Free Republic

Only days after falsely claiming that Israel killed more than 10,000 innocent Palestinians during Operation Protective Edge, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders found himself on Friday again facing questions about his knowledge, or lack thereof, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an MSNBC interview on Friday, Sanders was asked whether he had an opinion on whether Israel should withdraw to the 1967 borders. "Not at this point," Sanders replied. In the same MSNBC interview, Sanders said, "What I believe, first of all, is there are good people on both sides and there are political opportunists on both sides....

Fatah Central Committee member Tawfiq Al-Tirawi told the Maan News Agency that "Palestine stretches from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea" and that "a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, is just a phase." The former PA intelligence chief also said that "Hitler wasn't corrupt" in the January 19, 2016 interview. Tawfiq Al-Tirawi: "I believe that the current Palestinian Intifada has united the Palestinian people. The Intifada united the people in all geographical parts of Palestine. If you ask for my opinion on this issue, I have an 'extremist' view. Interviewer: "Yes, I'd like...

Over four decades after the 1973 war that saw Egyptian forces seize of the Sinai Peninsula from occupying Israeli forces in a shock offensive, the legacy of the brief conflict lives on. One of the tales of the war known by some Egyptians is the existence of a “secret code” used by the Egyptian army that Israeli intelligence was unable to crack. The cypher was simple yet unorthodox: using an unwritten language from one of Egypt’s ethnic minorities, the Nubians. With the system, words and commands that would have been undecipherable to even a veteran Israeli intelligence officer could be...

Sunday, May 17, 2015 Liberating Our Jerusalem Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog When Jordan's Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city-- the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and...

But what Israelis see is a pre-1967 border that is basically just a cease-fire line from the 1948-49 war that established the country. Without the West Bank, Israel is only 10 miles (15 kilometers) wide at its narrowest point. The strategic highland looms over Israeli cities, visible on a clear day from the outskirts of Tel Aviv and surrounding Jerusalem on three sides. They fear that if their army clears out it will be replaced not by peaceful Palestinian moderates but more menacing forces like Hamas — which took over the Gaza Strip soon after Israel handed it fully to...

  What happened to Jewish Holy Sites and places of worship in lands controlled by the Arabs? On May 28, 1948 the Arab Legion completed the capture of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the site of numerous ancient synagogues and the Western Wall of the Temple, destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD. These were and remain the holiest sites in the Jewish religion.After the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem was captured, the destruction, desecration and systematic looting of Jewish sites began and continued. 57 ancient synagogues (the oldest dated to the 13th century), libraries...

- WASHINGTON -- The United States government is not a speed reader, but after 37 years of reading U.N. Resolution 242, on Wednesday the government finally read it accurately. The government saw what is not there -- the missing definite article, ``the.'' Passed after the 1967 Six Day War, 242 mandated the withdrawal of Israel ``from territories occupied in the recent conflict.'' Not from ``the territories.'' Israel insisted on deletion of the ``the'' because it implied, as Arab and other powers acknowledged by their vehement opposition to the deletion -- withdrawal from all territories. This was strategic ambiguity. On Wednesday,...

Nov 18, 2008 19:32 | Updated Nov 19, 2008 10:03 Israel 'occupies' no Arab territories By LOUIS RENE BERES In urgent matters of national survival and geopolitics, words matter. The still generally unchallenged language referring provocatively to an Israeli "Occupation" always overlooks the pertinent and incontestable history of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza. A topographical map of Israel, delineating the 1967 borders. Photo: Courtesy Perhaps the most evident omission concerns the unwitting manner in which these "Territories" fell into Israel's hands in the first place. It is simply and widely disregarded that "occupation" followed the multi-state Arab aggression of...

In the wake of recent reports of a joint Israeli-Jordanian plan to link the Red Sea on the Israeli side and the Dead Sea on the Jordanian Side, parliamentarians in Egypt are agitating for the nation's caretaker junta to demand Israel surrender the port-city of Eilat. Egypt has insisted it has a claim to the city of Eilat since it lost the city to the nascent state of Israel in the wake of the Egyptian army's defeat in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, but after the 1979 Camp David Accords the claim was officially dropped. Or so it seemed. The...

