Free Republic

We talked before about whether Obama is a Sunni or Shiite Muslim. Recent revelations about Obama's father being a Shiite Muslim. Obama hired Valerie Jarrett.. an Iranian operative to run his Administration. Now he's essentially given the green light for Iran to make nuclear weapons. Obama used the Sunni group ISIS to knock out dictators. Once they are in power.. Shiite groups, which outnumber them, will wipe them out and fill the power vacuum. And today he says he would like to visit Iran before the end of his Presidency. The cat's out of the bag folks. The US has...

Saudi Arabia is moving heavy military equipment including artillery to areas near its border with Yemen, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, raising the risk that the Middle East’s top oil power will be drawn into the worsening Yemeni conflict. The buildup follows a southward advance by Iranian-backed Houthi Shi'ite militants who took control of the capital Sanaa in September and seized the central city of Taiz at the weekend as they move closer to the new southern base of U.S.-supported President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

On Tuesday, a man convicted of blinding another man in an acid attack was himself forcibly blinded in one eye, according to Amnesty International and Tasnim News, a semi-official news website. The punishment is believed to be Iran's first case of Qasas, meaning retribution in kind, Tasnim News said. Amnesty International denounced the sentence. "This punishment exposes the utter brutality of Iran's justice system and underlines the Iranian authorities' shocking disregard for basic humanity," said Raha Bahreini, Amnesty International's Iran researcher. "Meting out cruel and inhuman retribution punishments is not justice. Blinding, like stoning, amputation and flogging, is a form...

We know Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. He has said he'll stand with the Muslims with things get ugly in his book. He has said the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet Mohammed. He has said Muslims built America. He has threatened to shoot down Israeli jets. He has given the Muslim "one finger in the air" sign last summer. Obama has justified ISIS actions by saying "The Crusades" just as ISIS has done in many videos. He has a ring that says there is no God but Allah. But what kind of Muslim is...

A horrific video has emerged claiming to show a nine-year-old child being brutally murdered by members of a Shia militia who accused him of being a supporter of the Islamic State terror group. The footage was purportedly filmed near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, where a coalition of 30,000 Iraqi Army soldiers and private Shia armies launched a campaign to oust ISIS militants earlier this week. The horrific film has not been independently verified and could easily be just the latest piece of propaganda to be released by the terrorist organisation. Nevertheless the sheer brutality of the clip calls into...

Three attackers with grenades, Kalashnikovs and explosive suicide vests struck at the Imamia mosque in Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan's restive northwest, around the time of the main Friday prayers. The attack comes two weeks after a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in southern Pakistan killed 61 people ... violence has been on the rise in Pakistan in recent years, most of it perpetrated by hardline Sunni Muslim groups against minority Shiite Muslims, who make up around a fifth of the population. The suicide bombing at a mosque in southern Sindh province on January 30 was the deadliest...

Last summer, the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept from Syria into northern Iraq, routing Iraqi security forces and seizing the city of Mosul. Soon afterward, the group declared the establishment of a dubious "caliphate" in the area it controls and rebranded itself the Islamic State. With Iraq's army weakened and radical militants advancing on Baghdad, the country's Iran-backed Shia militias — which have their own history of sectarian abuses — fought back, halting the Islamic State's progress. The militias have successfully combated Islamic State fighters on the ground with the assistance of air...

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,...

NORFOLK Ayaan Hirsi Ali stood before a slide of the caged Jordanian pilot about to be set afire by Islamic State group extremists. That, she said at Chrysler Hall on Tuesday night, will be the norm if they are not defeated. "You are going to see people beheaded, their hands and legs cut off, the mass enslavement of women," warned Hirsi Ali, a sharp critic of Muslim leaders and radicals and an advocate of women's rights. "We have had over a long period of time... even before the Reagan administration, so many warning signs that we have ignored," Hirsi Ali...

Two hooded gunmen opened fire at a man in a kebab restaurant at one of Malmö’s largest shopping centres on Saturday afternoon, in full view of several families and their children. Their victim, thought to be Ashkan Moayed Abedi, a member of the Wolfpack Brotherhood criminal gang, escaped into the carpark where he was then gunned down in front of shocked shoppers. He died later in hospital. “They fired perhaps ten or twelve shots," ... Abedi, 30, was a key player in the gang war which took place in Sweden's third largest city between 2007 and 2011, leaving at least...

the split began during a power struggle of who would lead Islam after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 AD. A conflict developed between those who wanted the growing religion headed by qualified leaders and those who believed authority belonged to the direct heirs of Mohammed. The Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, ruled as caliph for five years before being assassinated. His sons, Hassan and Hussein, were excluded from the succession and both were later killed. Their adherents evolved into the Shia, whose name derives from the term shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali,”... Shia devotees would see the...

