Free Republic

August 13, 2013 Rand Paul: Hillary Clinton 'Needs to Be Deposed Again' to Explain Benghazi Susan Jones (CNSNews.com) - Sen. Rand Paul, who famously tangled with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a January Senate hearing on the terror attack in Benghazi, says it's time to bring her back before Congress to answer more questions about the terror attack. "See, the thing is, I think she needs to be deposed again," Paul told Fox News on Tuesday. His comments came one day after former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova told a Washington radio station that the real scandal in Benghazi is...

Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli adjunct religion professor and filmmaker known for his biblical archaeology History Channel series “The Naked Archaeologist.” In an op-ed in the Times of Israel, Jacobovici takes Reza Aslan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” to task for referring to the land of Jesus as “Palestine,” when a review of historical sources shows the place was known as “Judea,” a word that in Hebrew is synonymous with the word “Jew.” Jacobovici writes (emphasis added throughout), “in all his interviews, Aslan goes out of his way to refer to Jesus’ Judea i.e.,...

John Kerry warned that if his latest peace mission is unsuccessful, Israel will be isolated, according to columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently warned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that if his latest peace mission is unsuccessful, Israel will be isolated. According to Bloomberg View columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, Kerry capitalized on Israel’s anxiety over the European Union’s new guidelines which boycott Israeli entities that operate from beyond the 1949 Armistice Line. Kerry, according to Goldberg's latest column, has warned Netanyahu in recent weeks that if the current peace talks bear no fruit, Israel may soon be facing...

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Israeli military shot down a rocket launched toward a Red Sea resort town near the border with Egypt on Tuesday, the army said. It was the first time Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system successfully intercepted a rocket attack on the resort of Eilat, the military said. The incident came after days of heightened tension along the Egypt-Israel border. The army said the rocket was intercepted early Tuesday and that there were no injuries. It didn't provide more details and declined to comment on the origins of the projectile. An al-Qaida-inspired militant group based in Egypt's...

U.S. officials and experts do acknowledge [1] an Egyptian connection to the Benghazi attacks. They’ll point to what they call a ragtag group of jihadists, led by Muhammad Jamal Abdo Al-Kashif (aka Abu Ahmad), known as the “Jamal network.” However, the U.S. administration downplays this Egyptian connection, whereas several Arabic-language sources reveal a much larger connection. It is significant to point out that the first attack against the U.S. embassies on September 11, 2012, happened in Cairo. Egypt was the spark and Egyptians were the agents of both attacks. Al-Kashif had been locked up in one of Egypt’s most secure...

Ahmed Moussa, a prominent Egyptian television personality on the Tahrir TV channel as well as a former officer in Egyptian State Security Intelligence (SSI), went public on July 30 with a remarkable piece of information. Moussa said, addressing U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson (in absentia) on his show: Ambassador Stevens was killed in Benghazi, and you know who killed him, the U.S. administration knows who killed him, and you know how he was killed and it was a major strike against the U.S. administration, and all of you. The assassin is now present at Rabia Al-Adawiya [mosque protest] His name is,...

The ‘Syria problem' is playing out in other post-Arab Spring countries, from Libya to Tunisia and Egypt, where the space vacated by despotic regimes has been taken over by Islamic militants. Terror organisations have a ready platform In May, US President Barack Obama said that he was hoping to “refine and repeal” the mandate that he got from the Congress to fight the war on terror against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, as the core group was on the “path to defeat” and “this war, like all wars, must end”. Less than three months later, he has evacuated the US...

Via Breitbart and the Daily Mail, seven minutes from Joe DiGenova’s chat with WMAL yesterday. The key bit comes at 3:25, after he points out that Obama’s arguably guilty of contempt of court for publicly acknowledging a sealed indictment against the Benghazi attackers at his presser on Friday. This isn’t the first time that someone with inside info has floated the theory that SAMs were key to what the CIA was doing in Benghazi. CNN mentioned that too in its big scoop about agents allegedly being intimidated into silence, although the SAM connection was mentioned as speculation going around on...

Hamas has finally admitted that it is the Egyptians, and not Israel, who have turned the Gaza Strip into a “big prison.” … Why haven’t the “pro-Palestine” activists been sent to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to voice solidarity with the residents of the “big prison”? The answer is obvious: First, the activists’ main goal is to condemn Israel and hold it solely responsible for the miseries of Palestinians. The activists do not care about the Palestinians’ suffering as much as they are interested in advancing their anti-Israel agenda. They devote most of their energies and efforts...

