Free Republic

Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, nominated to be defense minister by Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani, was a commander in Lebanon overseeing Hezbollah operations during the time of the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. According to a report by Brig. Gen. (ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira, a senior research associate at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dehghan was sent to Lebanon and served as a commander of the training corps of the Revolutionary Guard in Syria and Lebanon. He joined the Revolutionary Guard after they were formed in 1979 and spent his entire military career there....

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah emerged from hiding on Friday to deliver his first major speech in years, addressing a rally in his southern Beirut stronghold in support of the Palestinian conflict against Israel. "Israel poses a danger on all people of this region...including Lebanon, and removing it is a Lebanese national interest," Nasrallah told hundreds of supporters in his half-hour speech. The charismatic Shi'ite cleric has lived mainly in the shadows, fearing assassination, since Hezbollah fought an inconclusive month-long war with Israel in 2006... Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s as the most prominent Lebanese faction fighting Israel's occupation of...

We may be in the era of Facebook and fracking. But 2013 is still beginning to look a lot like the cataclysmic century we just left behind.Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

Israeli navy seeks to counter Russian ship-killer Israel's navy is installing the Barak-8 air-defense missile system aboard its combat vessels to protect them against Syria's new supersonic Russian-built Yakhont anti-ship missiles which the Jewish state views as a potent threat to its long-held naval supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. HAIFA, Israel, July 30 (UPI) -- Israel's navy is installing the Barak-8 air-defense missile system aboard its combat vessels to protect against Syria's new supersonic Russian-built Yakhont anti-ship missiles, which the Jewish state views as a potent threat to its long-held naval supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. The medium-range Barak-8 was...

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned Lebanese officials last week that al Qaida-linked groups are planning a campaign of bombings that will target Beirut's Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs as well as other political targets associated with the group or its allies in Syria, Lebanese officials said Monday. The unusual warning -- U.S. government officials are barred from directly contacting Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated an international terrorist organization -- was passed from the CIA's Beirut station chief to several Lebanese security and intelligence officials in a meeting late last week with the understanding that it would be passed to Hezbollah,...

Hizbullah’s armed wing wired almost $100,000 (€75,000) to two men wanted over a bomb attack that killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria last year, a local newspaper reported Friday, according to the AFP news agency. According to the 24 Hours daily, the money was to help organize the blast at Burgas airport on the Black Sea on July 18, 2012, and to carry out reconnaissance in other countries. The attack on the tourist bus also killed the vehicle’s Bulgarian driver—a Muslim—and left 35 people injured. It was the deadliest attack on Israelis abroad since 2004. Israel immediately blamed Hizbullah for...

European Union foreign ministers agreed on Monday to blacklist Lebanese militant group Hezbollah’s armed wing, holding it responsible for terror attacks in Europe including a bus bombing in Bulgaria in which five Israelis were killed. The European Union put the military arm of Hezbollah on its terrorist list on Monday, in a major change to its policy on the region, fuelled by concerns over the Lebanese militant group’s activities in Europe. The decision was reached unanimously at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday after some member countries, which were resistant to the blacklisting, were persuaded by...

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad recently transferred two shipments of chemical weapons to Lebanon-based Hizbullah, the Syrian rebels are claiming. Fahad al Masri, a spokesman for the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, told the Lebanese news website El Nashra on Thursday that “the Syrian regime managed to deliver shipments of chemical weapons to Hizbullah.” He added that the weapons were delivered from an area near the capital Damascus and arrived in Lebanon sometime in the past several weeks. The transfer of the weapons, al Masri told El Nashra, was coordinated by Syria and Iran. …

A convoy carrying members of Hezbollah was hit by a roadside bomb near the Lebanese-Syrian border on Tuesday, wounding three of its officials in the third attack on the Shi'ite militant group since May, security sources said. The injured men were Hezbollah security officials travelling in a convoy of two vehicles heading towards Syria. A barrage of gunfire hit the convoy after the blast, security sources said. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, but Syrian Sunni rebel groups have threatened to strike Hezbollah in Lebanon following the group's military intervention in Syria on the side of...

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, is working on an initiative that would blacklist Hizbullah’s so-called “military wing” while leaving the EU open to talking with its political faction, EU diplomats said on Wednesday. EU ambassadors are set to discuss on Thursday the issue of adding Hizbullah to its list of terrorist groups. Counter-terrorist experts from the bloc's 28 member states twice failed last month to reach a unanimous decision to blacklist the Lebanese Shiite group. Two EU diplomats told Reuters on Wednesday that the proposal by Ashton suggests including a statement the EU "should continue dialogue with...

