Free Republic

War-weary Americans are worried their country is about to be dragged into another Middle East quagmire. Their concern is well founded. The United States military is already helping Israel shoot down Iranian missiles and moving more military assets into the region. MAGA support for President Donald Trump has remained consistent and bulletproof so far. But war with Iran may prove a red line for the president’s most loyal cohort. “I can tell you right now, our MAGA base does not want war,” MAGA influencer and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk said Friday during a segment of his popular...

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, either the world is using Socrates, or this is always one hell of a coincidence, which I do not believe. The defense stocks moved days before the Hamas attack. You projected that the war would start in Ukraine more than a year in advance. When are you going to come clean and explain how you do this? There was a daily panic cycle here, and this was the week with escalating volatility into the end of June, which you also forecast. HOW? FF ANSWER: Look, I have stated many times that when I created this model, it...

Mahdawi was arrested after arriving at a citizenship center in Vermont, The Intercept reports. ICE’s database appears to confirm Mahdawi’s detention. The database says Mahdawi is in ICE custody, listing his birthplace as Jordan. Mahdawi was born in the West Bank, but the ICE database does not have a category for the Palestinian territories. Several Columbia University anti-Israel activists have been targeted by the Trump administration, starting last month with protest leader Mahmoud Khalil. Mohsen Mahdawi’s Calls for Israel’s Destruction, Justification of Hamas Terrorism and Support for the Pro-Hamas Encampment at Columbia University (Columbia). Mohsen Mahdawi’s Calls for Israel’s Destruction,...

A bipartisan pair of senators is warning the White House that recent US strikes on the Houthis in Yemen risk “emboldening” the Iranian-backed group and flouted the law regarding congressional oversight of military operations. The letter from Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., shared first with Semafor, concerns the strikes that have made headlines recently.... “Neither the U.S. strikes since October 2023 ordered by President Joe Biden, nor the previous years-long campaign against the Houthis conducted by Saudi Arabia were successful in establishing deterrence against the Houthis,” Merkley and Paul wrote in the letter sent to President Donald...

A New York federal judge has denied the Trump administration’s bid to dismiss the legal challenge brought by Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist who was detained by immigration enforcement agents earlier this month, and has ordered the case transferred to New Jersey. Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities. He was transferred first to New Jersey and then to Louisiana, where he is currently detained. The Trump administration sought his deportation but two...

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, proclaimed on Wednesday that “there was no raw evidence” of an “imminent threat” to warrant the elimination of Iran’s top terror chief, declaring that President Trump “recklessly assassinated” Qasem Soleimani. Jayapal, upon emerging from a congressional classified briefing on the strike eliminating Iran’s top general, proclaimed that there was “no evidence of an imminent threat or attack” to justify the action against the terrorist mastermind, who directed terrorist proxies abroad. She claimed: President Trump recklessly assassinated Qasem Soleimani. He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack, and we...

A lot of foreign-policy wonks and elected officials responded to last night’s strike that killed Qasem Soleimani with an “on the one hand, on the other hand,” tone — expressing satisfaction that a man with blood of so many innocent people and U.S. soldiers on his hands had been killed, but concern for the ramifications of the act. But not everyone. Here is the statement from House speaker Nancy Pelosi: “American leaders’ highest priority is to protect American lives and interests. But we cannot put the lives of American servicemembers, diplomats and others further at risk by engaging in provocative...

U.S. Democratic Senate hopeful Kyrsten Sinema promoted events at Arizona State University featuring a lawyer convicted for aiding an Islamist terror organization and its leader. Sinema, a co-founder of the activist group Local to Global Justice, invited people in a now-closed Yahoo group to attend two events with Lynn Stewart, both in 2003. At the time of the invite, Stewart had been charged with helping her former client Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Egyptian spiritual leader of a terror group, to pass on secret messages to his followers to commit terror attacks. In the first event’s invite, Sinema said the...

