Free Republic

The National Park Service director will blame terrorism for having to shut down most of the National Mall during the government shutdown, saying that was the only way to protect the memorials with limited staff “in a post-9/11 world.” In testimony submitted to Congress, Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said he’s only been able to keep a dozen of the normal 300 employees charged with cleaning and caring for the capital region’s memorials during the shutdown, and without the rest of his staff he cannot guarantee the safety of the property.

Testing, 1, 2, 3, testing. Jihadists never go on furlough. While shutdown theater preoccupies Washington, terror plotters remain on the clock. The question is: Will America keep hitting the post-9/11 snooze button? At Los Angeles International Airport, two dry ice bombs exploded this week, and two others were found in a restricted area of the airport. According to the Los Angeles Times, the devices "appeared to be outside the terminal near planes where employees such as baggage handlers and others work on the aircraft and its cargo." That reminds me: It's been more than a year since watchdogs warned Capitol...

An alleged senior al Qaeda figure captured in Libya by U.S. special forces this month has been transferred to the United States and will face charges in court in New York, U.S. officials said on Monday. He was seized by a U.S. Army Delta Force squad on the streets of Tripoli on October 5 and whisked onto a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea where he was questioned by a team of interrogators. He was handed over to U.S. civilian law enforcement over the weekend and brought directly to the New York area, said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the chief...

After Islamic gunmen attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, the collective reaction from the US media was to speculate whether such terror could happen here, as if a jihadist assault on a mall inside America had never before been tried. CNN was typical: “Can it happen here? Yes, say security experts, but it hasn’t.” News flash: it did. On the evening of Feb. 12, 2007, a young Muslim man walked into the Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City with a pistol-grip, 12-gauge shotgun and a 38-caliber revolver and opened fire on shoppers, killing five and wounding four others,...

Rubin rose before Chief U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Portland, where she pleaded guilty to a dozen crimes – in Colorado, Oregon and California – as part of the underground Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen F. Peifer recounted Rubin's crimes as part of the largest group of eco-saboteurs ever taken down by the FBI. They called themselves The Family and committed an estimated $40 million in damage from 1996 to 2001. ... the terms of the highly structured plea agreement sets limits on the number of years Rubin will spend in prison....

"If a dry run is occurring, the attack will shortly follow." That's according to Wolf Koch, a Boeing 767 pilot for Delta Airlines and an official at the Air Line Pilots Association International, who was discussing common terrorist tactics in the run-up to devastating attacks like those on 9/11. That is an extremely worrying thought given a memo leaked this week from the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, which warns of "several cases recently…of what appear to be probes, or dry runs" of such attacks.

An Orange County man who had fought with Syrian rebels against the Assad regime was arrested Friday morning as he tried to leave the U.S. with a fake passport to fight for al Qaeda against U.S. soldiers overseas, said authorities. Twenty-four-year-old Sinh Vinh Ngo Nguyen of Garden Grove, also known as Hasan Abu Omar Ghannoum, was stopped at a bus station in Santa Ana, Calif. at 7:30 a.m. by members of the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force and arrested on suspicion of providing material support to al Qaeda. At the courthouse, his mother, Hieu Nguyen, told The Associated Press...

Last year, TheBlaze TV’s documentary team released the two-part miniseries The Project, exposing the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States post-9/11, and how it has successfully infiltrated key positions within the U.S. government and law enforcement. In Wednesday’s episode of TheBlaze TV’s investigative news magazine show For The Record, “Civilization Jihad,” (8:30 p.m. ET), viewers will get an update on how the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to extend its reach from deep within the U.S. out to American foreign policy and decision-making overseas.

One of the most popular and most important subjects on Shariah Finance Watch is the issue of Zakat. Zakat is a form of tithing in Islam and is considered one of the Five Pillars of the faith. Essentially, every Muslim who is able to do so is required to give 1/40 of his wealth each year to the “needy” through the system of zakat. Today, most of the zakat payments, at least in the West, go through Islamic charities and mosques. This has proven to be a problem because so many Islamic charities and mosques have been shown to provide...

