Free Republic

The Obama administration is claiming that the president has been out in front of the crisis in Egypt. The facts prove otherwise. He has been behind the curve and has badly damaged American interests -- perhaps irretrievably so. Barack Obama's campaign was built on spin and speeches. His presidency has used these tools to present a false image. In this case, his chief spin maestro, David Axelrod, has been peddling the story that Barack Obama has been "out ahead of this" ("this" being the crisis in Egypt). Politico Journalist Josh Gerstein was skeptical and fact-checked Axelrod's boastful claim. Press Secretary...

The Teheran regime has hanged 66 individuals since the end of 2010, according to France 24 International News. Among them was a 46-year-old Iranian-born, Dutch national Sahra Bahrami, who was hung on January 29 on drug-smuggling charges. Holland's Foreign Ministry said it was "shocked, shattered by this act by a barbaric regime," according to Agence France Presse. Bahrami's sister dismissed the Iranian charges, which she contended were fabricated. "She doesn't even smoke cigarettes, let alone possessing drugs. How could someone who participates in election gatherings and endangers her life, engage in such actions against her country?" she is quoted as...

WASHINGTON -- Hope and Change, it turns out, is all relative. They are a sweet elixir when you are talking about electing as president a smooth-talking street organizer with a fistful of vague promises and no governing experience. But Hope and Change become a noxious gas when you are talking about a popular uprising by freedom fighters shaking loose the iron grip of a 30-year dictatorship. At least that is how President Obama sees it. From the moment he took office, Obama has misread the situation in Egypt and sided with the convenience of tyranny over the untidiness of freedom....

In the first nine months of last year more than 300 immigrants defeated Home Office attempts to deport them. The full-year total is expected to top 400. Among those allowed to stay were killers, rapists and multiple offenders, along with a woman whose appeal was backed by an immigration judge even though he accused her of "manufacturing" evidence. Critics claimed that as a result of the court rulings, the Home Office was reducing its efforts to deport migrants due to the strong likelihood that it would face successful legal challenges on human rights grounds. In January The Sunday Telegraph revealed...

For the past several years, the buzz among those who take more than passing interest in world affairs has been about the meteoric rise of Communist-controlled China as the new global power. There are those around the world who view China’s emergence as a certainty, long anticipated, and deserving celebration. For them, this historic development is also indicative in some ways of the diminishing importance of the West, and in particular the decline of the U.S. from its pre-eminent superpower status. Among the many voices who have thrown caution to the wind in embracing China’s rise as inevitable and good...

Every week new articles come out from left-leaning journalists about how great Sharia law is and how we have nothing to fear. Yet we at NewsReal have written on many sad cases of how children are treated under Sharia all over the world. You don’t hear the whole story of the dangers of Islamic law unless you see how it affects women. This past week in Pakistan, for example, two women were falsely accused of blasphemy and almost beaten to death.

President Obama is planning to refocus attention on China's record of suppressing free speech and political freedom in the coming weeks, despite the risk of further destabilizing an important relationship after a contentious year. Since elevating human rights as a guiding principle of his foreign policy at the United Nations last fall, Obama has been looking for ways to engage China's leaders on the issue without undermining his efforts to enlist their help in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and in reviving the world economy. Senior administration officials say he is exploring ways to better reach Chinese citizens directly,...

Prominent Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is reported to have been sentenced to 11 years in jail in a case considered as part of a broader crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists in Iran. Sotoudeh's husband said she was also banned for 20 years from working as a lawyer and from leaving the country.

TEHRAN - Iran sentenced a prominent human rights lawyer to 11 years in prison on Sunday, highlighting an intensifying crackdown on lawyers that appears focused on people connected with 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The court also ruled that the lawyer, 47-year-old Nasrin Sotoudeh, is not allowed to practice law or leave the country for the next 20 years, her husband, Reza Khandan, said. Khandan said he himself was summoned to court this week, for reasons he didn't know. The Parliament news Web site, an outlet of members of parliament critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration, confirmed Sotoudeh's...

Sometimes the best way to find out what a person thinks about you is to find out what he tells others. That's why the report on America's human rights record filed by the Obama administration with the U.N. is particularly interesting. It's more accurate to say that this first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council was from the Obama administration rather than from the United States. Its main theme is what President Obama has done in his short two years, rather than what our great country has accomplished as a beacon of human rights over 234 years. What comes...

