Free Republic

Last month, I was thrilled to see Morocco become the fourth Arab nation in the past several months to announce that it would establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. It’s yet another step towards peace in the string of groundbreaking developments that began last summer with the historic Abraham Accords. Even today, Morocco and Israel have just signed an agreement allowing for direct flights to operate between the two nations. Before these recent developments, Morocco had already begun to blaze a trail for harmony among Muslims and Jews. They hold a reputation for tolerance and diversity that can serve as...

Sen. Rand Paul Questions Sec. of State Nominee Blinken on Regime Change. "... It's a DISASTER!" Video...

Israel on Monday advanced plans to build 800 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank, a move that could strain ties with the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced the move, saying it would include 100 homes in a settlement where an Israeli woman was killed last month in an attack allegedly carried out by a Palestinian assailant. The announcement will burnish Netanyahu’s right-wing credentials in a tough campaign ahead of March elections, but it could anger Biden, who is opposed to settlement expansion and has clashed with Israel over it in the...

When you meet the unbelievers, strike necks.” (Qur’an 47:4).. “Islamic State claims responsibility for attack on Pakistan’s Shi’ite Hazara minority that kills 11,” by Gul Yousafzai, Reuters, January 3, 2021 (thanks to Henry): QUETTA, Pakistan -Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack on Sunday that killed 11 miners from Pakistan’s minority Shi’ite Hazaras in Baluchistan province. The attack took place early on Sunday morning in the Mach area of Bolan district around 100 kms southeast of Baluchistan’s capital Quetta, killing the miners who were in a shared residential room near the coal mine where they worked, officials said. “The throats...

Iran’s state media has alleged that in addition to the United States, several countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Germany and Britain, had played a role in the assassination of its senior military leader Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike on January 3, 2020, while visiting Baghdad. According to DEFA Press, more countries would be added to the list once the investigation into Soleimani’s killing is completed. “We must learn from this experience, which came at a great price, and we must make every effort to preserve national unity and cohesion that was achieved...

Cardinal Acquits Islam, Migrants of Terror14 arrested for Vienna massacre are all Muslim migrants VIENNA (ChurchMilitant.com) - Europe's top cardinal has rejected claims blaming Islam or immigration for jihadi terrorism, even as police revealed that the 14 suspects arrested for Monday's Vienna massacre are all Muslim migrants. French bishops pay tribute to Catholic victims of jihad in NiceIn a Wednesday interview with SIR Agency, Cdl. Jean-Claude Hollerich, president of the Commission of the Episcopates of the European Union, asserted that incriminating Islam and immigration for French schoolteacher Samuel Paty's murder and recent jihadi attacks in Nice and Vienna "does not...

The Greeks who represent the last vestiges of Christian Byzantium and the Roman Empire are heading towards their final extinction in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, with their numbers dwindling to a mere handful under his Islamist government. What is now Turkey only began to be colonised in by the Turkic peoples in earnest from around 1071, after their Seljuk ancestors had arrived from Central Asia and vanquished the Greek-speaking Christian ruler Romanos IV Diogenes’s forces at the Battle of Manzikert. The last vestiges of the Byzantine state where finally snuffed out with the brutal conquest of Constantinople, widely regarded as...

Lahore (Agenzia Fides) - Imran Masih, a 38-year-old Christian from Faisalabad, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for blasphemy, was acquitted on appeal today, December 15, before the Lahore Supreme Court. The court overturned the first instance sentence that sentenced him to life imprisonment in 2010. This is confirmed by the Catholic lawyer Khalil Tahir Sandhu, who defended Imran, like many other Pakistani Christians unjustly accused of blasphemy. "This is good news for justice, for Christians, for the country. We are happy for the positive outcome of the process which, ultimately recognizes freedom for an innocent person. But on the...

Another Christmas is upon us, and it’s the same old story: in Muslim lands, Christians are oppressed and in constant danger of violent jihad attacks. And in the lands once known as Christendom, jihadis threaten new jihad massacres. And so it was no surprise when International Christian Concern reported Wednesday that “security forces in Pakistan reportedly stopped a major terror attack planned to take place on Christmas Day in Peshawar. In a raid on a house in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Khyber district, four terrorists, including the leader of a banned militant outfit, were arrested.” Among those arrested was Zakir Afridi, the...

NBC News’ streaming service Peacock host Mehdi Hasan said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “All In” that President Donald Trump “should be prosecuted” for his “sociopathic” behavior that lead to hundreds of thousands of “preventable deaths” from coronavirus. Hasan said, “The two worst presidents of the last hundred years are the last two Republican presidents the current one Donald Trump and George W. Bush which speaks volumes about the modern Republican Party and also when you compare Trump and Bush, Bush killed hundreds of thousands of people abroad, you know, brown and black people in faraway countries we don’t care about. Donald...

