Free Republic

The Egyptian government should consider a military solution for the unrest in Libya, Amr Moussa said in a statement issued Sunday. The former Egyptian foreign minister raised speculation that Egypt is considering an armed incursion into Libya, where fierce fighting continues between rebel groups and security forces. The current unrest in Libya, Egypt’s neigbour to the west, poses threats to Egyptian national security, the statement added. "The situation in Libya is a major concern for Egypt, Libya's neighboring countries, and the Arab world at large," Moussa said. "Statelets, sects and extremist factions in Libya directly threaten Egypt's national security. I...

Reverend Al Sharpton, host of PoliticsNation on MSNBC and former presidential candidate, will be the keynote speaker at the annual fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with an extremist history. CAIR’s 20th Annual Banquet will be held on September 27 in Arlington, Virginia and also features Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN). According to the U.S. Justice Department, CAIR is an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. More specifically, CAIR is part of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a secret body that was established to push the agenda of Hamas and...

An online friend “Miss Marple” notes the similarities between the thuggery in Ferguson, Missouri and the depredations of the Middle East’s jihadi wild packs: I read a book by the historian Barbara Tuchman [A Distant Mirror. The Calmitous 14th Century] which theorized that the Hundred Years War was caused by a culture that was adolescent, because so many older people had died during the Black Plague. All of the nobles and rulers at that time were in their late teens and had not much guidance from older, calmer heads. That idea has remained with me ever since I read the...

The American government has been asked by the international community to directly intervene in any truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, according to a report in Arabic daily Al-Hayat, and force Israel to agree to Hamas's demands in future ceasefire agreements. Egypt was reportedly behind the guarantee, as rumors swirl that the current conditions being discussed have found support both from the international community at large and from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Israel has denied agreeing to any truce deal proposed so far, however, and diplomatic sources in Jerusalem have emphasized repeatedly that Israel will not agree to any...

Germany, France and Britain have proposed reactivating a European Union mission on the Egypt-Gaza border to help stabilize the Palestinian enclave after a month-long war, a German diplomatic source said on Wednesday. […] Egypt, which was not involved in the negotiation of the 2005 agreement, has repeatedly shut the Rafah border over the past year, significantly increasing pressure on Gazans, who already face a rigid land and sea blockade imposed by Israel. […] Egypt wants any discussion over Rafah to take place bilaterally with the Palestinian Authority, rather than as part of any deal between the Palestinians and Israel to...

You could almost hear the groans from Democrat Jason Carter’s camp last week when his grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, co-authored an op-ed arguing that Hamas should be recognized as a legitimate political actor. Gov. Nathan Deal has since tried to tie his November opponent to his grandpa’s views of Hamas, the militant faction which the U.S. considers a terrorist group. Others, including some Democratic supporters, have questioned why Carter didn’t come out strongly against his grandfather’s position. Carter’s strategists don’t want the campaign to answer for his grandfather every time he says something controversial. They also recognize Deal and...

Hamas has sounded a belligerent tone as negotiations for a long-term truce continue in Cairo. In a message posted on his Facebook page, Hamas's "foreign affairs" chief Osama Hamdan said the Islamist terror group rejects the current Egyptian proposal, and pledged a "long war" of attrition against Israel. "Israel must accept the demands of the Palestinian people or face a long war," he said. Other Hamas officials issued similar statements over the course of Saturday. .....

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media.

Allies: With all the disconcerting things going on in the Mideast, you could be forgiven for missing an event critically important to America's long-term interests: Recep Erdogan's election as president of Turkey. Erdogan's 52% victory over the weekend in a stage-managed election, making him the nation's first directly elected president, heralds a new era of conflict in the Mideast and perhaps the end of NATO as we know it. Turkey has for decades been a key ally to the U.S. and NATO in the Mideast, an anchor in the Cold War against the USSR and friendly toward Israel as the...

