Free Republic

SMUGGLED photographs of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s most famous political prisoner, show him ghostly white and gaunt with sunken eyes. He is close to death after 56 days of a hunger strike. Mr Ganji was rushed from the Evin prison in Tehran to Milad Hospital last week as his health deteriorated. Massoumeh Shafiie, his wife, said doctors have tried to feed him intravenously but he has pulled out the feeding tubes. Mr Ganji, an investigative journalist, was jailed for six years in 2000 on charges of “acting against national security”. Some charges related to an article he wrote linking some of...

New York, August 3, 2005) - The Iranian government intensified its attacks on independent human rights defenders by arresting prominent lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani and threatening Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, Human Rights Watch said today. On Saturday evening, July 30, agents of the Judiciary, operating under the authority of Tehran chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, arrested Soltani inside the offices of the Lawyers Association in Tehran. The next day, a Judiciary spokesman announced that Soltani was arrested for "revealing secrets relating to the case of nuclear spies." Soltani is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran but has yet to be...

On June 8, 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited President Bush in the White House. Among the topics the two discussed were freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Speaking from the Oval Office, Bush declared Turkey's democracy to be "an important example for the people of the broader Middle East."Turkey remains an important ally of the United States despite recent bilateral tensions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have valued Turkey not only as a strategic military partner in the Cold War but also, in recent decades, as a democratic outpost...

 The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies Kay S. Hymowitz Summer 2005 Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city. By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be...

Today's culture wars can be directly traced to the cultural transformations of the 1960's. As a matter of fact, that critical decade represented nothing less than a cultural revolution of sorts--a revolution Stanley Kurtz describes as "both a fulfillment and a repudiation of the vision of America's founders." Kurtz makes his case in "Culture and Values in the 1960's," a fascinating essay published in Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic, recently released by the Hoover Institution Press. Edited by Peter Berkowitz, Never a Matter of Indifference is a thought-provoking collection of essays on moral character...

On Sunday they packed 'em in -- a circumstance you wouldn't have noted for some long while in English churches, which, like European churches in general, seem to resound mainly with historic echoes. But there was praying to be done, and it seemed to the English people meet, right and their bounden duty -- as the Book of Common Prayer would have it -- to lay their sorrows and perplexities before the Lord. And so, three days after the explosions and screams that scarred a London morning, something like the old European civilization popped back into view. I didn't say...

Some recent events would seem to indicate that the American Civil Liberties Union is lost in the woods without a compass. A moral compass, that is. For the last five years, the ACLU has been fighting the federal departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development because of their support for the Boy Scouts of America – support that has taken the form of raising money for their national jamborees, allowing military personnel to lead Scout troops in their personal capacities, and providing access to government facilities for free. Now, a federal judge has sided with the ACLU and ruled...

Nineteen days have passed since I began my hunger strike. I have lost nineteen kilograms. I am imprisoned. I do not have permission to make phone calls or read newspapers. I have been denied visitation. I cannot walk outside my cell. The liars say they have no political prisoners. They say the political prisoners are not on hunger strike. They distort the facts by calling a cell a suite, saying that prisons are as comfortable as they can be in a hotel! Calling a donkey a parrot does not miraculously turn the donkey into a parrot! Prisoner is someone whose...

If you’re an evangelical Christian, a Jew, a Catholic or any kind of believer – you have an implacable enemy – one who hates you and wants to destroy you. When I say hate, I’m not talking about pique, annoyance or a vague aversion. I mean hate the way Nazis hated Jews, the way white supremacists hate blacks, the way the Hutus hated the Tutsis. Once you reach this realization, it gives you an almost Zen-like clarity of vision and focus. Because then you understand your enemy, what motivates him, and what he is capable of. And you begin to...

Is Conservatism compatible with capitalism? Theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter thought (as did Marx) that the central process of capitalism was "creative destruction." Too much destruction, and there isn't much left to conserve. The conclusion would have to be that capitalism drives out conservatism, but for the last half century, America has been developing a dramatic refutation of this abstract thesis. It is a development that would have astonished students of American culture in the middle of the 20th century. In those days, Louis Hartz declared that America was a liberal society lacking both conservatism and socialism because it had...

