moral behavior has been cited by Christopher Hitchens in his national best seller, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." And Hitchens's citation has been widely quoted -- from the New Yorker to the website of the Oxford evolutionist and best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins. This is how the story appears in Hitchens's book: "A week before the events of September 11, 2001, I was on a panel with Dennis Prager, who is one of America's better-known religious broadcasters. He challenged me in public...

Contrary to what you learned at college, America from its inception has been a religious country, and was designed to be one. As the greatest foreign observer of America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, noted in his "Democracy in America," "Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power." Or, as the great British historian Paul Johnson has just written: "In [George] Washington's eyes, at least, America was in no sense a secular state," and "the American Revolution was in essence the political...

QUICKVOTE Do you believe your community should follow the example of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, in cracking down on those who hire and house illegal immigrants? Yes No

When you think about a Muslim suicide terrorist, is "happy" the first word you think of to describe him? When you think about Nazis or Communists or Klansmen or child molesters, do you immediately think, "Now there are some happy people"? Of course not. It only takes a moment's thought to realize that while most unhappy people don't engage in evil, most evil is done by unhappy people. This is true on both the macro and the micro levels. We all know how much more likely we are to lash out at others when we are unhappy and how much...

The cultural civil war in which America is engaged is, in large measure, about American exceptionalism. Conservative America generally believes in the concept; liberal America generally finds it chauvinistic and dangerous. What is American exceptionalism? The belief that America often knows better than the world what is right and wrong. This belief drives most of the world's opinion-makers crazy. And it particularly infuriates the American Left, that part of America that trusts what is called "world opinion" more than it trusts the American people. And from where does this belief in American exceptionalism derive? Mostly from the religious beliefs that...

When my older son was about 8 years old, I was putting him to bed one night and asked him what he learned that day in school. Normally he would answer, as nearly all boys do, by saying, "Nothing." But that night he had an answer.

Presidential poll gives Colo. congressman 1% WASHINGTON - It's official: Rep. Tom Tancredo is a blip on the 2008 presidential radar. Tom Tancredo's name was misspelled on survey group's Web site. A new poll shows Tancredo, a Littleton Republican, pulling 1 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, home of the traditional first-in-the-nation presidential primary election. American Research Group Inc. surveyed 600 likely Republican primary voters - including 433 Republicans and 167 undeclared voters - from Aug. 5 to 7. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., led with 39 percent, followed by "undecided" at 32 percent. Among others: former House Speaker Newt...

Jeanine Pirro declared "I have taken on the mob" when she announced her run for U.S. Senate this week, but she could have said "I have taken from the mob." The Westchester District Attorney pocketed nearly $12,000 in campaign checks from firms and associates with alleged links to organized crime, the Daily News has found. http://www.nydailynews.com/08-12-2005/news/politics/story/336603p-287502c.html

A New Mascot Meet a Frankenstein creation from the Politicker's crack origami squad. Meet... ....Pillary.

It is almost impossible to overstate how radically different Old Testament thought was from the thought of the rest of its contemporary world. And it continues to be, given how few societies affirm Judeo-Christian values and how much opposition to them exists in American society, the society that has most incorporated these values. Among the most radical of these differences was the incredible declaration that God is outside of nature and is its creator. In every society on earth, people venerated nature and worshipped nature gods. There were gods of thunder and gods of rain. Mountains were worshipped, as were...