Free Republic

A mom brought her six-year-old daughter into the office with a fever and a sore throat. I asked the little girl to open her mouth and say “Ah.” She shook her head and clenched her mouth shut. “Mom, it looks like I’m going to need your help here," I said. "Could you please ask your daughter to open her mouth and say ‘Ah’?” Mom arched her eyebrows and replied, “Her body, her choice.” Wow. This mom was invoking the “My body, my choice” slogan of abortion-rights activists to defend her 6-year-old daughter's refusal to let me, the doctor, look at...

Twenty years ago, after my first trip as a government minister to 13 college campuses in the United States, I told Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, that in my opinion, the main battlefield for the future of the Jewish people lies in American academia. Since then, I appeared dozens of times at different universities, and with each visit I witnessed the new antisemitism growing stronger. In light of this experience, I insisted in many conversations with liberal American Jews that while left- and right-wing antisemitism are connected and both are very dangerous, it is the left-wing variety that poses...

On Thursday, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene said the houses of her two daughters were swatted, coming just days after Greene’s house herself was hit. "Both my daughters' houses just got swatted today," Greene wrote on Twitter. "Big thanks to the police who responded! We appreciate you and support you! Whoever is doing this, you are going to get caught and it won’t be funny to you anymore."

A progressive congressman associated with "The Squad" who proudly voted to defund the Austin Police Department as a city council member and blasted the department just last week for alleged racist practices is under fire after requesting a police patrol at his home from the same department. "It’s come to our attention that Anti police king of the defund movement in Austin @GregCasar who only last week called APD an agency with racist practices has requested enhanced patrols around his house for the next week," the Austin Police Retired Officers Association posted on X Tuesday. "We want everyone in Austin...

Six weeks after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, American Democrats can no longer deny that their party has an antisemitism problem which, if left unchecked, may very well split the party ahead of next year’s elections and likely for the foreseeable future.To be sure, the Democratic Party has had to reckon with allegations of antisemitism multiple times in recent years, but this time it is wholly different, with direct implications for the party’s political viability — or even its survival in its current form.While Israel has long been a touchy subject for progressives, the overt antisemitism we...

I’m not on TikTok, and I recommend you delete your account if you are (or your kid’s accounts, if they have them). If you don’t think you can live without it you can cut out the middleman and send all your personal data to the Chinese consulate (or reach out to Eric Swalwell’s office and ask for Fang-Fang’s number, same difference). But putting aside the communists who run it, there’s a big problem with the communists who use it – many of them are teachers, and a disturbing percentage of them are mentally unstable. This isn’t just about TikTok, it’s...

Israel says 18 female hostages remain in Gaza, most of whom were taken from a music festival. ... Hamas is refusing to release its remaining female hostages is to prevent them from revealing the horrors they experienced in captivity. Israeli officials believe Hamas still has roughly 18 women in custody, most of whom were kidnapped from an Oct. 7 music festival near the Gaza border, ... Matthew Miller says that Hamas' refusal to release the women led to the collapse of the cease-fire on Friday. "It seems that one of the reasons they don't want to turn women over that...

I have been reminded a lot recently of the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator is a butler who was loyal to his lord. The butler idolized his employer. But as the novel unfolds, the lord he so fondly and faithfully served turns out to have been a foolish Nazi sympathizer in the years leading up to WWII. Imagine spending decades of your life serving someone you admire, and then having to face up to the reality that the man was a knave. I can think of so many Jewish friends who in recent years loyally...

DALTON, Ga. — A Macon man is now facing charges after he called Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s office and threatened to kill her, according to her office. Video of the call shared with Channel 2 Action News the man can be heard claiming he has a sniper rifle and is going to shoot the Republican congresswoman in the head. In the call, he claims to be a major donor before launching into an expletive-laden tirade.

Gender, ethnic, and racial diversity are lacking in leadership positions across U.S. academic surgery departments, according to a study published online Oct. 11 in JAMA Surgery. Yoshiko Iwai, from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and colleagues assessed how racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among U.S. academic surgery department leaders differs across roles and surgical specialties. The authors searched publicly accessible medical school and affiliated hospital websites in the United States and Puerto Rico (154 surgical departments affiliated with 146 medical schools; Jan. 15 to July 15, 2022). In total, 2,165 faculty were in included in...