I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a family of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and therefore were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of this country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and so-called liberals would be the first to deny it. n those days, the schools were old fashioned enough that my parents did not use their classrooms to indoctrinate students as tens of thousands of university professors and even more K-12 teachers regularly do today. It is also an...

Details are sketchy at this late hour, but CNN and others are reporting via Twitter that the Libyan PM has been “kidnapped.” revenge for al Libi raid?

More than 10,000 people in Arkansas were dumped into a blackout Sunday following an attack on that state’s electric grid, the FBI said today, the third such attack in recent weeks. In August, a major transmission line in the region, around Cabot, Ark., was deliberately cut. The FBI said that two power poles had been intentionally cut in Lonoke County on Sunday, resulting in the outage. According to the FBI: In the early morning hours of September 29, 2013, officials with Entergy Arkansas reported a fire at its Keo substation located on Arkansas Highway 165 between Scott and England in...

An Australian man from Queensland according to Australian intelligence sources blew himself up in Deir Ezzor, Syria while driving a truck full of explosives, reports Today Tonight. The Australian jihadist was fighting with Al-Qaeda and has been in Syria for a year, sources say. ...

Excerpted from "Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident" “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin cried out to the agitated crowd during a 2008 campaign rally, referring to then-Senator Barack Obama. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” This was how “real Americans” saw things, according to Palin. As for Obama, he’s “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s...

Only a few months have passed since President Obama last boasted that al Qaeda is on "the path to defeat." The jihadist groups can work independently, but most are reported to coordinate their carnage with Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's successor as the al Qaeda leader. And it was he, the United States says, who ordered coordinated attacks on American embassies and consulates in August, a plan that prompted the United States to close more than 20 of them. Where is this leading? The State Department says "current information suggests that al Qaeda, its affiliated organizations and other terrorist groups continue...

Unidentified foreign forces have launched a night-time raid on a militant base in the south Somali town of Barawe from the sea, reports say. A spokesman for the al-Shabab Islamist group told Reuters news agency that one of its fighters had been killed during the raid....... Al-Shabab claimed responsibility last month for the deadly attack on a Kenyan shopping mall..... According to the Somali news website Midnimo, two helicopters were also involved in the raid..... "Westerners in boats attacked our base as Barawe beach and one was martyred from our side," Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Masab, described as al-Shabab's spokesman for...

Al-Qaeda has now welcomed al-Shabab--the group responsible for the Kenya mall attack--into its ranks. Despite the targeted US killing of al-Qaeda leaders, more and more terrorist groups are joining the al-Qaeda network and expanding membership - what led former Australian intelligence analyst Leah Farrell to say, "al-Qaeda's bigger now than it ever has been." Both Osama bin Laden's death and the Arab Spring unrest allowed the al-Qaeda network to grow much stronger.

A federal judge has ordered the release of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner suffering from severe mental illness who has been spent much of his time at a psychiatric ward on the U.S. naval base since he arrived more than 11 years ago. U.S. officials say Idris, who is in his 50s, was captured with al-Qaeda fighters in 2001 by Pakistani forces while attempting to cross the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

MOSCOW — The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that it evacuated its embassy in Libya after armed men stormed the complex the day before, apparently seeking revenge for the killing of a Libyan Air Force officer. And though it was clear how the attack ended — Russian security personnel expelled the attackers, killing two of them, and then the entire embassy staff left the country — why it started remained murky. “According to the information we have, the direct reason for this aggressive action toward our diplomatic mission was the murder on Oct. 1 by a Russian citizen, Ekaterina Ustyuzhaninova,...

