Free Republic

By writing controversial book, is he committing political suicide or is he crazy like a fox? By WILLIAM BUNCH bunchw@phillynews.com WHAT IN THE WORLD is Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum doing? Is the GOP stalwart aiming to win the presidency in 2008? Or is he somehow trying, with his outspoken remarks, to lose the closely contested race for his Senate seat in 2006. And is he trying to do both at the same time? The boyish-looking western Pennsylvanian, who has an 11-year Senate career and who has "red"-conservative views in a state that's voted "blue"-Democratic in the last four White House...

Cairo -- From the pulpit of the Peace Mosque in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt's leading Islamic cleric ripped into terrorists who kill innocent civilians. They will be damned in this life and the next, he thundered before hundreds of worshipers. "The aggressors who blow up themselves, their cars and bombs against innocent men, women and children will not be given any mercy by God. ... They will be cursed by God and his angels," Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi said during his sermon preceding Friday's prayers. Tantawi, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's most venerated institution, last month condemned the...

The principle of Al-Takeyya The Arabic word, "Takeyya", means "to prevent," or guard against. The principle of Al Takeyya conveys the understanding that Muslims are permitted to lie as a preventive measure against anticipated harm to one's self or fellow Muslims. This principle gives Muslims the liberty to lie under circumstances that they perceive as life threatening. They can even deny the faith, if they do not mean it in their hearts. Al-Takeyya is based on the following Quranic verse: "Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will...

TWO OF Britain’s bombers, Richard Reid and Muktar Said-Ibrahim, converted or reconverted to Islam in prison. This is a very small number, of course, but as we have just seen, it does not take large numbers of such people to effect a huge change in a country’s atmosphere. And the omens for the emergence of more of them are not good. First, the number of Muslim prisoners has risen sixfold over the past 15 years. With more than 4,000 such inmates they make up 70 per cent of prisoners from minority groups. They are mostly of Pakistani descent, and the...

For certain enlightened liberals on university faculties, the lesser intellectual stature of Christians and conservatives is so much taken for granted that they do not hesitate to write about them in terms dripping with condescension and contempt. An example I encountered this week is especially odious, and I am happy to bring it to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience. The authors are four political scientists at the University of Pittsburgh - Barry Ames, David Barker, Chris Bonneau and Christopher Carman. Their paper is a critique of a study, published earlier this year, examining the statistical evidence that not...

Desperation has again led Muslims to commit suicide bombings, this time in London. Brits still bewildered by the attacks, protesting, "But we're not Jewish!" need to get out of their cocoons and start asking the relevant question: Why is this happening? To stop terrorism, one must remove the root causes of terrorism. To that end, maybe it's time England pulled out of occupied Londonistan. Only then will this cycle of violence end. With the unemployment rate among British Muslims at 10 percent above the national average, perhaps a divestment campaign, as well as an academic boycott of England, would help...

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - The poor people dressed in Islamic garb or in dirty blue trousers and T-shirts sitting in 118-degree heat in the hall of the Sharm el-Sheik Hospital were either the brothers, the cousins, or the friends of the people wounded in the terrorist attack of the day before. Just plenty of desperate young people. No women were there, no mothers, or sisters, or wives. Egyptian women almost don't live in Sharm. The family and children of the workers are in the villages near Cairo, and their beloved men come to visit for one week once a month....

Over the weekend, I received several emails from readers warning me that I might lose my job over the article I wrote criticizing my university’s new harassment policy. Readers who sometimes suggest that I should learn to hold my tongue fail to understand my simple philosophy of life. It is an uncompromising philosophy that guarantees both peace of mind and success in any important endeavor. It can be roughly summarized as follows: 1. If you want to be happy and successful, you must immediately disabuse yourself of the notion that there is no such thing as good and evil. If,...

I recently set out to learn more about Islam. I had no agenda at the time except to broaden my knowledge on the subject. What I have learned sickened me. I had previously been accepting of the notion that Islam was a peaceful religion and that the Muslim terrorists who inflict so much pain and death around the world represented a fringe element outside of mainstream Islam. I was wrong. The Islamic deity, Allah, is a false god. While the term "Allah" does indeed carry the same meaning as "God," Mohammed's Allah is nothing more than a construct of a...

Shehzad Tanweer was the bright, Muslim son of a first-generation Pakistani immigrant in Britain. His father owned a fish-and-chips shop, and Tanweer, at 22, was a university student headed for a profession - the kind of story of immigrant assimilation that is so familiar in America. Instead, Tanweer became a murderer, killing himself and other fellow travelers in the morning rush hour on London's Underground. Muhammad Bouyeri, born in the Netherlands, shot Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and a descendant of the painter, six times while Van Gogh was bicycling in Amsterdam. Then he cut Van Gogh's throat and,...