Militants assassinated a well-known supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Lebanon early on Wednesday, security sources said, the latest sign of Syria's civil war spreading to its smaller neighbor.

There is a story behind the story in the Zimmerman case. We have all heard about the numerous tweets and posts that are promising vengeance if Zimmerman is acquitted, but you must look beyond that. The promised racial riots are simply a cover for something bigger in my opinion. The call for blacks to riot is simply a smoke screen for a hidden agenda. My best suggestion is to be prepared to defend your family because there are some who want these “riots” to extend outside the State of Florida and we must look at the source. Whenever the New...

Syria's Islamist rebels say the downfall of Egypt's popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood president has proven that Western nations pushing for democracy will never accept them, and reinforced the view of radicals that a violent power grab is their only resort. Radical Islamist groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda, have lately been in the ascendancy in Syria's two-year conflict as the death toll rises above 100,000. Assad has celebrated President Mohamed Mursi's fall as a symbolic blow to the Islamist-dominated opposition, though on the battlefield, where his troops are already making gains, it is likely to have little impact...

Syrian rebels said on Friday the assassination of one of their top commanders by al Qaeda-linked militants was tantamount to a declaration of war, opening a new front for the Western-backed fighters struggling against President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Good news: John McCain will finally get his wish about being able to tell the good guys from the bad guys in Syria’s civil war.  Bad news: They’ll be the guys in the crossfire.  After playing footsie with al-Qaeda affiliates for more than two years in their attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the so-called secularists have discovered that terrorist networks tend to be unreliable partners: Syrian rebels said on Friday the assassination of one of their top commanders by al Qaeda-linked militants was tantamount to a declaration of war, opening a new front for the Western-backed fighters struggling against President...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl2002.aspx Treasury Targets Major Money Laundering Network Operating Out of Colombia 7/9/2013 Trade Based Money Laundering Network Supported Narcotics Traffickers Ayman Joumaa and Evaristo Linares Castillo WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury today announced the designation of Colombian nationals Isaac Perez Guberek Ravinovicz and his son, Henry Guberek Grimberg, as well as 29 other individuals and entities, including companies located in Colombia, Panama, and Israel, as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers (SDNTs). These 31 individuals and entities together form a money laundering network responsible for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in...

BBEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese pop idol Fadel Shaker shot to stardom crooning ballads that earned him the nickname “The King of Romance.” He disappeared as a bearded, gun-toting Sunni hard-liner in a shootout with the army in the coastal city of Sidon. Shaker’s transformation from entertainer to militant extremist spotlights a broader phenomenon in Lebanon: the drift of its Sunni Muslim community away from its traditional moderate leadership to — in some cases — hard-line, sectarian preachers.

"Lebanese Canadian Bank to Pay $102 Million in Hizballah Laundering Case" SNIPPET: "The Beirut-based Lebanese Canadian Bank ("LCB") will pay $102 million as part of a settlement reached this week with federal prosecutors. The LCB was accused in a December 2011 complaint of funneling money to the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah as part of a global money-laundering scheme. The "settlement shows that banks laundering money for terrorists and narco-traffickers will face consequences for their actions, wherever they may be located. This type of money laundering network fuels the operations of both terrorists and drug traffickers, and will continue to use...

An Egyptian court said on Sunday that the Hamas rulers of Gaza and Lebanon’s Hizbullah terrorist group helped prisoners, including current President Mohammed Morsi, escape during the 2011 uprising. AFP reported that the head of the court in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya asked the state prosecutor to investigate the circumstances of the January 2011 breakout from the Wadi Natrun prison, northwest of the capital. He said that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which Morsi hails, had organized the escape with members of Hamas and Hizbullah, according to AFP. …

Obama promised to “reset” the U.S. relationship with Russia, and he succeeded: Russia went from disliking, but respecting, America and President Bush, to loathing, and looking down upon, America and, especially, her president. The photograph of Obama and Russian President Putin sitting side-by-side radiating hatred spells it all out. One of the reasons given for Putin’s hostility, in addition to Obama’s decision to aid Syria’s Al Qaeda rebels, while Russia is aiding Bashar al Assad’s Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, is Edward Snowden’s revelation that the US is spying on Russia. That, of course, is ridiculous. The US has been spying...