Free Republic

A court ruling on Monday in Britain, if it is allowed to stand, could do nothing less than change the course of that country’s history, and that of the entire world. The U.K. has taken a decisive step away from the principles of free speech that it played a dominant role in formulating and giving to the world. There is serious cause for doubt now about whether the Sceptered Isle will even survive as a free society. Officially, Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a “religiously aggravated public order offence.” His specific crime, however, was that he publicly burned a...

The victorious Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant was the Republicans’ unanimous choice for president in 1868. As in so many other presidential campaigns, the Democrats made race the centerpiece of their appeal to the American people. They nominated former New York governor Horatio Seymour and ran him on a platform calling for the “immediate restoration of all States to their rights in the Union under the Constitution,” amnesty for all former Confederates, and “the regulation of the elective franchise in the States by their citizens.” That last point meant the right of white Southerners, chiefly former slaveholders and all...

full title: TurkeyÂ’s Erdogan to meet with Pope, thank him for opposing TrumpÂ’s recognition of Jerusalem as IsraelÂ’s capital. The United StatesÂ’ controversial recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is expected to dominate talks between President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan and Pope Francis on the presidentÂ’s first trip to the Vatican on Sunday. According to presidential sources, ErdoÄŸan will thank Pope Francis for his stance against U.S. President Donald TrumpÂ’s decision and his efforts to protect the status quo in the holy city. The Turkish president previously expressed his appreciation to Pope Francis who strongly opposed the bitterly-contested move...

Hadi Matar finally went on trial Tuesday for attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie back in Aug. 2022. There is little, if any, doubt about Matar’s guilt .. for he stabbed Rushdie multiple times in full view of a shocked crowd at the Chautauqua festival. .. Barone managed to delay the trial for over a year. Now that it has begun, both Barone and his opposite number, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, seem curiously intent on preventing any discussion of Matar’s motive. Matar tried to kill the man who, at the time of the stabbing had carried for...

The election is over, Trump has been reelected, but the lawfare continues nonetheless. On Monday, a federal appeals court that must have been under the influence of some psychotropic drug upheld Trump’s liability for supposedly sexually abusing the partisan fantasist E. Jean Carroll in a Bloomingdale’s dressing room sometime in the 1990s. Carroll’s story has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese that has been used for target practice, but despite lacking any evidence, she keeps winning in court — believe all women, doncha know, even the crazy mendacious ones. Trump’s team is going to keep on appealing, and...

Dick Cheney did it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it. Adam Kinzinger did it, of course. So did Jeff Flake. Mike Pence walked right up to the edge but ultimately declined to take the plunge, but even George W. Bush’s daughter, Barbara Pierce Bush, and Dick Cheney’s notorious daughter Liz (that is, former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Jan. 6) jumped right in. And now Liz Cheney is calling upon the biggest prize of all, former President George W. Bush, to join the party for the uniparty and endorse Kamala Harris for president. appropriate forum for an establishment mouthpiece to issue a call to...

They can't handle truth. Have you ever heard of Howard Lutnick? You most likely will soon. Howard W. Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the venerable financial services firm. He was one of the lesser-noted speakers at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday — you know, the one where, if you believe MSNBC, jackbooted Trump supporters were goose-stepping around and shouting “Sieg heil!” in terrifying unison when a Charlie Chaplin-mustachioed Trump appeared and gave them the straight-arm salute. While all that is lurid fantasy and the left’s latest shameless smear of the Bad Orange Man, Lutnick really did...

Ceasefire now? As much as Kamala Harris wants one and would capitalize upon one if it did materialize, the answer must be a firm no. After exploding pagers and a series of carefully targeted Israeli airstrikes have completely decimated Hezbollah's senior leadership, the jihad terror organization now wants a ceasefire with Israel. This will come as music to the ears of the Biden-Harris regime, which would like nothing better than an October peace agreement between Israel and one of the major players that are arrayed against it. The Harris campaign could wave this agreement in the air every time someone...

Just what the keffiyeh sanctions and inspires. The new academic year has scarcely begun, and Hamas supporters on campus are already signaling that they haven’t lost a bit of their fanaticism. If anything, they’re even more menacing. An incident at the University of Pittsburgh Friday evening shows that American college and university campuses are becoming increasingly dangerous places for Jewish students and other supporters of Israel, who are being threatened and brutalized all in the name of the “liberation” of “Palestine.”The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported recently that a man named Jarrett Buba, who at 52 years old is unlikely to be...

-snip- The rumors began with the form of Biden’s withdrawal from the race. On Sunday at 1:46 p.m. EDT, the Joe Biden X account published an image of a letter in which Joe states that “it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” It was a splendid 21st-century moment that Biden announced his own political demise on a social media platform, but it also raised questions, chief of which was: “Where’s Joe?” -snip- Shouldn’t Biden...