No one is quite sure yet what happened last night at the Jacksonville airport last night, but two arrests have been made, and at least one “destructive device” has been found. Security shut down the airport for several hours and evacuated it while dealing with two suspicious packages, one of which may have been the real thing:

Nairobi. SNIPPET: “An explosive found in a Nairobi matatu (taxi) was similar to the one used in a Kampala attack and two city bombings, a court heard on Tuesday. The object weighing 10kgs, was an improvised explosive device designed to be exploded at a target by either a suicide bomber or by remote control via a cellphone, a police officer, who presented bomb experts’ findings, said. “The device was complete with all the components of an improvised explosive device and was designed to function to maximum destruction of property and life,” the officer said. He told the court that the...

Spies & Secrets: 4 True Stories From Tom Clancy's Novels Sometimes truth may be stranger than fiction, but for best-selling author Tom Clancy, the two are often more closely paralleled. Clancy died Tuesday (Oct. 1) at the age of 66, but his thrilling, espionage and military-inspired novels helped him become one of the most well-known American authors. From a dramatic Soviet-era defection to a high-profile assassination plot, here are four true stories from Clancy's novels. • The Hunt for Red October Clancy's first novel, "The Hunt for Red October," was published in 1984. The book introduced Clancy's most famous fictional...

Officials issued an all-clear late Tuesday after Jacksonville International Airport in Florida was evacuated in response to suspicious packages. "At this point, we've gotten an all-clear in the terminal and our garages and our surface lots," Jacksonville Airport Authority spokesman Michael Stewart told reporters. "We erred on the side of caution in terms of doing whatever's necessary to make sure that everybody is safe," he said. Shannon Harley, with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, told reporters that a device was found and rendered safe. He provided no other details. The evacuation had an impact on flights, with some arriving aircraft diverted...

Samantha Lewthwaite, the County Down born woman known as the White Widow, evaded capture at the Kenyan shopping mall by smearing blood over her face, security sources there have said.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Jacksonville International Airport was evacuated Tuesday evening because of two suspicious packages found there, according to the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, and witnesses say two men were taken into custody.

A Coolidge man accused of setting off a bomb in the parking lot of the Casa Grande Social Security office last November was found guilty Friday of three weapons and ammunition possession charges. Abdullatif Ali Aldosary, 48, is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 9 in U.S. District Court. Each offense carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. ... The U.S. Attorney’s Office earlier dismissed charges of malicious damage to federal property by means of explosives and attempted interference with the work of a government agency that had been filed against Aldosary ... Aldosary...

<p>As if the senseless massacre of innocents in Nairobi’s Westgate mall was not horrific enough, reports are surfacing that the Islamic terrorists who seized the mall last weekend tortured, beheaded, raped, and mutilated their victims before killing them. A police doctor who entered the mall after the attack said these reports “are not allegations. Those are f***ing truths.”</p>

'A British man who offered himself as a hostage to save the lives of a group of children was today described by colleagues as a 'born leader'. Mitul Shah, 38, a sales executive from London attempted to strike a deal with the terrorists, replacing children with himself, a heroic act which gave several victims vital time to escape. The selfless father did not get through to the gunmen and was shot alongside a number of children in the Kenyan tragedy, leaving behind his wife and two-year-old daughter. Today his employers, the cooking oil company Bidco Oil, and his work colleagues...

I am posting a 1950 quote attributed to the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of America’s greatest teachers/preachers. Sheen was not a bigot. He was, rather, truly a saintly man of God who was also a scholar relating to Islam. He did however see that the depraved death cult in Islam enjoys support from another death cult – the deniers of the sanctity of human life at all stages – the “progressive.” “At the present time, the hatred of the Islamic countries toward the West has become hatred against Christianity itself. Statesmen are now taking it into account that...

He betrayed the U.S. by signing up with Al Qaeda, but this homegrown terror-abettor from Brooklyn is claiming that his country owes him an apology. Wesam El-Hanafi, 38, an Egyptian-American computer whiz and Baruch College alum, is due to be sentenced for providing support to Al Qaeda. But the Brooklyn-born basketball fan is simultaneously suing the U.S., arguing that mistreatment after his detention led to a deadly medical condition. El-Hanafi suffers from deep-vein thrombosis; he has blood clots in his right leg, the suit says. “He has trouble walking. He has constant pain,” said lawyer Jake Harper, who filed the...

