Free Republic

On his visit to Lebanon this week, Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may or may not throw a “symbolic stone” over the northern border to express his hatred of Israel. Reports on whether the stone-throwing will actually take place are unclear, but one thing that is clear is that Ahmadinejad will be greeted by a volley of blue and white balloons – 2,000 of them – courtesy of Likud MK Ayoub Kara. “We are planning to fly 2,000 balloons across the northern border to Lebanon when Ahmadinejad comes for a visit Wednesday,” Kara told Voice of Israel radio. “The balloons represent...

California Republican candidate Carly Fiorina is headed for Israel in a move she hopes will give her an edge over incumbent Democratic and Jewish Senator Barbara Boxer. Both candidates bill themselves as "pro-Israel." Sen. Boxer previously has been supported by pro-Israel groups, but Jewish voters’ growing dislike of U.S. President Barack Obama may taint her record. Fiorina, a former chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard, already has scored points on the issues of the Ground Zero mosque and the building freeze against new Jewish home construction in Judea and Samaria. She has come out against building the planned multi-story mosque...

Click The Picture To Enlarge I had an initial rough scan of this forwarded to me by a very respected elder Jewish friend and historian. He wrote: "In the current issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the foreign policy journal put out by the Council on Foreign Relations, this full page, color ad appeared on the inside back cover. Look at it carefully. See who is designated as "Resistance" and who is designated as bring "Stability" to the situation. In the upside down, topsy-turvy world of double-speak this is being promulgated via every library in the U.S. as well as in...

by JTA.orgAccording to the Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans say their sympathies in the Middle East conflict are with Israel, while 15 percent side with the Palestinians. The rest favor both sides, neither side or have no opinion.Support for Israel was higher only in 1991, shortly after Israel was hit with Scud missiles during the Gulf War, when it was at 64 percent.The poll, conducted in early February, was part of Gallup’s annual World Affairs survey in which Americans were asked a series of questions about their opinions of 20 countries or entities, including Israel and the Palestinian Authority....

We are entering troubling times. The conviction that war is upon us grows with each passing day. What remains to be determined is who will dictate the terms of that war - Iran or Israel. Iran has good reason to go to war today. The regime is teetering on the brink of collapse. Last week, the bellwether of Iranian politics and the commercial center of the country - the bazaar - abandoned the regime. In 1979, it was only after the bazaar merchants abandoned the shah that the ayatollahs gained the necessary momentum to overthrow the regime. Last Tuesday the...

SAN DIEGO -- The son of a Hamas founder who became a Christian and an Israeli spy will be granted U.S. asylum after he passes a routine background check, an immigration judge ruled Wednesday. Mosab Hassan Yousef got the news during a 15-minute deportation hearing after a U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorney said the government was dropping its objections. The agency denied Yousef's asylum request in February 2009, arguing that he had been involved in terrorism and was a threat to the United States. Attorney Kerri Calcador gave no explanation for the government's change of heart.

In “The Israeli Threat; An analysis of the Consequences of Israeli Strikes on Iranian Nuclear Facilities”, Sam Gardiner examines one possible and increasingly likely outcome of the Iran-West controversy. If Israel were to decide that it had no choice but to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, what would be the consequences? This is the question Sam Gardiner tackles in this Special Report.Israel seems to be losing confidence in the commitment of the Obama Administration to protect its interests with respect to Iran. As tensions with the U.S. increase on this and other issues Israel is arguably pushed in a direction that...

The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is the second youngest campus in the California state university system. UCI has made its mark among prestigious American universities, steadily rising in the U.S. News & World Report ratings of “America’s Best Colleges.” Following the al-Qaeda terror attacks on September 11, 2001, however, the prestigious and relatively subdued Orange County campus began drawing attention and earning a reputation as a breeding ground for anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic sentiment. At UCI, certain registered student groups, while claiming to exercise rights to free speech, have violated state and university policy. This is particularly true of...

PLEASE PRAY FOR GILAD SHALIT AND MOSAB HASAN YOUSEF Please pray for Gilad Shalit.>> Christian Post article published yesterday: Pro-Israel Epicenter Conference to be Seen, Heard in 200 Nations >> Israel National News item about 2010 Epicenter Conference Many Christians around the world are asking, “What is something I can do right now to bless Israel and her neighbors in the name of Jesus?” Tonight as the 2010 Epicenter Conference begins, I will be asking Christians to: 1.) Pray for the Lord to protect, encourage, comfort and provide for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been...