A few weeks ago, the US Central Command announced that an air raid had killed an ISIS chemical weapon expert in Mosul. The ISIS operative, Iraqi engineer Mahmoud al-Sabawi, used to work at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program before he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 US led invasion. The idea that ISIS terrorists have access to chemical weapons brings back images of the genocide inflicted on the Kurds by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980’s. The Halabja Massacre killed up to 5,000 and injured between 7,000 and 10,000 more. If ISIS jihadists have a stash of chemical weapons,...

At 1:58 pm on June 8, 1967, Capt. Yiftach Spector lined up his Mirage IIICJ fighter jet above the USS Liberty and raked it from bow to stern with his armored-piercing bullets from his 30 mm guns. Even now, 37 years later, the attack by the Air Force on the American spy ship on the fourth day of the Six Days' War fuels the fire of intrigue, conspiracy and cover-up theories. Nevertheless, what follows is powerful evidence that the attack was a tragic mistake. The Israel Air Force archives have audiotapes of the radio transmissions made prior, during and after...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Reviewing documents covering 36 years, the State Department concluded Monday that Israel's attack on the U.S. spy ship Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War was an act of Israeli negligence. The United States also was negligent, a State Department official said, for failing to notify Israel that the electronic intelligence-gathering ship was cruising international waters off the Egyptian coast and for failing to withdraw the Liberty from the war zone. A daylong conference that studied fresh documents as well as the established record failed to produce a consensus for any of three views voiced most often:...

New documents released by the State Department relating to the period of the 1967 Six Day War include CIA memos that say Israel did not know it was striking an American vessel when it attacked the USS Liberty off the coast of the Gaza Strip on June 8, 1967, killing 34 American sailors and injuring 172. The memos say the attack was carried out "by mistake, representing gross negligence." Along with the release of the documents, the historian for the top-secret National Security Agency said Monday he believed available evidence "strongly suggested" Israel did not know it was bombarding an...

http://www.nsa.gov/liberty/ U.S.S. Liberty What’s new? On 08 June 2007, the National Security Agency (NSA) finalized the review of all material relative to the 08 June 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. This additional release adds to the collection of documents and audio recordings and transcripts previously posted to the site on 02 July 2003. The attack on the USS Liberty, like others in our nation's history, has become the center of considerable controversy and debate. It is not NSA's intention to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of...

Last June, I had written a post here commemorating the 45th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty. The post, in which I argued (in defiance of every conspiracy theory), that the Israeli attack on the American ship was a mistake, has been giving me considerable heartburn as of late. In the last several days, my e-mail and facebook page have been flooded with the harshest condemnations concerning the article, tarring me as being a “hack,” a “traitor,” and nothing less than a running dog for the “Jewish/Zionist/apartheid” lobby. My article, which scored a modest few dozen Facebook recommendations...

Leading defense officials from the United States and Israel, meeting in Israel this week, raised the controversial attack on the U.S. ship USS Liberty, by Israel, in June 1967. The attack has caused considerable controversy over the years despite both governments being reticent to publicly discuss the affair. It is rare that defense officials from either side discuss the attack which killed 34 U.S. service personnel, and wounded 171 others. In talks this week however between the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Michael Mullen, and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, together with other senior Israeli...

Nabil Sha'ath, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and a close confidant of Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, says the PA wants to renew peace talks. Speaking on Thursday at a conference of the far-left Meretz party in Tel Aviv, Sha'ath claimed "we are interested in renewing the talks." Sha'ath clarified "there are topics that are open for negotiations, and they are the core issues, while on the other hand there are topics that are not up for negotiations: the Palestinians' right of self-definition in the 1967 borders, and the right of unity in the Palestinian...

People generally buy a Chevrolet Corvette planning to drive the wheels off it, but examples with absurdly low mileage have to come from somewhere. Cars suffer a small breakdown and are parked for years, owners suddenly pass away and their children don't know what to do with the cars, vehicles get donated to museums... the list of usual suspects for something like this is pretty limited. But the story of this unrestored and completely original 1967 Chevrolet Corvette with just 2,996 miles on the clock is a new one for us. Here's what we know: Don McNamara turned 30 in...