Free Republic

Ramadi, the provincial capital of western Iraqi Anbar, fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Friday, May 15 after its inhabitants were put to mass flight. The town, 110 km west of Baghdad, controls the traffic on the Euphrates River. Small pockets of Iraqi troops are still stranded there after taking hundreds of casualties. The jihadists are in mid-momentum of a fresh multi-pronged offensive, which they launched shortly after they lost Tikrit last month to the biggest counter-offensive they had faced since seizing large tracts of land in Iraq nearly a year ago. This momentum has carried...

[1]Anyone can get an honorary degree these days. Cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal has one of those from a California law school. Kermit the Frog got one. So did brutal dictator Robert Mugabe from Michigan State University.Now Sut Jhally is joining [2]their ranks (with apologies to Kermit, who doesn’t really deserve to be classed with Mumia, Mugabe and Jhally) as Simon Fraser University is giving him an honorary degree.Jhally is a nasty clown of the sort that usually finds a sinecure in academia, who has ranted that “The New Republican Party – American Terrorists.” Jhally also tweeted in 2013...

This is a massive betrayal of Israel and all free people, and an endorsement of the genocidal “Palestinian” jihad against the Jews. A “State of Palestine” will no more bring peace than did the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: just as with Gaza, a “State of Palestine” will just become another jihad base. The Vatican has every reason to know that. The “Palestinians” on their official media outlets make no secret of their goal of wiping out Israel and killing Jews wholesale. Now the Vatican has signed on to that. —The Vatican said it would soon sign its first treaty with...

[1]Also Hitler’s corpse would like reparations for not being allowed to conquer London.Considering that British rule helped bring in Muslim illegal aliens into the historical Jewish homeland, who then refused to leave and began killing people, Israel can then demand reparations from the UK for Hamas.Or maybe the UK can just resettle Hamas in Tower Hamlets. No one would notice the difference [2]. Hamas official Essam Adwan stated Friday that Britain “paved the way” for a “Zionist takeover” by preventing Palestinians from establishing an armed resistance against Jews in 1947 and by weakening the local economy and education system.The...

Pope Francis met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Saturday, calling him “an angel of peace,” days after the Vatican said it was preparing to sign its first accord with Palestine to the anger of Israel. Abbas met the pontiff for about 20 minutes for a private audience, a meeting that comes a day before the pope is due to canonise two Palestinian nuns, who will become the first Palestinian Arabs to gain sainthood.

President Reuven Rivlin was born on September 9, 1939, in Jerusalem. However, according to the Google search engine, the tenth president of the State of Israel was born in “Palestine.” The Mayor of Ra’anana, Ze’ev Bielski, made the shocking discovery. “While working on a speech for the arrival of President to Ra’anana, and I typed his name into Google in English, and then we were amazed to see that says he was born in Jerusalem—in the Palestinian state,” Bielski stated to Yediot Aharonot on Friday. […] This is not the first time that Google has leaned toward labeling parts of...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) applauds the passage of the FY 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Thursday after a week of debate and consideration by both parties. Sen. Cruz introduced or cosponsored more than a dozen amendments that were successfully adopted by the committee. “Congress’ first priority is to provide for the national defense and ensure our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have everything they need to defend our freedom,” said Sen. Cruz. “I am grateful for the committee’s support for my amendments, including measures that will ensure...

One hundred and fifty members of Congress – all Democrats and, among them, most of the small group of bitterly anti-Israel lawmakers – signed a letter supporting President Obama’s diplomatic efforts vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Authored by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (Illinois), Lloyd Doggett (Texas), and David Price (North Carolina), the letter exemplifies the hyper-partisanship that has driven the left wing of the Democrat party on this issue even as that wing has cried “partisan extremism” at the responses from Republicans. As if trying to prove Churchill right, this Iran Surrender Caucus, whenever presented with a choice between dishonor...

Iran is optimistic that it can reach a final nuclear deal with world powers, its foreign minister said in an excerpt of an interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine published on Friday. "An agreement is very likely - provided that our negotiation partners mean it seriously," Mohammad Javad Zarif told Der Spiegel. Zarif criticized Saudi Arabia, which has voiced concern that a nuclear deal could embolden Iran and harm its security. "Some people in the region are evidently panicking," he said, adding there was no reason to do so. "We don't want to dominate the region. We are happy with our...

