Free Republic

Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that the Middle East was in a dangerous situation, undermining National Security Strategy Advisor Jake Sullivan's claims last fall that President Biden’s policy led to a “quieter” region and de-escalated Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As Iranian proxy groups throughout the Middle East continue to attack U.S. forces with drones and missiles, senior Biden Administration officials have been forced to confront a region that is increasingly more dangerous and more volatile than the one that they inherited. Experts say that the new violence in the Middle East is a direct result of a failure...

Farming origins gain 10,000 years Wild types of emmer wheat like those found at Ohalo were forerunners of today's varieties Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say. These grasses included wild emmer wheat and barley, which were forerunners of the varieties grown today. A US-Israeli team report their findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The evidence comes from a collection of 90,000 prehistoric plant remains dug...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site that was occupied for thousands of years, spanning the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. While a large body of research has explored this transition across many archaeological sites, much remains to be determined about the specific timeline, including the full range of early animal management practices that may have preceded large-scale herding.To shed new light, Smith and colleagues turned to ancient animal dung. Specifically, they analyzed the presence of dung spherulites—tiny calcium carbonate clumps found in the dung of animals—at Abu Hureyra, and considered this evidence alongside other archaeological, archaeobotanical,...

There's nothing a person says that more serves better to convinces me of their ignorance than when they use the "C" word. They use it as if it was a magical talisman that would make us crumble to the ground and eagerly convert to whatever twaddle they're peddling. People who believe the Crusades were somehow "bad" inevitably are completely and unforgivably ignorant of both Christian and Moslem histories, let alone the infamous and barbaric treatment of Christians under invading Moslem armies in Spain, Portugal and France between AD 711-1492. The Crusades weren't started by Christians or the Church. Instead, they...

Researchers have directly dated the earliest-ever fossil from an anatomically modern human found outside of Africa and the Levant. This 90,000-year-old fossilized finger rewrites traditional theories of early migration, beating expectations by some 25,000 years. Homo sapiens, the team thinks, were exploring what was once the wet grassland of Saudi Arabia far earlier than previously thought. Humans may not have left Africa in one big wave, but in a series of trickles... Extensive testing at institutions around the world revealed not only was this the finger bone of a modern human, but it was also the oldest directly dated Homo...

The declaration of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, ISIS or Daesh by its Arabic acronym) as a “project terror organization” by the National Security Council (MGK), the nation’s top military and security institution, on March 28 is nothing but a reflection of a long-held view by Turkey’s Islamist rulers that has often downplayed the threat of religious extremism and radicalism in the 80-million-strong predominantly Sunni nation in a dangerous and unstable neighborhood. The MGK statement, which is a recommendation, or rather an order in practice to all government agencies, reveals the troubling mindset among Turkey’s rulers....

Pastor J.D. addresses the significance of the Israeli strikes targeting the city of Damascus prophetically, and shares three main reasons people are unaware of its seriousness geopolitically.

Study of 44 ancient Middle Eastern genomes supports idea of independent farming revolutions in the Fertile Crescent. Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran. ...the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history — the Neolithic revolution. Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the...

Many who closely follow the dueling Islamic terror narratives emanating from the White House are mystified by Mr. Obama's inability (or deliberate unwillingness) to utter the phrase "Islamic terrorists." Many are curious, too, about why he refuses to call ISIS "ISIS," steadfastly insisting instead that everybody in his administration call the terror group "ISIL." What's the difference, and why is it important? The agendas behind each diverge widely. In fact, the variance between the two is elephantine in scale. ISIS stands for the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," a terror group controlling a large swath of both Iraq and...

Islamic extremists in Germany are trying to recruit Syrian refugees to their cause, the country’s domestic security service has said. The warning was issued as one of Germany’s best known Islamist preachers published a list of suggestions on how best to approach refugees. Pierre Vogel, a former boxer and convert to Islam who has been described as “Germany’s most influential Salafist preacher,” an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam, called on his followers to seek out new recruits at refugee shelters. The preacher told his followers to take gifts and donations with them, and to volunteer to help staff with the...

