Free Republic

On the one hand, it’s a good idea to be respectful of religious holidays. However, in a nation like America that has people from every faith on earth, if all of us took a holiday every time some religion had a holy day, we’d never get anything done. The Council on American–Islamic Relations would apparently be just fine with that. Standing in front of the Montgomery County Council Office Building in Rockville, Northwest High School senior Anhar Karim said he is one of many students in the county who have faced a hard decision related to two Muslim holidays. Karim...

A federal immigration judge denied bail Friday to a 23-year-old engineering student from Tampa who has been charged by the U.S. government for engaging in terrorism. The defendant, Youssef Megahed, has already been acquitted by a federal jury of related charges. But now, he faces essentially the same charges again in an immigration court, where if he is found guilty he faces deportation back to his native Egypt. The case has inflamed Muslim immigrant groups, and has become a cause célèbre in Egypt, where President Barack Obama makes a much anticipated trip next week. The issue: Whether an immigrant defendant...

In Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge wishes that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” Scrooge would make the perfect public-school bureaucrat -- except he’d insist on calling it a holiday pudding, playing “Winter Wonderland” as background music, and doing it all in the name of inclusiveness, sensitivity and church-state separation. In the latest manifestation of what Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition calls “secular fundamentalism,” the South Orange/Mapplewood, New Jersey School District has banned playing the instrumental...