France’s campaign in Mali exposes Europe’s unpreparedness for 21st-century war. WITH WELL-ARMED radical Islamist insurgents closing in last winter on Mali’s capital, Bamako, French President François Hollande suddenly decided to defend Western civilization. Plunging in the polls as the most unpopular French president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, he just might have had ulterior motives; diverting hostile public opinion at home with a military escapade abroad is a tried and true tactic for floundering chiefs of state. Be that as it may, French troops, mainly Foreign Legion, began deploying to Mali in Operation Serval on January 11....

(excerpt) ... our failure to appreciate that while al Qaeda central has been badly weakened by U.S. counterterrorism efforts, the group was never close to being extinguished. It adapted. It gave greater power to semi-independent affiliates, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and to more loosely connected groups, like Boko Haram in Nigeria. The West made the mistake of failing to effectively tackle these affiliates and their propaganda, dismissing them as local problems irrelevant to the war against al Qaeda. While groups like AQAP and Boko Haram initially did focus their violence locally, terrorists who endorse...

A U.S. citizen and a foreign national were charged in federal court in Miami on Tuesday with providing financing and recruits to al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist organizations fighting in Syria and other places. Gufran Ahmed Kauser Mohammed, a 30-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in India, and Mohamed Hussein Said, a 25-year-old Kenyan, were arraigned on a 15-count indictment charging them with links to three U.S.-designated terrorist organizations that have operated in Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Both men, who were arrested in Saudi Arabia and turned over to U.S. custody last week, pleaded not guilty and were ordered held...

Egyptian police are expected to start taking action early on Monday against supporters of ousted President Mohamed Mursi who are gathered in crowded protest camps in Cairo, security and government sources said, a move which could trigger more bloodshed. The sites are the main flashpoints in the confrontation between the army, which toppled Mursi last month, and supporters who demand his reinstatement. Western and Arab mediators and some senior Egyptian government officials have been trying to persuade the army to avoid using force against the protesters, who at times can number as much as tens of thousands. "State security troops...

A wave of bomb attacks hit Iraq over the weekend, as people celebrated the Eid al-Fitr festival marking the end of Ramadan, with more than 60 reported dead. The BBC reported that 11 bombs targeted both Shiite and Sunni areas of the capital, Baghdad, hitting cafes, markets and restaurants in at least nine different districts. A bomb also killed at least 10 people in Tuz Khurmato, north of the capital. This Ramadan in Iraq is thought to have been one of the deadliest in years, with more than 670 people killed. Most of the violence in the past six months...

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3942.htm

Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

Environmental Protection Minister Amir Peretz (Hatnua) accused the Bayit Yehudi party Sunday of recklessly endangering the “peace process” with the initiative to approve 1,200 housing tenders in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. The decision was announced by Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel. "While [Hatnua leader] Minister Tzipi Livni is making extensive efforts to convince the leaders of Europe that we desire peace, and that the matter of borders will only be determined in negotiations between us and the Palestinians, Minister Ariel is busy with an unnecessary provocation and with messages that run counter to the prime minister's decision to renew...

Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi) has become a target for left-wing anger. Ariel’s encouragement of housing projects built for Jews in Jerusalem has led various groups to accuse him of trying to “mess up the peace talks.” The latest such project is an initiative to build 63 housing units between the majority-Jewish neighborhood of Armon Hanetziv and the majority-Arab Jabal Mukaber neighborhood. The new homes will be marketed to Israelis. Ariel will be at the site on Sunday for the inauguration of the new project, as will Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. Leftist activists published statements expressing their frustration with...

In what is being described as yet another example of Palestinian Authority (PA) denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the very legitimacy of the State of Israel, the Presidential Guard of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has claimed the Western Wall as an Arab and Islamic site. Last week, a picture of the Western Wall was posted onto the PA Presidential Guard's official Facebook page with a PA flag superimposed on it, along with the words "The Al Buraq Wall - Public Relations and Information - The Presidential Guard - Palestinian youth know their rights." The Western Wall...

