Free Republic

The highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Eastern Bloc says the Soviet Union orchestrated an anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda campaign in the Middle East four decades ago -- and the effects of the effort still reverberate. The Middle East was a key battlefield in the Cold War, and Moscow spent considerable resources courting Arab states in the region and vocally backing the Palestinian cause. Humiliated by the defeat of the Soviet-backed Arab states in their 1967 war against Israel, Yuri Andropov devised the operation to discredit the Jewish state and present Zionism as "Nazi-style racism" while at the...

Classified report will bust myth that millions of Palestinians need UNRWA, sources say Congress is pressuring the State Department to release a long classified report on Palestinian refugees that insiders say could change the calculus on how the United States approaches the situation and allocates millions in taxpayer funds to a key United Nations agency, according to sources and a congressional letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Dozens of members of Congress have already signed on to an effort to force the release of this State Department publication, which sources say was originally classified by the Obama administration in...

A Mattis-Bolton accord on Jordan replacing the PLO in future negotiations with Israel will undoubtedly reinforce Trump's preparedness to make this long-overdue call Mattis-Bolton accord can sway Trump to dump PLO for Jordan President Trump’s possible call for Jordan to replace the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as Israel’s negotiating partner under Trump’s soon-to-be-released “ultimate deal” will be considerably strengthened if Trump’s newly-appointed National Security Adviser - John Bolton - and Secretary of Defense - James “Mad Dog” Mattis - concur on such a move. Bolton has supported this strategy since 2009‚Äì telling Eric Shawn on 21 January 2018:

Having female terrorist leaders is proof of gender equality in Fatah, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' secretary-general said. At a recent ceremony at the El-Bireh High School for Girls, school principal Nida Abd Rabbo announced that promoting terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi as a role model to female students is an "educational responsibility," the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported. Last week, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official PA daily, wrote, "It's [the Al-Yasser Cultural Forum's] goal is to strengthen the affiliation with Palestine and its history, and to adhere to the Palestinian identity, because this is a great educational responsibility. The forum's...

A French consular employee has been arrested and accused of smuggling weapons from Gaza and into the West Bank. Diplomatic driver Romain Franck, along with five West Bank and East Jerusalem residents, were indicted Monday for using Franck's diplomatic vehicle to smuggle in 70 pistols and two assault rifles into the West Bank, the Times of Israel reports. Franck was first arrested on February 15. Franck is accused of knowingly transporting the weapons using his diplomatic vehicle since fewer security checks allowed him to do so without security officials knowledge. Prosecutors allege he transported the weapons to the West Bank...

Democratic obstruction in the Senate has left the Department of Education without leadership in its office of civil rights at a time when anti-Semitism has risen by 94 percent in U.S. schools. Kenneth Marcus, the Trump administration's nominee to be assistant secretary for civil rights, has been stalled since Oct. 30. Marcus is the founder and president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing civil rights of the Jewish people. Marcus was not confirmed out of the Senate HELP committee until last month on a party line vote and now awaits...

Saleh Ra'fat of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, said on Sunday that the committee would convene in the coming days to discuss the latest developments and to follow the implementation of PLO Central Council decisions, which called for severing ties with Israel. Interviewed by Voice of Palestine Radio, he sided with applying to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, demanding that a legal investigation be launched against Israel for its "crimes" against the Palestinian people and the joining of "the State of Palestine" to 22 other international organizations. Saleh also called on Arab countries not to agree to...

Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary General Saeb Erekat recently told Nikki Haley, our U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, that she "needs to shut up and realize the Palestinian leadership is not the problem." He was reportedly not happy with a speech Haley gave in January in which she excoriated Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his anti-Semitism . "He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th century to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers," Haley said of Abbas's recent comments. Between Haley's rebuke of Abbas and President Trump's decision to move...

The PLO has seemingly done its dash--and hundreds of millions in cash--in defiantly taking on Trump President Trump and America’s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley - virtually within hours of each other - have laid the groundwork for Jordan to replace the PLO as Israel’s negotiating partner under President Bush’s 2003 Roadmap—endorsed by the United Nations, European Union, and Russia - and Bush’s 2004 Congress-endorsed commitments to Israel. Haley told the UN Security Council:

TEL AVIV – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ deputy in his ruling Fatah faction this week dismissed years of American aid amounting to several billion dollars with the declaration that the U.S. has never given anything of “substance” to the Palestinians and added that “nothing good will come from them.” “Recently we were forced to review all of our relations with the American administrations in recent years, and not just the Trump administration. We assessed that nothing good will come from them for the Palestinian people and the nation, and this is completely clear,” said Aloul in an interview with...