We must go back into Iraq. Then when we leave, we must not leave an Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion, there were two strategic errors. The first was when the Americans took down the US flag in Baghdad. In some American stores the sign says: "If you break it, you own it." We broke Iraq, but then we refused to own it – we refused to raise our flag and say: "It's our responsibility now if your power doesn't work or someone tries to rob you." The second great error is the one that's really coming...

The United Nations Security Council took aim at Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on Friday, blacklisting six people including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) spokesman and threatening sanctions against those who finance, recruit or supply weapons to the insurgents. The 15-member council unanimously adopted a resolution that aims to weaken ISIS and al Qaeda's Syrian wing Nusra Front, Reuters reported. ISIS has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while Nusra Front was added earlier this year. Both groups are designated under the U.N. al Qaeda sanctions regime. EU ministers agreed Friday to back the arming...

Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman. The statement comes amid tension between the Clinton and Obama camps in the wake of the interview. It also comes as Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state, are due to cross paths at a social gathering Wednesday night in Martha’s Vineyard. In the interview, Clinton dismissed the Obama administration’s self-described foreign policy...

The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed. Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media. In the words of El-Mogaz News, Morsi’s wife “is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who was unfit for the...

“I think that a new, repugnant form of fascism is emerging with notable strength…The Nazi genocide of Jews outraged all the earth’s peoples. Why does this (Israeli) government believe that the world will be insensitive to the macabre genocide which today is being perpetuated against the Palestinian people?” (Fidel Castro, August, 5, 2014) “Who cares, what that senile ZOMBIE Castro says!” strikes me as a reasonable retort from many readers. “Unfortunately,” I’m forced to answer. “Many otherwise reasonable care very much what Fidel Castro says.” Take Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu: “The remarks attributed to Castro demonstrate his deep understanding...

Through his State Department ventriloquist dummy, Barack Obama is denying that there is any truth to a Wall Street Journal article that Obama put a halt to ammunition shipments to Israel. The problem for Obama is that his credibility has long been shot so nothing he or any of his underlings asserts can be believed.At some point, credibility matters and the lack of it can reach a point so low that the default position of those you’re trying to convince is justifiably that you’re lying.Advantage, Netanyahu. White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in...

According to officials, until now the Islamic State (IS) was behaving like a well-organized army, moving with strategic intent and pursuing military objectives. Now, officials are seeing at least a partial shift to classic insurgency tactics, as militants begin to blend in among the population, making targeting more difficult. “One of the things that we have seen with the [IS] forces is that where they have been in the open, they are now starting to dissipate and to hide amongst the people,” Lt. Gen. William Mayville Jr., director for operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. “The targeting in...

In 627, Mohammad’s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, records that his army held off a twenty-five day siege by Mecca’s ruling tribe, the Quraysh, at his redoubt near Medina. When the prophet learned that the Meccan army included some of the city’s Jews, he ordered the attack of a nearby largely defenseless Jewish settlement and tribe, the Banu Qurayza. While the prophet was overseeing the decapitations, “He caught a glimpse of Rihanna, a beautiful Jewish woman, whose husband and father were beheaded before her eyes just hours earlier. Muhammad asked her to become his wife. She refused. So he took her...

Egyptian Islam Yakin calls himself Abu Salma Bin Yakin and has tweeted photos of himself fighting in SyriaA gym freak, a fan of rap music and a philanderer, Islam Yakin, 22, has recently raised many eyebrows in his homeland Egypt after joining the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), an Al Qaida splinter group in control of vast swathes of Iraq and Syria. Yakin studied high school at the French Lycee la Liberte in the eastern Cairo quarter of Heliopolis and earned a law degree at Ain Shams University in the Egyptian capital. Months after his graduation in...

MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas discussed in a phone call Wednesday the situation in the Gaza Strip and international efforts to end armed hostilities in the violence-torn enclave, the Kremlin said in a statement. “The Palestinian president praised Russia’s active role in international efforts aimed at stopping deadly hostilities, establishing a humanitarian ceasefire and seeking ways for long-term political settlement [of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict],” the Kremlin said. Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian negotiators are currently seeking a deal in Cairo to extend a humanitarian truce in Gaza as the current three-day ceasefire...