LONDON -- Monkey business proved to be lucrative Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than $25,000. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol's and Renoir's work didn't sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo's paintings. An American bidder named Howard Hong, who described himself as an ''enthusiast of modern and contemporary painting," bought the lot of paintings for $26,352, including a buyer's premium. The sale price far surpassed predictions. "We had no idea what these things...

At around the age of eighteen, I became interested in politics. Prior to that, my attention was focused elsewhere due to my age, I believe. I did not understand the real meaning of political language, but I tried, mostly without success, to seek out sources to research and understand it. When I turned eighteen, in accordance with Muslim education, I completed an intensive program of Islamic study, which took four to five months. During this time, I began reading non-Iranian, secular books. While reading history, sociology, anthropology, and religious texts, it became clear to me that, when religion moves from...

It seems the L.A. Weekly wants to seek out and destroy Christianity itself instead of any particular sect thereof. I can say this because the newspaper has admitted as much in a recent column (go here). More on that later. This June 10 column has identified Christians as “Christers,” the kitschy new hate word created by anti-religionists in the U.S.A. to describe their foe: you and me. The Weekly uses this pseudo word some 16 times in the Op Ed even going so far as to make it appear as if the word was used in a Wall Street Journal...

(RNS) "The God Who Wasn't There" is a feature-length documentary exploring the theory that Jesus Christ never existed. It begins its theatrical screenings in New York and other cities throughout the United States on Friday, June 17. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times says the film is "provocative -- to put it mildly." Christianity Today called it "an irreverent, Michael Moore-like documentary." The film claims that Jesus is a fictional character, a legend never based on a real human being. Directed by former Christian Brian Flemming the film includes interviews with liberal religious leaders and non-believers. "Many Christians believe...

Regime Change in Iran: Interview with Gary Metz Ryan Mauro - 6/3/2005 Gary Metz operates the Regime Change Iran web site (http://www.regimechangeiran.com), one of the top-notch blogs keeping readers up-to-date on developments inside Iran. RM: Given the fact that there were such large intelligence failures when we went into Iraq, and such a large portion of the American population feels the war is a mistake, how can we trust the intelligence coming out of Iran? GM: Our intelligence inside of Iran is not what it should be. It will take years to build the kind of intelligence this country needs...

Each spring as high school graduation approaches, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sends out a letter to public schools warning them that no one can pray or make remarks referring to their faith at graduation. But the ACLU goes further than that. They typically demand that public schools censure any speech that might be viewed as having a religious tone. It is not enough that the school not sponsor prayer or religious activities, the ACLU believes government must prevent people from doing or saying anything that may have religious meaning. I sat on a public school board and saw...

While American universities may proclaim diversity as an exalted value, a recent study shows that the only freedom of thought that really exists on campus is "to believe the dominant political ideology. Other ideologies are marginalized." (Klien and Western. For full text of study, follow links below.) But Phil Mitchell doesn’t need a study to validate what he has experienced for over 20 years. "The truth is, universities are the most hostile, narrow-minded and intolerant environment in society," Mitchell said. Mitchell, 57, is a former history professor at the University of Colorado (CU) and a deeply committed Christian. He was...

US chastity ring funding attacked The silver ring is a constant reminder of the abstinence promise The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the US government over its funding of a nationwide sexual abstinence programme.The ACLU says the Silver Ring Thing programme violates the principle that the state budget cannot be used to promote religion. The programme, which targets teenagers, is an offshoot of a Christian ministry. Since 2003, it has received more than $1m from the Department of Health and Human Services. Symbolic ringThe funding is part of a government initiative to expand abstinence-only sex...

The emotions this movement inspired coincided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced--Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement. The Rev. King's multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement. In retrospect, it's clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals. Some have since returned to traditional, private lives; others have become neoconservatives. But many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public-policy...

Shuffling out of the movie theater last weekend, I emitted a silent scream, frustrated by yet another example of Christianity under assault, the tumescent epic, “Kingdom of Heaven,” a film so utterly contemptuous of Christians and adoring of Muslims that a leading authority on the Crusades branded it “Osama Bin Laden's version of history.” “What insane times we live in,” one film critic notes. “Here we are in the midst of the War on Terror, and all Hollywood can do is continually bash Christianity.” In an industry historically known for coddling communists (the blacklist, Jane Fonda, Stone, Spielberg and others...