President Barack Obama's foreign policy failures have the world looking a lot like it did at the close of the Carter administration, says House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "This is like 1979 all over again," the California Republican said Thursday on Fox News Channel. The last time Americans were being held hostage was in 1979 in Iran; today, they are being held by the Islamic State (ISIS), McCarthy said. Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and now have invaded Ukraine, he added. Before Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the Benghazi attacks in 2012, the last American ambassador to die in...

Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, snapped his fingers to signify how quickly the Jewish state could go from being strong to vulnerable in the face of a nuclear Iran. “We don’t believe the choice is war or to accept this deal,” Dermer said. “We believe the way to peacefully resolve this issue is to combine a credible, military threat of force with crippling sanctions.” “That combination has not been deployed for 10 years,” he noted. “We had sanctions on Iran for a long time, but crippling sanctions only began in 2012. And within 18 months, Iran...

However, this challenge is usually of limited scope, with political objectives confined to such conventional goals as assuming power in a state or gaining independence. Their violence, however disruptive, still accepts the state-based international order as an organizing principle. One might even claim that by aspiring to eventually become recognized state authorities, most terrorist groups reaffirm and strengthen an international order that is based on states. The challenge posed by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda is different. These groups have many more state enemies than most terrorist groups, and they challenge the practical sovereignty of their target states in more...

Jpost editorial: Shortsighted Vatican By JPOST EDITORIAL BOARD 05/14/2015 The Vatican announced this week that it was poised to sign a treaty with the Palestinian political leadership. The Vatican announced this week that it was poised to sign a treaty with the Palestinian political leadership, representing what was referred to in official Holy See documents as the “State of Palestine.” News media played up the announcement, with The New York Times calling the specific mention of a “State of Palestine” a “significant symbolic weight to an intensifying Palestinian push for international support for sovereignty that bypasses the paralyzed negotiations with...

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

)—Five Iranian boats fired shots across the bow of a Singapore flagged cargo vessel in the Persian Gulf on Thursday in an attempt to potentially stop the ship, a U.S. official told CNN. For the first time, the incident brought another Persian Gulf nation into the recent rising maritime tensions in the region. It is not yet clear if any of the rounds hit the Alpine Eternity. There were no U.S. citizens or cargo on board. The Pentagon is still gathering information about the incident.

DOHA (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirate's coastguard said it went to the aid of a Singapore-flagged ship on Thursday after the vessel came under Iranian naval fire, the Gulf state's news agency reported. The coastguard said the cargo ship, flying a Singapore flag,

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, addressed a gathering of Iranian teachers on May 6 who repeatedly responded to his address by chanting in unison: “Allah is great! Khamene’i is the leader! Death to the enemies of the leadership! Death to America! Death to England! Death to the hypocrites! Death to Israel!” According to an English-language transcript of the speech published by the BBC, the Iranian teachers interrupted the ayatollah with chants calling for death to America, England and Israel at three points in his speech. “We say that teachers carry out the task of the prophets; this is the...

The Saudis are in play, casting about for partners. In a clear vote of no-confidence in US President Barack Obama’s leadership, Saudi King Salman led several Arab leaders in blowing off Obama’s Camp David summit this week. The summit was meant to compensate the Sunni Arabs for Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Salman’s decision is further proof that US-Saudi relations have jumped the tracks. For 70 years the Saudis subcontracted their national security to the US military. Deals were closed with a wink and a nod. That’s all over now. Obama has destroyed Washington’s credibility. Salman views its gentleman’s agreements...

Muslim Leader Who Said Israel is ‘Enemy of God’ Invited to White HousePosted By Joe Kaufman On May 15, 2015 @ 12:28 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments [1]Regardless of the circumstances, when a representative from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with close ties to Hamas, is allowed into the White House, a serious, indeed dangerous, problem exists.One day after the brutal death of his cousin – a revenge attack following the murder of three Israeli teens – Tariq Abu Khdeir, a 15-year-old boy who had traveled to Israel from Tampa, Florida, found himself arrested and...

President Obama’s Camp David summit with the Gulf Arab states on Thursday will seek to boost arms sales to the Gulf neighbors but the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been taken off their wish list. White House officials on Monday sought to tamp down speculation that King Salman of Saudi Arabia canceled his attendance at Camp David when the U.S. made clear that his country would not be permitted to buy F-35s. “We do not and never anticipated this to be a summit that only focused on one capability, like the F-35, for instance,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy National...