(Updates with output from Shabwa field, Belhaf gas facility stopping) Jan 19 (Reuters) - Oil companies in Yemen's Hadramout and Shabwa provinces, including the main gas export facility at Belhaf, have suspended operations amid protests over the seizure of a presidential aide by Shi'ite fighters who control the capital Sanaa, local officials said on Monday. The Shi'ite Houthis seized President Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi's chief of staff, Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak, a native of the southern Shabwa province, on Saturday amid a dispute over a proposed new constitution that threatens to bring down the government. "Several oil firms with small production...

Is the Middle East becoming less Arab? Hisham Melhem Saturday, 8 November 2014 President Obama’s letter to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he laid out the foundation of a new relationship emanating from a nuclear compromise, and stressed shared U.S.-Iranian interests in combatting the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is emblematic of a gradual and subtle shift in Washington’s attitudes towards the region in general and its Arab actors in particular. In this rapidly changing Middle East, the U.S. sees a diminishing Arab influence brought about by the erosion of the state system, lack...

Washington DC thinks we are stupid, they really do. The professional political class has yet to grasp the understanding that “WWW” as a prefix in the internet stands for “World Wide Web”. We are quite capable of connecting, collecting and digesting information directly from the heart of the issues being debated. Despite all the DC pontifications, obfuscations, and professional talking points to the contrary, we know in Syria there are two options, support Bashir Assad or support radical Islamists, that’s it. There is no mysterious “moderate” third option; the “rebels” are radical islamists. President Obama and Republican Senator John McCain...

While helping Iraqi forces to break the Islamic State's siege of Amerli, the US Air Force supported a deadly Shia militia that is responsible for killing hundreds of US soldiers. The Shia militia, known as Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous, has also captured and executed US soldiers and British citizens in the past. Iraqi forces, supported by "paramilitary forces" such as the League of the Righteous, advanced on Amerli late last week and reached the town by Aug. 31, The Washington Post reported. By Sept. 1, the siege, which lasted for more than two months, was...

Iraqi Shia militias and Kurdish forces are continuing their advance against Islamic State militants after breaking the siege of Amerli in northern Iraq. A BBC team entered the town on Monday, finding residents who had endured more than two months under siege. The joint forces have also seized the militant stronghold of Suleiman Beg. Meanwhile Amnesty International says that it has uncovered new evidence that Islamic State have launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the north.

Siege of Mecca, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria: US and Gulf Destabilization PoliciesMurad Makhmudov and Lee Jay WalkerModern Tokyo Times In the 1980s the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and some other nations began to fund Sunni Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan. This meddling came hot on the heels of the Siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia in 1979. Therefore, funding radical Sunni Islamism in Afghanistan came at a very opportunistic time for the rulers based in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan became the central base in training international jihadists and spreading Islamism in Afghanistan. Irrespective of the motives in...

Sunni politicians in Iraq have suspended talks to form a new government, in protest of a mass killing inside a mosque in the northeastern province of Diyala. In a statement on Saturday, Salim al-Jabouri, speaker of the Iraqi parliament, denounced as "terrorists" the Shia armed group suspected of killing at least 73 people inside a Sunni mosque.... Jabouri and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak are demanding that outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the main Shia parliamentary bloc hand over the perpetrators within 48 hours and compensate the families of victims, the AP news agency reported. [....] The attack on...

The battle of our centuryFATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZAIt is not a war between religions. It is a war within Islam that has lethal consequences for all those it touches. It began dramatically on Sept. 11, 2001. Our century is characterized by a lethal theological war in the house of Islam, with brutal consequences for the whole world, whether it be lower Manhattan or northern Iraq. Centuries are not exactly 100 years long. The late British historian Eric Hobsbawm proposed a more persuasive division of history with his "long 19th century," which began with the French Revolution in 1789 and...

People walk through the rubble of the Prophet Younis Mosque after it was destroyed in a bomb attack by militants ISIS in the city of Mosul, July 24, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer MOSUL: Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) that controls large parts of Iraq have blown up a Shiite shrine in the city of Mosul, an official and witnesses said Saturday. Jihadists destroyed the Nabi Shiyt (Prophet Seth) shrine in Mosul, the de facto Iraqi capital of the "caliphate" proclaimed last month by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. " ISIS militants stopped people from coming...