Free Republic

Iran is a threat that can't be overlooked George Jonas , Canwest News Service June 9, 2008 For the benefit of those who missed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2005 threat to wipe out Israel, he repeated it last week. Israel, he said, "will soon disappear off the geographical scene." The occasion was the 19th anniversary of the death of theocratic Iran's founder, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Whatever one thinks of the sentiment, the sentence is bizarre. Threatening to wipe a country off the map is like threatening to slay all men and women and let dogs lick their blood. It's...

The messianic Obama mag cover is becoming funny. How many more can you all add?

There's an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen - and it's accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly ("Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?") concludes that "In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights." The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy. I disagree with that conclusion. Today's Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than...

Recently I spent several days in Ubud, Bali, attending a conference on the theme of "Islam in Multicultural Asia" organized by the New York-based Asia Society. Bali is a lush tropical island of immense beauty at the centre of the Indonesian archipelago, and its people are mostly Hindu in a country with the world's largest Muslim population. The setting for a conference on Islam in Indonesia was a bold idea. Islam in Asia...is distinctly different... to the Middle Eastern version of Islam with which the West is mostly acquainted and predominantly concerned since 9/11. Americans supporting Democrats who have persuaded...

Barack Obama's first vocational choice was to help people in a poor African-American community. Later, he joined a church founded on black liberation theology. This combination could result in an Obama presidency that embodies something new in American history -- a Neoliberal Theocracy. When we in the West hear the word theocracy, we think of mullahs, fatwas, and human pronouncements issued with the presumptuous authority of divine edicts. But not all theocracies are so dictatorially dogmatic. They range from the theocratic-lite nature of the United Kingdom's monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, to the industrial-strength theocracy of...

People mocked Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney for their religious backgrounds often during the presidential campaigns, but at least they never claimed to be on a mission to save the souls of Americans through government action. Oh, people accused them of wanting to do so -- to impose Southern Baptist or Mormon theology on an America that wants relentless secularism, but in point of fact both men gave stirring speeches on how their faith informs them personally but not their governance. One campaign really has explicitly claimed to be on such a mission, however. Michelle Obama gave a speech at...

ROMA, February 6, 2008 – In the two days before this Ash Wednesday, the first meetings were held in Rome in preparation for the scheduled visit to the Vatican of a representative group of the 138 Muslim scholars who in October of 2007 addressed to the pope and to the heads of the other Christian confessions a letter with an offer of dialogue entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You." The meetings will be held at the pontifical council for interreligious dialogue, and will be presided over by cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran. The schedule arranges for the Muslim representatives...

BAGHDAD January 22, 2008 at 9:33 AM EST Associated Press — Iraq's parliament has passed a law to change the country's Saddam Hussein-era flag. The decision meets the demands of Iraq's Kurdish minority, who suffered greatly under Saddam and threatened not to fly the banner during a pan-Arab meeting in the Kurdish-run north next month. The measure, which expires in a year, was approved by show of hands, with 110 of 165 legislators present voting in favour. Among other things, it will remove the flag's three stars, said to be representative of Saddam's Baath party. The words “Allahu Akbar,” or...

Demonstrating the extent to which he sees himself as "defender of faith", the Prince of Wales wrote to Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, saying that he was "determined to continue the battle to spread the message that proper fundamentalism is in the best interest of the future of our world." Charles told Mahathir, who later claimed that Jews "rule the world by proxy", he understood the "frustrations" Muslims experience "as a result of apparent Western misunderstanding and misrepresentation. I have, for a long time, despaired of the ignorant and thoroughly evil 'role' of the tabloid media in...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for “purposes of interrogation,” the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman reached by telephone, said the blogger, Fouah al-Farhan, was “being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws.” Mr. Farhan’s blog, which discusses social issues, had become one of the most widely read in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Farhan, 32, of Jidda, was arrested Dec. 10 at his office, local news sources reported. Two weeks before his arrest, he wrote a letter to friends warning them that it was imminent. “I was told that...

