Free Republic

Ladies and gentleman, Kanye West is in the building. Or in this case, outside of it. The outspoken rapper paid a visit to the Occupy Wall Street protests Monday afternoon, led by rap mogul Russell Simmons. Simmons was there to appear on Reverend Al Sharpton’s radio show, which the MSNBC primetime host was broadcasting live from the park. The media spotlight on the movement has not faded and celebrity interest hasn't abated. Organization, however, is still lacking and political goals still need unpacking. As the protests enter their fourth week, and copycat demonstrations proliferate as far as Fort Myers, Fla....

CAIRO (AP) -- A U.S. drone strike killed a son of Egyptian-born Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in Afghanistan, a radical Islamist group said. Egypt's Gamaa Islamiya, or Islamic Group, had posted on its website on Saturday a notice mourning the death of Ahmed Abdel Rahman, the son of the "Blind Sheik" now serving a life sentence in the U.S. for his involvement in a plot to blow up New York city landmarks. Abdel Rahman was the spiritual leader of the Gamaa, as well as of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

An Islamic cultural centre close to the site where New York's World Trade Center once stood has opened quietly in spite of scenes last year of vehement protests from those who said the area should not house a mosque. The opening ceremony for the Park51 centre on Wednesday featured a photo exhibit called "NYChildren", displaying over 160 portraits of immigrant children living in New York. Sharif El-Gamal, the center's developer, said the biggest error on the project was not involving the families of 9/11 victims from the start. "We made incredible mistakes," El-Gamal told The Associated Press in an earlier...

The backers of the controversial "Ground Zero Mosque" have won a court fight clearing the way for them to build the mosque and community center complex two blocks from the site of the 9/11 terror attack. In a decision on Friday that was made public today, New York State Supreme Justice Paul Feinman dismissed a lawsuit by former firefighter Timothy Brown who argued that New York City was wrong to allow the destruction of a 150-year-old building to make way for the Islamic center.

There has been a shakeup at the Cordoba Initiative/Park 51, the group behind the projected Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero. The deceitful pro-Sharia Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan are out, and an imam from Washington, D.C., Abdullah Adhami, is in. What does this mean? First, it means that we won. We are declaring victory. It seems clear that Rauf had to go because he had become a liability to the taqiyya project of the Ground Zero mosque. And that is because of the light we shed on his true beliefs and allegiances. Rauf snagged more...

After watching as much as I could take, this debate came down to between Jonah Goldberg a Fox News Contributor presenting in-depth points in this debate moderated by Megyn Kelly, and I do give her credit for keeping things in line, while syndicated radio talk show host Nancy Skinner looked very, very disorganized over the course of the debate as Mr. Goldberg stayed on track. The highlight was when Mr. Goldberg called liberals “ideological ambulance chasers” those who would exploit this very tragic and senseless act in AZ. Spot on Mr. Goldberg.

Suhail Khan, a major Republican sup porter of the Ground Zero mosque, has been lobbying GOP leaders on the Hill to back off their opposition. He's got their ear, mainly because he portrays himself as a moderate, patriotic Muslim. Yet newly surfaced videos contradict that. Khan, a Bush administration vet who sits on the board of the American Conservative Union, assures skeptics that "Park 51 community center" imam Feisal Rauf is a "moderate." Fears over the mosque are overblown, he insists, fomented by "anti-Muslim bigotry." In a recent letter to fellow Republicans, he warned the party was "alienating millions of...

Most of the the nation was shocked during the 2008 presidential campaign when videos came out of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After all, this was candidate Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor and mentor.  The initial reaction was typical of our divided nation.  Conservatives pushed the Wright videos and the Left tried to silence their importance.  After a while people just got sick of talking about it. When the dust settled the accepted ‘reality’ was that Jeremiah Wright was nuts but Obama barely knew the guy and never heard any of Wright’s more extreme teaching.  Today if you bring up Jeremiah Wright, eyes...

Today I was at a dinner party and I noticed that the Law and Order SVU was on television. I wasn't really paying attention to what was on TV at the time, but I noticed that they had a tea party scene included in the episode. In this scene, there were protesters outside the construction site of the future Ground Zero mosque, protesting the building of the mosque. The man and woman portraying the special units (I don't watch this show so I don't know their names) commenced to counteract the protest by saying this was only going to be...