Middle East peace talks could "collapse" due to continuing Israeli settlement expansion, a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official warned Tuesday, on the eve of the scheduled resumption of the fragile process. "Settlement expansion goes against the U.S. administration's pledges and threatens to cause the negotiations' collapse," Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP. The comments came after Israeli authorities approved the construction of a total of more than 2,000 homes in Jerusalem and the Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, in the days leading up to Wednesday's scheduled new round of direct talks between the Israel and the PA. .......

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally let the "cat out of the bag" when he said two months ago that, “The crumbling of the UN force on the Golan Heights underscores the fact that Israel cannot depend on international forces for its security. They can be part of the arrangements. They cannot be the basic foundation of Israel’s security.” Netanyahu's lawyer-like parsing of the words "cannot depend," "basic foundation," and "can be part of" cannot hide the fact that the words "can be part of" really only mean US troops will almost certainly "be part of" any "peace" deal in Judea...

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Israeli military on Tuesday shot down a rocket launched from neighboring Egypt toward a popular Red Sea resort, and an al-Qaida-linked militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, fueling concerns that jihadist groups are trying to disrupt the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. It was the first time that Israel has deployed its "Iron Dome" rocket defense system in Eilat, a normally placid resort near Egypt's Sinai peninsula that is popular with Israeli and European tourists. The incident came after days of heightened tension along the Egypt-Israel border fueled by an Egyptian crackdown on militant groups. The area...

(CNSNews.com) – The leader of the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram – which the State Department so far has refused to designate as a foreign terrorist organization – boasted Monday that it was now strong enough to “comfortably confront” the United States. Boko Haram is not only fighting the cause of Islam in Nigeria, Abubakar Shekau said in a video message, but also against the leaders of the U.S., France and all other countries that do not rule according to the teachings of the Qur’an, the Lagos Guardian daily reported

Washington (CNN) -- The State Department has evacuated most of its diplomats from Lahore, Pakistan in response to a terrorist threat against the U.S. consulate, senior State Department and other senior U.S. officials told CNN. "We have picked up what we regard as a threat worthy of taking this action," one senior U.S. official told CNN. The State Department issued an "orderged departure" for all of its diplomats in Lahore Thursday, except for a handful of emergency personnel. The diplomats were moved to Islamabad, the nation's capital, officials said. A travel warning issued by the State Department said the department...

FORT HOOD — The past few days have featured harrowing testimony from witnesses and victims who described the gruesome, blood-soaked scene inside the medical processing center where Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13. Yesterday columnist Ken Herman sat in the courtroom and described the scene in today’s Statesman: In a day of often harrowing testimony — “It was squirting across the room,” victim Mick Engnehl testified when asked how he knew he was bleeding — I found the most disturbing moments to be the silent ones, when prosecutors, in advance of offering them as evidence, handed Hasan small containers holding bullets...

The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic. Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.

Hamas plans to publicly execute two prisoners in Gaza this week as a "lesson" to others, according to Amnesty International. The organization has described the move as "deeply disturbing," reported the British Guardian. The human rights organization said a 23-year-old man had been sentenced to death for "collaboration with an enemy entity," He told his lawyer he had been beaten during interrogation, Amnesty said. An appeal at a military court is scheduled for Wednesday but he will be at risk of imminent execution if it is unsuccessful, reported the Guardian. The second man, 27, confessed to the rape and murder...

J Street attempted to cover up evidence of a failed Boston event on Friday, within minutes of a Washington Free Beacon reporter mocking the group’s inability to draw a crowd on Twitter. J Street was forced to cancel an event originally scheduled for June 20 in Boston due to a “lack of attendance,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. After a reporter for the website noted on Twitter that J Street, which bills itself as a top “pro-Israel” group, failed to attract a crowd, evidence of the failed event’s existence was removed from Facebook. The event had been named, “Drinks...

Ted Koppel Writes the Dumbest Op-Ed About Terrorism You Can Imagine August 10, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield When you saw the name “Ted Koppel�, your first reaction was probably to wonder if he was still alive. The answer is, yes. He is.Your second reaction was probably to wonder if he was still the same smug boring media personality reciting liberal truisms at the speed of a snail.The answer also yes.And for some reason the Wall Street Journal gave Ted Koppel editorial space to write one of those “The only real danger from terrorism is if we hit terrorists too hard�...