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC's yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how...

How an average English girl became the ‘White Widow’ By Maureen Callahan When Samantha Laithwaite’s husband blew up a London subway, she played the grieving victim. Then she became a killer. She grew up middle-class in suburban Buckinghamshire, England, and was considered an average girl in every way. Her father, Allen, was a former British Army soldier-turned-lorry driver; her mother, Christine, a homemaker. She has one older brother, Allen, and friends recall that as early as junior high, Samantha Laithwaite was a pretty and popular girl. When her parents broke up in 1994, she took it hard but seemingly no...

The West thought it was winning the battle against jihadist terrorism. It should think again. A FEW months ago Barack Obama declared that al-Qaeda was “on the path to defeat”. Its surviving members, he said, were more concerned for their own safety than with plotting attacks on the West. Yet the inconvenient truth is that, in the past 18 months, despite the relentless pummelling it has received and the defeats it has suffered, al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies have staged an extraordinary comeback. The terrorist network now holds sway over more territory and is recruiting more fighters than at any...

A French mother who sent her three-year-old son to school in a T-shirt reading "I am a bomb" and "Jihad, born on September 11" was given a suspended prison term Friday for defending crime. Bouchra Bagour said she had simply wanted to mark the birthday of her son -- who is named Jihad and was born on September 11 -- and had not intended any connection with the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Her brother Zeyad, who gave his nephew the T-shirt, was fined 4,000 euros and given a two-month suspended prison sentence.

“We knew our Muslim neighbours all our lives,” Georgios says .... we thought they would never betray us. We ate with them. We are one people. Every time there is a conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, "moderate" Muslims always join the jihadis. We've seen this time and time again all over the world. This is never discussed in the media. Read this.  "Syria crisis: In sacred Maaloula, where they speak the language of Christ, war leads neighbours into betrayal"  The Independent, September 28, 2013 (thanks to Filip) Muslims and Christians had lived together in this town of churches and...

There have been questions about Mohamed Elibiary’s true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out. Among those who found this explanation...

“Have a nice day”—this is how Iranian President Hassan Rohani concluded his phone conversation with US President Barack Obama, the first direct contact between leaders of the two nations in over three decades. A message on Rohani’s Twitter page, which has since been deleted, stated that Obama answered in Farsi by saying “khodahafez” to indicate goodbye, whose literal meaning is “may God be with you.” The tweet was one of several Rohani posted after the historic phone conversation. He noted that Obama had phoned him and told him he was positive that relations between Iran and the US would have...

Senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials met with representatives of the Iranian government several times over the past two weeks in Beirut and in Tehran, to discuss developments in the region, Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported Monday. The parties conducted an assessment of recent events in the Middle East, including the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the Syrian crisis and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Officials reportedly also agreed to fortify what they called the “axis of resistance.” …

Beckel, the so-called "liberal" on Fox News, made this point on his show this week while discussing the horrific terror attack on the Kenyan shopping mall. Beckel opined that Muslims should not be allowed to build any more houses of worship in America, "until you stand up and denounce what's happened in the name of your prophet." Sorry Bob, you're dead wrong. If you would take a moment to read our amazing U.S. Constitution, you would perhaps understand the rights we are all guaranteed as Americans, such as freedom of religion. Let me address this to Beckel: I have never...

This past summer, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) changed its corporate name to Washington Trust Foundation, Inc. (WTF). Last week CAIR/WTFreleased, under the CAIR moniker, "Legislating Fear -- Islamophobia and its Impact in the Unites States." Originally scheduled for release on the day of the Navy Yard shooting massacre, CAIR presumably elected to delay release of the report until they were reasonably certain Jihad played no role in this latest example of workplace violence at an American military facility. Does CAIR seek to suppress the free speech of any group with which it disagrees? Why does CAIR label speech...