Imam of Ground Zero mosque to launch tour to pressure Americans to accept mosque. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has plans to embark on a months-long speaking tour designed to pressure Americans into accepting his Cordoba House mosque project. The tour will kick off next month in January 2011 and hit 12 media markets throughout the remainder of the year. News of this only broke on Wednesday, as most Americans were preparing to celebrate Christmas, when Rauf gave an interview to the New York Times. News of his plans were further confirmed by his spokesperson only yesterday, again, when most Americans...

The Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) at the University of California, Los Angeles and the UCLA School of Law's Journal for Islamic and Near Eastern Law co-sponsored a lecture (podcast available here) last month by Khaled Abou El Fadl, chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program, with the vague title "Shari'ah Watch: A View from the Inside." The flyer for the lecture promised "an informed discussion about Shariah and its role and impact in the West," yet Abou El Fadl delivered neither. Instead, his audience of 35 -- comprising mostly seniors and left-wing students -- witnessed a meandering, repetitive...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office worked behind the scenes to help the organizers of a mosque and community center near ground zero, intervening with city administrators to get a temporary prayer service permit and having an official ghostwrite a letter to community leaders.

Dozens of emails between Mayor Bloomberg’s aides and developers of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero show the mayor’s office has gone out of its way to support the controversial plan – with one of his commissioners going so far as to ghost write a letter to a community board leader on the mosque’s behalf.

Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from Ground Zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11th, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. The audacious move stands to reignite the embers of a divisive debate that dominated headlines surrounding the ninth anniversary of the attacks this fall, say people vested in the issue. The application was submitted under a “community and cultural enhancement” grant program administered by the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment...

Specifically on the White House scandal again – I was told a report was coming soon. Something from a mainstream media outlet. Have you heard something similar? Where did you hear that? Your newspaper days coming back to you now? Just something I heard – reliably. Have you heard anything similar? (pause) Yes. Many people have. This thing is percolating just under the surface right now. Sooner – not later, the pot is gonna start boiling. Yeah, someone is about to test the waters with this thing. I’ve heard that. Then again, I’ve heard that for a while now, so...

So what exactly is their, um, "Game"? Mayor Bloomberg and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the hugely controversial Ground Zero mosque, were all smiles last night as they posed with lefty blogger Arianna Huffington, who anointed them both "Game Changers." They were among the guests Huffington hosted at the Skylight Studio in SoHo at her party honoring "100 innovators, visionaries and leaders." If one picture is worth a thousand words, this one -- the first of the three of them together -- raises at least as many questions. Reporters were kept far away from the guests, so no one...

In the ever changing world of popular news stories everyone appears to have forgotten about the Ground Zero Mosque. The story captured America’s attention for about two months, and then the public suddenly and simultaneously forgot about it. The anger subsided even though Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf still plans on building the Park 51/Cordoba House Mosque near the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. The final chapter of coverage appeared to be that the Right is just going to have to hate it while Muslims and the Left love the Mosque location– and have won the battle. But...

Yesterday on FoxNews I heard Geraldine Ferraro say that whoever coined the term ObamaCare was brilliant. She said it took all the negatives of the plan and tied it around Obama's neck. So I know my fellow Freepers will have the answer to the question "Who first coined the word "ObamaCare". Also, since the people clearly regard ObamaCare as negative, how are conservatives going to get us back to FreeMarket Health Care?

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division Tuesday came out in support of the construction and expansion of an Islamic mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn., that local landowners and others have bitterly opposed. A "friend of the court" brief was filed in a pending lawsuit in state court against Rutherford County, Tenn. The county had granted permission for the construction of the $5 million mosque on a 15-acre site. The move comes in the wake of a bitter national debate in New York City over a planned mosque and Islamic community center to be built just two blocks from the Sept. 11...

“Very few people were true Nazis, so, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come." The fanatics rule Islam. It is the fanatics who march, who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide, who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or execute honor killings, who take over mosque after mosque, It is the fanatics who zealously spread...