A world-historical societal transformation is taking place before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. Britain, the erstwhile leader of the Western world and the foundation and source of English-speaking civilization, is in its last days as a free society, and will soon become an Islamic state. Yet despite the mountains of evidence that this transformation is taking place, many will still deny that it is happening at all. They may not even admit it when it overtakes them personally. The English actor-turned-political-activist Lawrence Fox recently noted what was happening: "The Mayor of London is a Muslim. The...

For politicians, one would think it would have been an open-and-shut case, and in earlier, saner ages in our national life, it would have been. If a group of people in America get together and scream “Death to America,” officials ought to be lining up to condemn them, and there should be investigations and, if non-citizens are involved, deportations. We live, however, in Old Joe Biden’s America, in which the America-hating left is the dominant cultural force, and so some high-profile politicians have been notably wary about condemning calls for the destruction of the nation they have vowed to protect...

Israel is now engaged in the fourth war it has had to fight for its survival. The three others were fought in 1948, 1967, and 1973. In addition, there have been a half-dozen other campaigns the Israelis have had to fight against the terrorists of the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The IDF soldiers, their ranks increased with the addition of 360,000 reservists, have been fighting up and down the Gaza Strip, a hellishly difficult theatre of war — that is, urban warfare in one of the most densely-populated places on earth. Israel’s mortal enemy, the terror group Hamas, has built...

The New York Times proudly announced last Monday that it had “won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Those prestigious journalism awards went to “Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times” for “photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.” The Times neglected to mention, however, one telling detail: Masoud has been unmasked as a member of Hamas who participated in the Oct. 7 jihad massacres inside Israel.The Paper of Record shows...

The Biden regime has been under heavy pressure from its far-left base for months. Foes of Israel have repeatedly demanded that Biden’s handlers punish the Jewish state for defending itself, or else they’ll lose their votes in November. Clearly, the Biden camp has been listening, and now the matter has come to a head: the Biden regime has actually threatened our foremost ally in the Middle East with a cutoff of military aid.The Jerusalem Post reported that “Biden issued a memorandum on Thursday night asking countries receiving US military funding to prove they’re following international humanitarian and human rights laws.”...

There will be no musical festivities. No tree-lighting ceremony. No extravagant decorations that normally bedeck the West Bank city of Bethlehem at Christmas. With the war in Gaza raging, this is a city in mourning. In perhaps the most overt display of how Israel’s war in Gaza has dampened Christmas celebrations in the city seen as the birthplace of Jesus, a Lutheran church put up its crèche, but with a sad and symbolic twist. The baby Jesus — wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white checkered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity — is lying not in a...

[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]It’s the most wonderful time of the year and all that. But in the city of Jesus’ birth, the mood is quite different, and the locals will tell you that it’s all Israel’s fault.In the run-up to Christmas Day, Gil Zohar of Religion Unplugged reported sorrowful words from the Rev. Dr. Munther Ishaq, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church: “Christmas celebrations are canceled this year — for it’s impossible to celebrate Christmas while our people in Gaza are going through...

Will she now reconsider her support of Old Joe Biden and abetting of his corruption, in light of the fact that it was the Biden regime’s treason and fecklessness that enabled the Oct. 7 jihad massacre to happen? Don’t hold your breath. Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a major Democratic donor well connected to the Biden administration, has been bringing attention to the hostages after her 3-year-old great-niece, a U.S. citizen, was orphaned and taken captive by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Hirsh Naftali is known for buying Hunter Biden’s artwork, visiting the White House more than a dozen times and being...

As one of the first orders of business after the House of Representatives selects a new Speaker and additional military and humanitarian aid is approved for Israel, the House should at minimum vote to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and take away her committee assignments. Rep. Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American sworn into Congress, reacted to the Hamas terrorists’ horrific massacre and abduction of Israeli civilians by condemning Israel’s “occupation” and “apartheid” policies. Not one word of condemnation for the atrocities the terrorists committed after invading Israel and rampaging through the streets and into Israeli homes, slaughtering men, women, and children...

Ever since video spread far and wide last week of Sen. John Fetterman (D-Uncle Fester) reacting with sarcastic derision to news that House Republicans were considering beginning a formal impeachment inquiry against Old Joe Biden, rumors have been flying that the guy in the video wasn’t Fetterman at all. Twitter/X is full of detailed comparisons of still photos from each, with the slovenly socialist’s supporters deriding doubters as crazed conspiracy theorists going nuts over photos taken with different lighting or from different angles. Amid all the back-and-forth about whether there are now two Fettermans, however, the biggest part of the...