The woman in a full-length burka walked calmly into the drab government office. She moved close to the desk behind which an administrator was shuffling his papers. Others queued around her. Suddenly, without warning, she detonated the suicide vest she was wearing. The explosion flashed a brilliant white on the grainy CCTV before the cameras cut out, obliterating everything – and everyone – in the room.

President Barack Obama spoke by telephone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the first direct conversation between leaders of the United States and Iran since 1979. Obama believes a comprehensive agreement is possible regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions, telling reporters at the White House that "the test will be meaningful, transparent and verifiable action" and if proven would ease international sanctions in place against Iran. The news of the historic telephone conversation between the two presidents also played out on Twitter in Rouhani's posts. It was unclear whether Rouhani was retweeting direct messages between the two or curating his conversation on Twitter.

It was at 11.44am that time stood still at All Saints' Church. The clock on the wall is frozen at the very minute seven-year-old Shyam Emmanuel lost his parents. In that same moment, seven children were sent to their deaths along with 78 adults who had congregated outside the gleaming white walls of Peshawar's main Christian place of worship.

What fun I had last night watching Question Time on the BBC. Author Will Self - in the video that you can see by clicking on the link just below this post title - (his name is oddly suited to him, but then everything about the man is weird) is always very entertaining. This time he surpassed himself, by denying that terrorism is a problem - especially, God (or rather Allah) forbid, Islamic terrorism. This pearl of wisdom came in answer to a question from the audience about the risk of a terror attack in Britain after what happened in...

Soldiers told of the horrific torture meted out by terrorists in the Nairobi mall massacre yesterday with claims hostages were dismembered, had their eyes gouged out and were left hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Men were said to have been castrated and had fingers removed with pliers before being blinded and hanged. Children were found dead in the food court fridges with knives still embedded in their bodies, it was claimed.

That’s an interesting question considering that the government has broken down, the country is on the verge of civil war and Al Qaeda terrorists are openly operating training camps there. “In Libya, when the Security Council provided a mandate to protect civilians,” Obama said at the UN “America joined a coalition that took action. Because of what we did there, countless lives were saved, and a tyrant could not kill his way back to power.” Obama went far beyond the UN mandate by bombing his way to regime change. His actions resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Africans in Libya,...

The State Department has done almost nothing to enhance security at dangerous diplomatic outposts since last year’s deadly Benghazi attack, the department’s chief watchdog reported. In an audit released Wednesday, the State Department’s inspector general blasted the department for failing to formulate a strategy to protect high-risk installations abroad, even after Libyan ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered during a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2012. “The Department of State has neither a conceptual framework nor a process for risk management,” the report reads. “There is no one person or office specifically tasked to oversee the assessment...

Tunisian authorities say a suspected religious extremist blew himself up while making a bomb in a home he was renting near the capital. … Separately, the interior ministry says an “extremist” was arrested on Friday after he blew off his hand while handling explosives in Menzel Bourguiba, 43 miles from Tunis. …

At least 68 people were killed when Islamic militants from Somalia’s al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab group stormed into the Westgate Shopping Center in Nairobi, Kenya on Saturday and opened fire. The stand off between the terrorists and the police and army has entered a third day. it is unclear how many gunmen and hostages are still inside the shopping center. Update: We’ve added 10 photos of the rescue operation.

Then Nahash the Ammonite came up, and encamped against Jabeshgilead: and all the men of Jabesh said unto Nahash, Make a covenant with us, and we will serve thee. And Nahash the Ammonite answered them, On this condition will I make a covenant with you, that I may thrust out all your right eyes, and lay it for a reproach upon all Israel. And the elders of Jabesh said unto him, Give us seven days’ respite, that we may send messengers unto all the coasts of Israel: and then, if there be no man to save us, we will come...