Ever since David Horowitz broke from the radical left back in the 1980s, he has been trying to warn conservatives that they don’t really understand the core principle of the left, and the depths of the left’s power-mad depravity. Conservatives too often think that the Israel-Palestine conflict, or civil rights, crime, income inequality, transgender ideology, climate change, etc, etc., are discrete issues to be argued against the left with reason and facts. To which Horowitz replies: The issue is not the issue—the issue is revolution! (And a key corollary is: the more violent, the better. Hence the approval and celebration...

Maybe now she’ll see how her citizens feel. Pamela Price, the progressive prosecutor in Alameda County, California, got a look at crime, up close and personal, when her office laptop was stolen from an SUV after her bodyguard parked the vehicle Friday afternoon, according to KGO-TV in Oakland. And police never showed up to take a report. The incident took place during working hours when Price was at the Alameda County Family Justice Center about 3:30 p.m., KGO reporter Dan Noyes wrote in a social media post. When she returned to the vehicle, she found a window broken and several...

Joel Simonds, a Los Angeles-based rabbi involved in progressive causes, has always known that many of his ideological allies did not agree with him on Israel. But after this weekend’s terror attack, the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust, Simonds said many liberal Jews feel abandoned by people they thought were friends, some of whom have expressed little sympathy for the Israelis killed while focusing instead on the plight of Palestinians. “In these last few days, the silence is deafening and it is hurtful and a betrayal on so many levels,” said Simonds, the founding director of the Jewish...

Two progressive Jewish organizations have issued responses to the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas, saying that an Israeli "apartheid" has caused the violence. Over the weekend, Hamas launched the deadliest Palestinian militant attack on Israel in history. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) then launched a subsequent attack on the Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country is "at war" and has cut off supplies of food, fuel, electricity and medicine into Gaza. In a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, the Jewish organization, If Not Now, who call themselves "a movement of American Jews organizing...

Progressives are facing backlash over their initial responses to the attacks on Israel by Hamas militants, revealing the degree to which they’re at odds with others in the Democratic caucus over the issue. Members of the Squad such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) took heat from fellow Democrats this week over statements criticized for being too tepid in the wake of the violent attacks against Israeli civilians. Meanwhile, after mounting pressure, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned the “bigotry and callousness” at a pro-Palestinian rally aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York City.

After the horrifying images of what Hamas did in Israel on Saturday went around the world, it’s hard to believe that anyone came out in support of the Palestinian jihad. But numerous leftists found a way and seized the opportunity of the bloody massacre of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians to advance anti-Israel talking points. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah) led the way with a statement that was a masterpiece of blame-shifting and displacement of responsibility. After seeing ordinary Israelis massacred wholesale at a peace festival, on the street, and in their homes, Tlaib began by putting the perpetrators and their...

(Two background notes. (1)Nick Riemer is a very prominent Australian "progressive" "antizionist" and his views expressed here are relatively moderate compared to those who are celebrated Hamas' "act of resistance" though less moderate than those engaging in "both sideism"; (2) Everyone knows that the slaughter, rape, kidnapping, and so on of hundreds of Israelis is precisely what Hamas would do to the entire Jewish population of Israel if it had the power to do so. So, with that said…)There has been too much pointless debate over whether those who call for Israel's destruction are necessarily antisemitic. The important point is...

Hamas terrorists fired rockets into towns, shot at civilians from paragliders, and kidnapped women and children from their homes. Grandmothers at gunpoint, loaded onto golf carts, to be held hostage or killed by twisted, depraved thugs — supported by soulless New York City progressives. Yes, in Times Square on Sunday, the Democratic Socialists of America will host an “All Out for Palestine” rally. Wear a mask so you’re not recognized, the organizers say. Best to just let the swastikas do the talking. “Never mind the hundreds of Israeli civilians and children who have been murdered, wounded, abducted, and terrorized. Their...

The deadly surprise offensive by Hamas militants on Israel over the weekend threatens to ignite tensions between moderate and progressive Democrats already divided over the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. For President Joe Biden, that long-simmering discord is at risk of mushrooming into a divisive intraparty clash over the US government’s next moves – especially as Israel launches what it has promised will be a ferocious crackdown on Gaza – that could ultimately threaten the liberal coalition so crucial to his reelection strategy. Early signs of Democratic infighting and anxieties over potentially difficult...

We talk frequently – those of us who are paying attention – about the various policy proposals of the opposite sides in American politics. It goes back centuries; it predates our founding era, even. One side has one solution and the other side proposes an alternative; both sides debate, and eventually one option or the other is tried. Sometimes – and this is one of the goals of the idea of states’ rights – some states try one method and other states try the other. The “laboratories of democracy” concept is given its opportunity, and we can see which methods...