Muslims, by belief and practice, are the most blatant violators of human rights. We hardly need to detail here Muslims' systemic cruel treatment of the unbelievers, women of all persuasions, and any and all minorities across the board. To Muslims, human rights have a different meaning, and its protective provisions are reserved strictly for Muslims -- primarily for Muslim men. Just a couple of examples should suffice for now. Oppression of women, for one, is so systemic in Islam that to this day women are, at best, second-class citizens under Islamic law. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islamdom, denies women...

..."The Ontario couple is part of what some experts say is a growing demand for reducing twins to one, fueled more by socio-economic imperatives than medical need, and raising vexing new ethical questions. Experts question whether parents should choose to terminate a fetus just because of the impact the child would have on their lives, and note that even more medically necessary reductions can trigger lifelong angst and even threaten marriages. The mother said the Toronto doctor who eventually did her reduction performs several a month." If you recoiled upon reading about this couple choosing to "reduce" - kill -...

Court: No Abortion Right in Ireland, Europe, But Attacks Ban Strasbourg, France -- The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights today unanimously reaffirmed that the European Convention on Human Rights contains no “right” to abortion. That's the good news for the pro-life movement, but the court also unanimously ruled in favor of one of the three women who brought a lawsuit saying the Ireland abortion ban violates their rights. http://LifeNews.com/int-1719

The video offers a rare glimpse of the type of punishment inflicted on women who break the country's strict morality code. The victim was punished under Sharia law for wearing trousers under her Islamic clothing. The footage shows her crawling on the ground, raising her arm to try to ward off the attacks and screaming as the whip strikes. The public punishment sparked protests among females against laws they said humiliated women. Dozens of them were arrested. The governor of Khartoum said there had been a mistake in the way the victim's punishment had been carried out. Sky's foreign affairs...

The dramatic protests in Iran last summer, the response of the Iranian authorities, and the reaction of the international community served to sharpen the focus of a study already underway by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Concerned about what seemed to be the deteriorating human rights situation in Iran, the Subcommittee on International Human Rights decided to undertake a broader study into the mistreatment of the Iranian population by the governing regime, and also into the Iranian government's role regionally and internationally with respect to human rights and violations of international law. With regard to its international role, the...

LAST JUNE, Luigi Padovese, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of the Turkish port city of Iskenderun, was murdered in his home by a 26-year-old Muslim who stabbed him eight times in the heart and then severed his head while shouting “Allah is the greatest.” He is one of many priests murdered in Turkey since 2008. Here are words of appropriate outrage from Europe. Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, in a speech addressed to the Turkish ambassador last week, decries the Islamification of the West and the “romance of tolerance and human rights.” “Your devotion to freedom of religion is pure hypocrisy,” Stadler...

Listening to the Left this AM "pardoning" China for (but not limited to) : Openly stealing technology for 3 decades, widespread, wanton, & massive pollution of their country, disregard for their impoverished, massive increase in their military (for what reason?), using their low-wage-empowered economic weight to crush their neighbors, and their overt threats to Taiwan; makes you wonder just what is the basis for the love affair the left in America has with China.....other than their belief China will either economically or militarily crush Democracy in the world.

You may wonder why a man just shy of his 88th birthday would get up at 5 in the morning to fly to Omaha to give a speech. Frankly, since accepting this kind offer, I’ve wondered myself. Here’s why. Having devoted much of my life to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights come alive in many places in the world, I have become alarmed at how some human rights organizations, including the one I founded, are reporting on human rights in the Middle East... When I was in Israel, I went to the Gaza border and I...

You may wonder why a man just shy of his 88th birthday would get up at 5 in the morning to fly to Omaha to give a speech. Frankly, since accepting this kind offer, I’ve wondered myself. Here’s why. Having devoted much of my life to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights come alive in many places in the world, I have become alarmed at how some human rights organizations, including the one I founded, are reporting on human rights in the Middle East. In reading about the discussions and actions of students on American campuses, I...

Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called the Saudi win, "a very good outcome" Good news, everybody. Saudi Arabia now has a seat on the women’s board at the United Nations. That’s right, a regime where it’s illegal for women to drive or leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian, where girls were pushed into a burning building because they were trying to flee without covering their ‘obscene’ female faces… will be a key player in the international effort to empower women. I don’t know what contribution the Saudis can make to the project, since in...