<p>This year's Ramadan was the most violence since 2007, with 671 people killed. Police said the deadliest of today's attacks took place when a suicide bomber drove his explosive-laden car into a residential area in the town of Tuz Khormato, 130 miles north of Baghdad, killing eight people and wounding dozens. "My shop's windows were smashed and smoke filled the whole area," says a shoe shop owner, who survived an attack near his store in New Baghdad. "I went outside of the shop and I could hardly see because of the smoke. ... At the end, we had a terrible day that was supposed to be nice because of Eid."</p>

A previously undisclosed site advertised by Iran as a launching pad for its space program could be used for testing ballistic missiles, according to a London-based weapons research publication. The publication IHS Jane’s analyzed satellite imagery and concluded that the site, located 220 miles east of Tehran near the Caspian Sea, was developed in the last three years to be one of three launching sites for Iran’s space program, the New York Times reports: The Jane’s report was likely to be viewed with concern by Western officials and Israel. They have expressed suspicions that Iran’s ballistic missile development is part...

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of country. Thus continues the administration’s penchant for wordplay, the bending of language to fit a political need. Obama doesn’t like this terror war. He particularly dislikes its unfortunate religious coloration, which is why “Islamist” is banished from his lexicon. But soothing words, soothing...

(Reuters) - Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.The extent of the contacts between the militants is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates...

(Reuters) - Local officials and residents in Yemen's southern Lahj Province said a drone destroyed a vehicle travelling on a mountain road late on Saturday evening killing its two occupants and bringing to 15 the death toll from four strikes in three days.

Having declared an end to the War on Terror, the US president no longer has any clear idea of his country's global role The West can no longer rely on American leadership in the world. For the remaining duration of the Obama administration, Washington’s judgment and effectiveness in foreign policy cannot be trusted. It is quite an achievement for the one remaining superpower to appear as ineffectual and wrong-footed as the United States has managed to do in the past week. But there it is. The president’s global strategy in his second term was based on two resounding premises. First,...

The way D.C. political operatives are reacting to the news that Liz Cheney is challenging Sen. Mike Enzi in the Wyoming GOP primary, you’d think the Republican Party had another Sharron Angle on their hands — someone so much more conservative and rhetorically unrestrained than the incumbent or establishment candidate that she wins the primary only to lose a winnable general election race by a wide margin.Well, Cheney is famously unrestrained. But that’s about where the similarities end. Wyoming is so deep red that the winner of the GOP primary will sail through the general, no matter who it is....

Dr. Kamil Sedik, secretary of the Congregational Council in Alexandria, has condemned repeated attacks by Islamist groups against Coptic Christians in Egypt, saying that authorities are permitting the violence by not providing adequate security for vulnerable Copts."Copts are subjected to violence by criminals, who were released from prison by deposed President Morsi, because of their [Copts] ideological affiliation," Sedik told Mideast Christian News. Moreover, Sedik accused government officials of failing to cope with criminal attacks against Copts. "The government does not provide security for Copts, but it tolerates prisoners who are under investigation," he said in reference to the meeting...

Events in one Syrian town cast light on the nation’s strifeIlyas was, he told me, the very last Christian to flee Qusayr. He had been one of just a handful in the town to join the revolution — an odd thing for a Christian to do because the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were and are mostly Sunnis, and the Christians mostly sided with Assad. Still, it didn’t save him. One day he heard banging on the door and saw men with Kalashnikovs standing there. There were familiar faces, some he had known for years. He said: ‘They told me: “You’re...

Violence has been on the rise across Iraq since a deadly crackdown by government forces on a Sunni protest camp in April, and attacks against civilians and security forces notably spiked during Ramadan. The surge of attacks has sparked fears that the country could spiral into a new round of widespread sectarian bloodshed similar to that which brought the country to the edge of civil war in 2006 and 2007. In the holy Shiite city of Karbala, police said four people were killed in a car bomb attack near a cafe at night. Karbala is 80 kilometres (50 miles) south...

In the wake of the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat’s angry letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry about Israel’s new settlement building amid the resumption of peace talks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent his own letter to Kerry over the weekend, lambasting the Palestinians for failing to curb incitement against Israel. Netanyahu wrote to Kerry that leading Palestinian Authority officials were calling for Israel’s destruction even after peace talks resumed on July 31 in Washington — the first major effort since negotiations broke down in 2008. Incitement and peace don’t go together,” Netanyahu wrote, explaining that new generations...