You’d probably think there’s no connection between the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “South Pacific” in 1949 and the murdering Muslims of the 21st century. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. That musical explains these events. The most obscure song from that musical is, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” It’s low popularity is probably due to its dark subject, the injection of prejudice into the minds of children. Here are two of its verses, which make the point: You've got to be taught to hate and fear You've got to be taught from year to year It's got to...

Sun 24 Jul 2005 Britain must wake from its daydream GERALD WARNER THERE was formerly a tribe of South Sea islanders who, until discovered by explorers, had never made the connection between sexual congress and pregnancy. An examination of the DNA of Tony Blair might well reveal a genetic link with those innocents: his thesis that the bombings in London are totally unconnected with the Iraq war is the contemporary equivalent of their bland ignorance. It is true that the September 11 attacks predated the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; it is also true that they occurred in America, not...

Jihad without borders By Syed Saleem Shahzad KARACHI - A line connects the resistance strategy of Iraq's Ba'athists and Afghanistan's Taliban militias as they both draw on the same blueprint in their struggle against US-led forces in their respective countries. Significantly, their roadmap, conceived in the mountains between Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area and Afghanistan and in the southern parts of Baghdad, involves taking their battles to the home countries of the invading forces. The bomb attacks in London on July 7 can be viewed as the first manifestation of this approach. [end]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   The Jaishul al-Qiba al-Jihadi al-Siri...

Global Eye The United States long ago ceased to be anything like a living, thriving republic. But it retained the legal form of a republic, and that counted for something: As long as the legal form still existed, even as a gutted shell, there was hope it might be filled again one day with substance. But now the very legal structures of the Republic are being dismantled. The principle of arbitrary rule by an autocratic leader is being openly established, through a series of unchallenged executive orders, perverse Justice Department rulings and court decisions by sycophantic judges who defer to...

In 1939, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact cleared the way for Hitler to start World War II. The Pact caught the world by surprise, because it was an alliance between two bitter enemies, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Similarly, what made possible the recent bombings in London, and the many more that will follow in Europe and the U.S., is the Marx-Mohammed Pact. Once again, two sworn enemies, Marxism -- specifically the cultural Marxism commonly known as Political Correctness -- and Islam, have made a Devil's bargain whereby each assists the other against a common enemy, the remnants of the Christian West....

Wisconsin Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., in a highly visible national role as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is doing a great impression of anchorman Howard Beale going stark, raving mad in public. Beale, played by actor Peter Finch in the film "Network," became a media hero for suddenly flipping out on the air and rambling incoherently that he was "mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Sensenbrenner is much too boorish and pompous ever to become a folk hero. But even though media all over the country have taken notice of Sensenbrenner's seriously bizarre...

I believe thursday's bombings in London, combined with the first wave of explosions two weeks ago, are changing something for the better. Never before have I heard Muslims so sincerely denounce terrorism committed in our name as I did on my visit to Britain a few days ago. We're finally waking up. Except on one front: the possible role of religion itself in these crimes. Even now, the Muslim Council of Britain adamantly insists that Islam has nothing to do with the London attacks. It cites other motives — "segregation" and "alienation," for instance. Although I don't deny that living...

TAMPA - A heart-breaking last will and testament and a letter vital to the prosecution's case were quietly entered into evidence Thursday in the trial of Sami Al-Arian and three other defendants. Without mentioning what they were, federal prosecutor Alexis Collins asked the judge to accept T-516 and T-402 into evidence. With those meaningless labels, two documents passed into the public record like a death notice slipped under a door. Their subject: martyrdom. One last will and testament came from Adel Kamel Daher, a 26-year-old Palestinian who was gunned down by Israeli soldiers after attacking an Israeli convoy with two...

The terrorist attacks of 7 July, as the ludicrous BBC refuses to call them, have raised many questions. We might ask what turned ordinary Muslim youths into mass murderers. Or we might wonder how a religion of peace can inspire people to terrorism across the world. A more pressing question, however, is: why Britain? Not why was Britain attacked, because the list of countries targeted by Islamist terrorism is growing so fast it will soon be quicker to list those unaffected. But rather: why did Britain become the first country in the developed world to produce its own suicide bombers?...

Best of Jim Cook July 19, 2005 THE DEATH OF PROSPERITY The purpose of our Constitution and Bill of Rights was to limit government. The founding fathers knew that we must be protected from our own government. People seem to forget that. Throughout the twentieth century, liberals did all they could to broaden the role of the state and put government in charge of all aspects of our lives. They bear responsibility for constructing a massive centralized bureaucracy. Now both parties endorse big government. What our founding fathers tried to prevent from happening, the politicians have managed to override. The...