Muddy roads, rusted cars, makeshift shelters and piles of garbage: The desolate images at the beginning of German director Milo Rau’s new film, The New Gospel, show how farm workers live near the southern Italian city of Matera. Most of them are African refugees. They have no residence permit and work for hours under the scorching sun or in the freezing cold for a pittance in the tomato fields and orange plantations. They are hired and supervised by Italian foremen, the “caporali.” The mafia controls the agricultural economy in the Matera region; there is no way around their contact men....

Rep. Ilhan Omar blamed “criminal neglect” on the part of President Trump for her father tragically passing away due to the coronavirus. Omar (D-MN) made the harsh accusations during a conversation with MSNBC. “My father and over 300,000 people have lost their lives to Covid because of dangerous criminal neglect by Trump and his administration,” she said. Nur Omar Mohamed passed away in June due to “complications from Covid-19.” ... Omar also seemed to suggest the President and/or members of his administration should be “prosecuted” for those deaths, citing a memo released earlier in the week by House Majority Whip...

LAHORE, Pakistan (Morning Star News) – A Catholic family’s five-month search for their 12-year-old daughter who was kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam and married to a 45-year-old Muslim in Faisalabad, Pakistan, ended on Saturday (Dec. 5) when police found her chained in her abductor’s house, sources said. The discovery came on the heels of the killing of a young woman in Rawalpindi, allegedly shot dead by her Muslim suitor for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and marry him. Earlier this year the father of 12-year-old Farah Shaheen reported his daughter was kidnapped on June 25, forcibly converted to Islam...

Queensland Police say the alleged murders of an elderly couple in Brisbane are being treated as a terrorism event. In a disturbing development, they have also urged anyone who has relatives in the Parkinson area of Brisbane to check on them. The bodies of the 87-year-old man and 86-year-old woman were discovered in their Ulinga Crescent home on Thursday afternoon when police performed a “welfare check”. Both had suffered significant injuries. On Friday, Deputy Comissioner Tracy Linford said police had discovered a link between the dead couple – whose names are yet to be released – and a man shot...

Democrat Raphael Warnock was already struggling to beat back allegations of anti-Semitism, and then Linda Sarsour and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib jumped into the Georgia Senate election picture. The Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] plans to hold Sunday evening a virtual “vote-a-thon” aimed at encouraging Georgia Muslims to vote in the Jan. 5 run-off elections, an event featuring the Democratic congresswomen as well as Ms. Sarsour. All three have expressed support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment cause, and all three have been embroiled in recent years in headline-grabbing anti-Semitism controversies. All three...

Study of England, Scotland and Wales dispels myth of ‘Asian grooming gangs’ popularised by far right The majority of child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under the age of 30, an official paper has said. The report, which covers England, Scotland and Wales and summarises a range of studies on the issue of group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE), also known as grooming gangs, said there was not enough evidence to conclude that child sexual abuse gangs were disproportionately made up of Asian offenders. High-profile cases including in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford have involved groups of men...

A former Osama bin Laden henchman convicted in two deadly 1998 bombings is free and living in the UK this week after being released early — thanks to a Manhattan federal judge who agreed the terrorist was way too obese to survive the coronavirus behind bars.Adel Abdel Bary, 60, had spent 21 years in a New Jersey prison for his role in the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.“Defendant’s obesity and somewhat advanced age make COVID-19 significantly more risky to him than to the average person,” US District Judge...

The terrorist who beheaded a French school teacher near Paris for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to his class has been given a hero's funeral in his native Chechnya. Footage shows mourners at the ceremony for Abdullakh Anzorov, 18, in his native village of Shalazi in the oil-rich Russian region. The body of the killer who decapitated teacher Samuel Paty, and was lauded as a 'lion of Islam' at his funeral, had been returned from France on Saturday. Anzorov was shot dead by French police minutes after the beheading in the Paris suburbs on October 16. Some 200 people...

The inquiry into the 2019 attacks on two Christchurch mosques revealed on Tuesday that security services had not given enough focus to right-wing terror, and could only have prevented the shootings “by chance.” The judicial probe called for 44 key changes to counterterrorism operations in response to the murder of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern welcomed the publishing of the almost 800-page report and said she would accept recommendations. “The Royal Commission found no failures within any government agencies that would have allowed the individual’s planning and preparation to have been detected...

“Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” That phrase, coined by writer Sarah Hagi in 2015, elicited millions of flickers of recognition and launched a million tote bags. Ijeoma Oluo untangles that charged irony in her searing new book, along with its perilous implications.