In response to the European Union’s guidelines which forbid any contact with Israeli companies operating beyond the 1949 Armistice Line, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has clarified that Israel will not sign any contracts with Europe so long as the boycott of these regions continues. Netanyahu met on Thursday to discuss the issue with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, Finance Minister Yair Lapid, Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir and Science and Technology Minister Yaakov Perry. Following the meeting, Netanyahu said, “Israel will not sign agreements with the EU, so long as the directive on the [pre-]1967 borders remains in...

The intensity of the Obama administration's participation in this cover-up became clear in May 2012. At that time, Congress had placed a clause inside the Defense Appropriations Act requiring the Pentagon to award Purple Hearts to Ft. Hood's victims. Rather than accept this eminently reasonable demand, which simply required the administration to acknowledge reality, Obama's emissaries announced he would veto the appropriations bill and so leave the Pentagon without a budget unless the clause was removed. SNIP THE SAME is the case with regards to the September 11, 2012, attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Already on the day...

August 8, 2013 Column One: When failure carries no cost By CAROLINE B. GLICK This week, after a three-and-a-half-year delay, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was finally placed on trial for massacring 13 and wounding 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. Hasan was a self-identified jihadist. His paper and electronic trail provided mountains of evidence that he committed the massacre to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. Islamic supremacists like Hasan, and his early mentor al-Qaida operations chief Anwar al-Awlaki, view as enemies all people who oppose totalitarian Islam’s quest for global domination. Before, during and...

Several Egyptian terrorists were killed in an air strike in Sinai on Friday, which some claimed Israel had carried out. Security sources and witnesses said the terrorists were struck as they prepared to launch a rocket into Israel, reported AFP. The source of the strike was not immediately clear. Some sources spoke of an Israeli air strike conducted from Israeli air space and others credited the Egyptian military. Witnesses said at least five members of a cell led by local Islamist militants were killed in the raid. Egypt's army said two explosions were heard at around 4:15 p.m. local time...

JERUSALEM – An Israeli drone strike in the Sinai Peninsula -- carried out in coordination with Egypt’s military -- killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed their rocket launcher, Egyptian security officials told Palestinian media Friday. Israeli officials declined to comment on the report. Egypt's military said it was investigating the incident after residents near the Egypt-Israel border reported hearing a large explosion Friday, according to Ahram Online, an Egyptian news site. Two unidentified Egyptian security officials told the Associated Press that Israeli drones were behind the strike. The attack comes as Egypt’s military is launching another major crackdown in...

Excerpt (source - email) OBITUARY? In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy...

Was made, by the USA closing 22 Embassies in Muslim countries. That action has shown that we can easily be intimidated by nothing more than,"Chatter," by radical extremist Muslim's. If a host Muslim country is either unwilling or incapable of protecting our Embassy, the Embassy should then be closed forever.

Muslims in Ethiopia protested in the capital Addis Ababa during Eid al-Fitr prayers on Thursday, as part of a two-year-old campaign against what they say is government interference in their religious affairs. … Demonstrators chanted “Allahu Akbar” and hoisted banners that read “respect the constitution”, referring to allegations that the government has tried to influence the highest Muslim affairs body, the Ethiopia Islamic Affairs Supreme Council. Ethiopia, long seen by the West as a bulwark against militant Islam in the Horn of Africa, denies the claims, but says it fears militancy is taking root in the country. …

The Brain Dead American Media missed this veiled threat in Obama's opening statement: "We shouldn’t forget the difference between the ability of our government to collect information online under strict guidelines and for narrow purposes, and the willingness of some other governments to throw their own citizens in prison for what they say online" Tell that to the arab who made a movie and posted it to the Net and who was blamed for creating the Benghazi Attacks ? Tell that to all those who have been surveilled by federal agencies using the NSA databases ? Obama often uses words...

Controversial atheist British professor Richard Dawkins has provoked outrage in a tweet he made deriding the lack of academic achievements by Muslims. On Thursday, the best-selling author of "The God Delusion," tweeted that: "All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” That post provoked a slew of outraged responses, including accusations of "racism," and "Islamophobia." Responding to the fierce criticism, Dawkins retorted in another tweet: "Muslims aren't a race. What they have in common is a religion. Rather than Trinity, would you prefer the comparison with Jews?...