Free Republic

She has played the Queen and a gangster’s moll but her latest casting has sparked controversyNobody is quite what they seem. And actors? Well, for actors that’s the job. Dame Helen Mirren, as well as being herself for 76 years, has by now notably been Lady Macbeth, a London gangster’s moll, a thief’s wife, an alcoholic cop, an action hero, Prospero and also a British monarch at least four times. Now she takes on Golda Meir, the late prime minister of Israel, in a new biopic, and the casting has caused controversy. The choice of a non-Jewish actor to star...

This month marks the 43rd anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. We have been fed some false information about this war. For starters, Israel did not strike first unlike in the 1967 Six day war when Israel was forced to launch a pre-emptive strike as her enemies amassed on her borders and as the UN stood aside and allowed them to do so. The Arabs shot first  On the night of September 25, King Hussein secretly flew to Tel Aviv to warn Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir of an impending Syrian attack. Throughout September, Israel received eleven more warnings...

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...

Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to warn that the Egyptian and Syrian armies were about to attack Israel. Elazar urged a preemptive strike; six years earlier, in the Six-Day War, Israel’s preemptive strike had proved highly effective. But Meir and Dayan, who were under...

"The Muslim Brotherhood is a mortal enemy of our civilization, they say so openly, their slogan says so openly, their way is Jihad, their method is death."

The Israeli Air Force reported Monday that a swarm of locusts, some 10 kilometers length, is currently making its way from the Sinai Pennisular toward Israel. The swarm was picked up by an Air Force radar in the south of the country. The information was relayed to the head of the Ramat Hanegev Regional Council's agricultural committee, Yaakov Moskovitz, who said that the swarm was flying at a high altitude and that there was no indication that it was about to make landfall. "The weather is working in our favor," said Moskovitz. "As long as it stays cold the locusts...