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is ashamed to say “England” for fear of appealing to racists, a damning party report says. The English Labour Network — set up by Labour moderate MPs — ordered a study to look at how to champion patriotism. But the group, which was founded last year, found that Labour is too scared to mention England, or celebrate St. George’s Day — which is today. The report warns: “Labour’s biggest single problem is we often don’t mention England even when talking about England.” It adds: “Some activists are uncertain about celebrating St. George’s Day or reflecting English...

It may not be the reunion fans were hoping for, but Pink Floyd have come together to support a pro-Palestinian activist group. The Women’s Boat to Gaza is part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. It contains 13 women, including the 1976 Nobel peace laureate from Northern Ireland, Mairead Maguire, and it journeyed from Barcelona to Gaza in September in order to bring attention to the Israeli’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The organization posted on its website that they lost contact with the boat on October 5th, and presume that the Israeli Occupation Navy has surrounded it in international...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on Monday called on the U.S. government to send more money to Middle East countries in turmoil to push them toward democracy. Speaking to the Columbia Rotary Club, Graham — the ranking Republican on a Senate foreign policy subcommittee — said he is working on a $1 billion package of aid for Egypt before that country’s November elections.

The U.S. Treasury Department is openly providing protection to terrorists by removing thousands of names from an international watch list used to prevent European Union funding from reaching terrorist organizations, according to a report dated January 24, 2010 in Israel National News.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday that the administration will decide in the next week the fate of the remaining Guantanamo Bay detainees. Holder, speaking to reporters at a conference in Doha, Qatar, said “We will by Nov the 16th make the determination as to who can be tried in the reformed military commissions, who can be tried in our article 3 federal courts.” More than 200 detainees including five of the September 11 plotters are still being held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba, which President Obama has vowed to close by the end of his first year...

Radical leftist George Soros has long been dedicated to destroying traditional values in America. The convicted insider trader and major funder of the Center for American Progress, whose president, John Podesta, is a co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, has now personally contributed $50,000 to the Obama Presidential Inaugural Committee, according to Accuracy in Media.

A new Hollywood movie about the battle of Iwo Jima opened last week right about the time CNN began airing footage it obtained from terrorists showing U.S. soldiers being killed with sniper fire. It is a fitting contrast. The movie tells the story of the three surviving GIs who were immortalized on film raising the flag over Mt. Suribachi. The CNN tape shows the exact opposite: Instead of heroism, we see unsuspecting American soldiers being dropped one by one. No flag raising, no glory; just another dead U.S. soldier. Of course the Mt. Suribachi photograph is a distortion. ...snip... Which...

“In the Footsteps of bin Laden” is the work of Christiane Amanpour and Peter Bergen, the CNN consultant who famously interviewed the terrorist in a cave in Afghanistan in 1997. Mr. Bergen, on whose book “The Osama bin Laden I Know” this program is partly based, is mindful of the ways his subject manipulates the American media. He admits that Mr. bin Laden gave his first interview to Peter Arnett on CNN because he wanted to “use” the cable news channel to promote jihad. Nonetheless, in tonight’s documentary, Mr. Bergen sounds awed anew by the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans that Mr. bin...

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned on Thursday the arrest of over 60 Hamas members by Israeli forces early in the morning. He said that diplomacy was the only solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and that political figures should not be arrested. Israel stated that the arrests were made as part of a criminal investigation into the Hamas officials' involvement in a terrorist organization. Israeli officials insisted that the detainees would be entitled to legal representation, and would be released if it were to be found that the suspicions against them were unfounded. Over 60...

WASHINGTON, June 22 - Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly...

Joe Malchow drew our attention to this astonishing article in today's New York Times, in which the Times sticks up for Zarqawi, defending him against what the Times regards as unfair criticism of his weapons-handling technique in the video released by the U.S. military last week: The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi's hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a...

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for the torture of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 and early 2003, Human Rights Watch said today. A December 20, 2005 Army Inspector General's report, obtained by Salon.com this week, contains a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt that implicates Secretary Rumsfeld in the abuse of detainee Mohammad al-Qahtani. Based on an investigation that he carried out in early 2005, which included two interviews with Rumsfeld, Gen. Schmidt describes the defense secretary as being "personally involved" in al-Qahtani's interrogation. Human Rights Watch urges the United States...