Free Republic

A video from 2011 is making the rounds again on social media just in time for the Christmas season. Lebanese-born cleric Abu Musaab Wajdi Akkari declares in the video posted on The Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project website that the “Merry Christmas” greeting is “worse than fornication, and drinking alcohol and killing someone.” “You cannot say Merry Christmas, not even if an alien came and he told you – you cannot even say it to him and say: ‘He’s just an alien,” Akkari says in the video, first posted on Nov. 6, 2011. "I’m never going to...

EL AVIV — American and Israeli intelligence officials have concluded that Yasir Arafat has forged a new alliance with Iran that involves Iranian shipments of heavy weapons and millions of dollars to Palestinian groups that are waging guerrilla war against Israel.The partnership, officials said, was arranged in a clandestine meeting in Moscow last May between two top aides to Mr. Arafat and Iranian government officials. The meeting took place while Mr. Arafat was visiting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to senior Israeli security officials who declined to describe the precise nature of their information.The new alignment is significant...