RAMALLAH — Palestinian leaders voted on Monday to call for the suspension of recognition of Israel, as they met in response to US President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The vote ordered the Palestine Liberation Organisation to suspend its recognition of the Jewish state until Israel “recognizes the state of Palestine,” cancels its annexation of East Jerusalem, and stops settlement activity, a statement said. It was unclear if the vote by the Palestinian Central Council, a high-ranking arm of the PLO, was binding. A previous vote by the council in 2015 to suspend security coordination with Israel...

The White House has decided to quietly withdraw from all its ties with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas. DEBKAfile’s exclusive sources report that the Trump administration has resolved to scrap all ties with the Palestinian leadership in retaliation for its campaign against US President Donald Trump and his Jerusalem policy. Several warnings to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of what was in store if he did not desist from castigating the US president fell on death ears. Last week, two Arab crown princes, Saudi Muhammed bin Salman and UAE Sheikh Muhammed bin Zayed, summoned Abbas to their capitals and...

(JTA) — The Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington, D.C., canceled its Christmas reception due to President Trump’s expected announcement that he will be recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

...that the PA is freezing all contacts with the United States over last week's announcement by Washington that it will close the representative office of the PA and PLO in Washington, DC under law unless the PA resumes serious negotiations with Israel. PA Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki told AFP.“In practice by closing the office they are freezing all meetings and we are making that official.” A spokesman for the PLO confirms that it had received instructions from PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas “regarding closing down all communication lines with the Americans.”

Such a referendum would send a clear signal to President Trump that there could indeed be some possible light at the end of the Gazan terrorist-tunnels There is little hope that reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah will end a decade of bitter internecine feuding which has seen a parallel entrenchment of territorial divisions between them in Gaza and the West Bank. Gazan and West Bank Arab populations will continue to be the victims of this ongoing power play as both groups remain bitterly opposed to recognising Israel as the Jewish National Home.

The Trump administration declared its firm support Thursday for a bill that would suspend U.S. financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority until it ends what critics have described as a long-standing practice of rewarding Palestinians who kill Americans and Israelis. The State Department announcement comes nearly six weeks after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee backed the measure. The legislation, which is named after an American who was stabbed to death in Israel by a Palestinian, reflects bipartisan outrage over what lawmakers have termed a “pay to slay” program endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. “The Trump administration strongly supports the Taylor...

1. Ahmad Abu Adass In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home. It was there, after a prayer session,...

An award-winning journalist who broke the story of the group of Jewish women ejected from an LGBTQ march in Chicago last month has been reassigned to non-journalistic duties at the paper which ran the original report, the Windy City Times. Gretchen Rachel Hammond — whose June 24 story caused a national storm after she detailed how three women flying Jewish Pride flags embossed with the Star of David were instructed to leave the gathering by organizers from the Dyke March Collective — confirmed to The Algemeiner on Monday that while she was still employed by the paper, she was not...

Should the United States pay Palestinian terrorists? For the overwhelming majority of Americans and Israelis this is a rhetorical question. The position of the American people was made clear – yet again – last week when US President Donald Trump’s senior envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt met with Palestinian Authority chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and repeated Trump’s demand that the PA cut off the payments. Not only did Abbas reject their demand, he reportedly accused the presidential envoys of working as Israeli agents. Abbas’s treatment of Kushner and Greenblatt was in line with his refusal to even...

Academic and media professionals, journalists and diplomats, governmental, non-governmental and international organizations have been rewriting the history of Israel – both ancient and modern – for decades, portraying Israel as an abhorrent state, guilty of the lowest forms of crimes. The concerted and massive effort to denigrate a modern state – in order to criminalize and dehumanize its people in the eyes of the international community – knows no precedent, even though the people that brought the world the Ten Commandments has always been at the receiving end of hatred and vilification. The Nazi and Soviet regimes represented the apex...