Last week, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote a column titled "Secular Europe's Merits," in which he explained why he prefers the secularism of Europe to the religiosity of America. To his credit (other New York Times columnists do not generally agree to debate anything they write -- Paul Krugman, for example, has refused to discuss his new book on liberalism with me), Cohen agreed to come on my show, and proved to be a charming guest. A distinguished foreign correspondent for Reuters and the International Herald Tribune, Cohen nevertheless betrayed what I believe is endemic to those who...

NOT ALL OF Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's encounters in New York during his recent trip were testy. The Shiite theocrat had what the New York Times called a "warm, even friendly exchange" with 150 church officials at the United Methodist Women's Church Center for the United Nations. One sponsor, the Mennonite Central Committee, called the gathering a "time of dialogue and prayerful reflection among the children of Abraham." A Mennonite official further explained that "mutual respect and graciousness in this conversation blunts the demonization which is part of the current rhetoric of both governments." The meeting is the third between...

Cairo, Egypt (AHN) - An Egyptian court has sentenced a woman to three years in prison because her father converted to Islam briefly 45 years ago. Under Egyptian law, religion is passed to children from the father. Shadia Nagui Ibrahim, 47, a Christian, was charged with fraud for putting Christianity as her religion on her marriage certificate, even though she was unaware that her father's conversion in 1962 had made her officially Muslim. According to reports, Ibrahim's father left home in 1962 when the woman was only two years-old and converted to Islam. However, only a few years later he...

The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam   By Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chesler FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, October 05, 2007 The booklet that you are about to read details some of the principal ways in which women suffer in the Islamic world – often with religious and cultural sanction. Many of these crimes against women, such as wife-beating, are ordained by the Qur’an itself; others, such as female genital mutilation and honor killing, are praised by Islamic clerics and hallowed by Islamic culture. That feminists in the West remain silent about this deeply ingrained and institutionalized mistreatment of women,...

Religious conservatives are at odds over which of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination should get their backing. Many of the top leaders on the religious right privately say it's impossible to name a top-tier, declared Republican hopeful who can pass the "straight face" test as someone social conservatives can honestly say they would trust if elected. Catholics and Protestant evangelicals on the right account for about a third of the Republican Party's electoral coalition, and it's difficult for a Republican to win without them. "The problem is that there isn't someone seen as a titular head of the...

We are engaged in a war that is not only defining our times, it is determining our destiny. I'm not talking about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even the broader war on terror – those are offshoots of the real war. I'm talking about the culture war. The culture war is a struggle between secular socialism and free market traditionalism, and the outcome of this struggle will ultimately determine whether or not the jihadists will pick up the pieces to convert America and Canada into a North American caliphate.

For several weeks CNN has been hyping their miniseries God’s Warriors as an “unprecedented six-hour television event.” The series dedicates two hours each to “God’s Jewish Warriors,” “God’s Muslim Warriors,” and “God’s Christian Warriors.” Prior to the first airing, CNN invited several bloggers to preview a few clips from the series and to submit a question for Christiane Amanpour to be answered during a special webcast. The three clips provided by CNN each highlighted one of the “fundamentalist” branches of the three Abrahamic faiths: the segment on Jews focused on theocratic Israeli settlers, including the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin;...

the toll from the blast was 115 dead — nearly three-quarters of them women, children and elderly.

Iran is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown that both Iranians and U.S. analysts compare to a cultural revolution in its attempt to steer the oil-rich theocracy back to the rigid strictures of the 1979 revolution.

N.C. judge OKs witness oaths using Quran By STEVE HARTSOE, Associated Press Writer 35 minutes ago Witnesses and jurors being sworn in at state courthouses can take their oath using any religious text, not just the Bible, a judge ruled Thursday. Judge Paul Ridgeway said both common law and state Supreme Court precedent allow witnesses and jurors to use the text "most sacred and obligatory upon their conscience." The ruling came after the American Civil Liberties Union argued that limiting that text to the Bible alone was unconstitutional because it favored Christianity over other religions. The issue surfaced when Muslims...