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) used mustard agent in its fight against a Kurdish militia in Syria, testing has confirmed. Unnamed US government officials involved in investigating alleged chemical weapon use by Isil in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh confirmed mustard gas had been used, according to the Washington Post and CNN. Mustard gas, used during World War One, can cause blisters, blindness and respiratory damage and is an internationally-banned chemical weapon. Last month, members of a Syrian Kurdish militia, the People's Defence Units or YPG, reported that projectiles fired by Isil's jihadists had released...

Sometime after 1200 BCE, civilization collapsed, and a dark age prevailed. The Late Bronze Age collapse of societies throughout the Levant, the Near East and the Mediterranean some 3,200 years ago has been a mystery. Powerful, advanced civilizations disappeared, seemingly overnight. Now an archaeologist believes he has figured out what lay behind the cataclysm. The trigger seems to have been the invasion of ancient Egypt in 1177 BCE by marauding peoples known simply as the “Sea Peoples,” as recorded in the Medinet Habu wall relief at Ramses III' tomb. The relief depicts a sea battle (and also carts full of...

One of the more interesting aspects of this flood of human misery is that it is not entirely spontaneous. Jihadi groups are doing their best to encourage it. ... That would not be surprising. In 2004 Europe agreed to pay Muhammar Gaddafi four billion pounds a year in exchange for a promise to halt people smuggling to Europe. Experts have also drawn links between the massive rise in would-be migrants and a so-called ‘deal in the desert’ struck by Tony Blair in 2004 – which saw the late Muammar Gaddafi agree to crack down on human traffickers as well as...

On Wednesday President Obama met with certain Muslim leaders in the White House — but the White House refused to state exactly who they were. Sadly, the president fails to realize it’s not his house. It belongs to the American people. I’m quite sure we’ll eventually find out exactly who these individuals were — probably ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood cohorts who recently visited the State Department. But I hope whoever it was, they discussed this particular topic. As reported by Fox News, “Islamic State militants in Iraq have committed “gross human rights abuses” that may amount to war...

Q: From what you know, please, tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant otherwise known as ISIS? France came out with the largest number of supporters for the Islamic State. Only 31% of French “people” responding to the survey stated they had “very unfavorable” opinions of the Islamic State. The rest responded to various degrees of approval, meaning that they clearly approved of the Islamic State. Therefore, the headline of the actual article, “15% of French people back ISIS militants, poll finds”,...

A Texas plumber has been receiving threats after a photo emerged of Islamic extremists in Syria firing a high-powered gun from the bed of his old pickup, which still bears his company’s logo on the door. An extremist group, Ansar al-Deen Front, posted the photo of its fighters aboard the Ford F-250 sometime on Monday. That prompted a flood of calls to Mark Oberholtzer, who owns Mark-1 Plumbing in Texas City, and has nothing to do with Syria’s bloody civil war. “How it ended up in Syria, I’ll never know,” Oberholtzer told The Galveston Daily News. …

Ethnic Kurds clashed overnight with alleged members of a hardline Islamist movement in Hamburg last night, as ISIS clashes spread far from Syria. Police in the northern German city say 14 people were injured overnight in the violence involving hundreds of demonstrators before riot police were able to quell the disturbance. Police spokesman Karina Sadowsky said this morning that fighting began after hundreds of Kurds held a protest against the Islamic State group... ...Last night's violence in Germany came as at least nine Kurdish demonstrators were killed by police in Turkey as demonstrations against the government's failure to help Syrian...

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning. President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh...

The infiltration of Syrian militants into Lebanon threatens Hezbollah’s presence in the strategic Golan Heights. First, Jabhat al-Nusra has taken control of the Syrian side of the border facing the Lebanese area of Shebaa, which is occupied by Israel, isolating Hezbollah from the Syrian extension in the Golan Heights. Hezbollah considers the area a strategic position in its conflict with Israel... Jabhat al-Nusra’s control of the Syrian-Lebanese-Israeli triangle has put an end to this and prevented it from being used as a multidisciplinary card in the hands of Hezbollah. Second... It isolates Hezbollah and its supporting forces in Lebanon and...