The world remains sick with a very old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission now and then, but it always reappears as virulent as ever. It even develops into new strains. Some have called it a lethal obsession. It is called anti-Semitism, and if the Jews did not exist, some anti-Semite would invent him. It’s that bad. The Helen Thomas story is now old but it was very revealing. In just a brief moment of time, she spewed in microcosm what kings, generals, fuhrers, pharoahs, and Muslim extremists have done...

The Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) has yet really to condemn the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia 35 years ago. Or the Marxist orchestrated famine in Ethiopia that killed almost as many during the 1980s. It never directly condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Saddam HusseinÂ’s hundreds of thousands of murdered victims also failed to arouse the WCCÂ’s concern across 25 years. Nor has the multitude of crimes by IranÂ’s theocracy across 30 years interested the WCC. North KoreaÂ’s slave state for the WCC is a place of pilgrimage but not criticism. Even North KoreaÂ’s recent unprovoked torpedoing of...

Los Angeles: Israel Solidarity Rally I attended an Israel solidarity rally earlier today in Los Angeles, California. The event opened with America's national anthem followed by the Israeli anthem. Several people spoke at the event, including Irvine Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who is running for U.S. Senate, and California's Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who is running for Governor. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, Consul General Jacob Dayan, and actor Jon Voight also delivered speeches.

IN the last few days, Jerusalem has been blanketed by an unusual combination of humiliation and steely determination. How is it, people here wondered aloud, that the same country that tripled its size in three lightning days in June 1967 and then pulled off the rescue at Entebbe nine years later now seems to botch everything? We lost the 2006 war in Lebanon, believing — incorrectly — that our venerated air force could win the war from the skies. The strikes on Gaza in December 2008 were a military success, but we have utterly failed to convince the world that...

On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the...

THE JERUSALEM POST MAY 28 2010 In October 1994, several days after kidnapped IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman was killed in a failed attempt to save him from his terrorist captors, I was scheduled to teach my weekly graduate seminar at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. But given the horror of what had just transpired, I couldnÂ’t even imagine simply teaching as planned. I no longer recall what had been scheduled for that day. But what I do remember is that I decided to scrap the usual fare and that I taught a text in memory of Wachsman.As the...

The recent argument made on a handful of websites, blogs, columns, and in college lecture halls that US military aid to Israel is damaging to the United States is not only erroneous, it hurts the vital national security interests of our country and threatens the survival of the Jewish State. In fact US support for Israel is essential not only for the Jewish State’s national security but for America’s as well. Every bit of that support—and more—withstands all reasonable scrutiny. Under the 2010 US budget about $75 billion, $65 billion, and $3.25 billion will be spent on military operations and...

Last week Israel celebrated its 62nd year as a nation, but there was major cause for concern amid the festivities as the Israeli people faced the looming menace of a nuclear-armed Iran, as well as the prospect of a rapidly deteriorating relationship with Washington. The Israel-bashing of the Obama administration has become so bad that even leading Democrats are now speaking out against the White House. New York Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Barack Obama’s stance towards Israel in a radio interview last week, stating his “counter-productive” Israel policy “has to stop”.At the same time a poll was released by Quinnipiac...

  Photo by: Ariel Jerozolimski 'Independence War hasn't ended' By HERB KEINON AND DAVID HOROVITZ19/04/2010 Ya'alon discusses gaps with US, says settlements shouldn't be removed.   Some cabinet members are heard from constantly – either because they have significant ministries (Gideon Sa’ar in education), or because they push themselves continuously onto the airwaves (Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer). Others, with no small amount of influence, are rarely in the public eye. Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon fits that bill. Ya’alon’s job, as he describes it, is essentially to prepare policy options for government meetings dealing with...

Tea Party Infiltrators -Lions and Tigers and Bears... Oh My!!! Many have asked about the news that there may be "infiltrators" at tea parties around the nation. A website (crashtheteaparty.org) was recently set up. The creator, though he tried to hide his identity, has been outed; his name is Jason Levin, and he's a middle school teacher in Beaverton, Oregon. He’s on record saying that you might see some of his team in Nazi uniforms at your local tea party pretending to be racists and other offensive characters. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy doesn't it? And one has...