Free Republic

Link only, due to Wired's copyright complaints. Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday MachineI'm posting this without any text, because I think it's important. The "Doomsday" machine is apparently real, and still operational. Read the article for more details.

(snip) "To say this complicates the Obama administration's diplomatic outreach is to put it mildly. This administration -- in fairness, not unlike the last few years of the Bush administration -- seems prepared to make an endless series of concessions to Tehran in order to secure a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue. Yet despite these repeated overtures, the Iranians refuse to budge even an inch and instead make announcements of more centrifuges and new missiles. Now they're launching airstrikes in Iraq."

When President Roosevelt addressed Congress after Pearl Harbor, he cited Japan fifteen times in a speech of five hundred words. When President Bush did the same after 9/11, he uttered “Islam” or “Muslim” more sparingly — just eleven times in a speech of three thousand words. And when Senators Obama and McCain spoke at the respective conventions and debates, asking to be entrusted with America’s security, not a single reference to Islam could be found. “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about,” noted linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. Based on the language used by Western...

[Granted, this article is 4 years old, but it seems to cover the issue in pretty good detail. I post it as a follow-up to the 7/1/08 FrontPageMag article I put up yesterday. Since that one received so many varied responses (~60) and close to 1000 views, I thought it would be interesting to see what folks had to say about this one. Some people seemed to dismiss or greatly minimize the threat. Others said there was nothing new about it (~50 yrs old), suggesting many people today were already aware of the details (many people today can't find Iraq...

"A woman reacts after hundreds of policemen threw a tight security ring around the courthouse and chased away the families of the defendants during a trial session of the Muslim Brotherhood leading members at a military court in Cairo, Egypt Tuesday, April 15, 2008. A security official at Egypt's military trial of 40 top members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood group says that 25 of the Islamists on trial have been sentenced to up to 10 years in jail.""A veiled woman holds a sign reading in Arabic 'Freedom for the hostages of reform' after hundreds of policemen threw a tight...

The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination? To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians...

Muslim Tories: 'Iran has right to nuclear arms' By Andrew Porter Last Updated: 2:56am BST 19/10/2007 A body set up by David Cameron to advise the Conservatives on Muslim issues has criticised the Government's relationship with Israel and concluded that Iran has "legitimate" reasons for wanting nuclear weapons. The Conservative Muslim Forum also wants the compulsory history curriculum in schools changed to give "full recognition to the massive contribution that Islam has made to the development of Western civilisation". It also argues that preachers who advocate a rejection of democracy and its institutions should not be denied entry into Britain....

Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child's death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth. In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a...

“You don’t roll out a new product in August,” said President Bush’s aide, Andrew Card, apropos Iraq in the summer of 2002. But in this seventh September of a no longer new war a somewhat battered product is in need of a rebranding. It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a “war on terror,” an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with “Islamist,” “Islamo-,” or “Islamic” might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various “friends” like Mubarak and the...

Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan? Sometimes the words chosen can mean the justification of an additional measure of military power. Always they calibrate the public mood and the public perception of what is going on. I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939 and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even...

Russian and Chinese troops are joining forces this week in the first military exercises by an international organisation that is regarded in some quarters as a potential rival to Nato. Thousands of soldiers and 500 combat vehicles will take part in “Peace Mission 2007”, organised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. Russian officials have also proposed an alliance between the SCO and a body representing most of the former Soviet republics. Scores of Russian and Chinese aircraft begin joint exercises tomorrow before a week of military manoeuvres from Thursday that will include Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan...

RAF jets scrambled to intercept Russian planes By Sally Peck and agencies Last Updated: 7:54am BST 19/07/2007 Two RAF fighter jets were scrambled on Tuesday to intercept two Russian planes on course for British airspace, it emerged yesterday. The incident marked the latest escalation of tensions in the standoff between London and Moscow. As Moscow hesitated in its response to Britain's expulsion of four Russian diplomats, two Tornado fighters raced to meet the Tu95 "Bear" bombers that had been dispatched from their base near the northern port city of Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. The planes turned back before they...

The Hamas victory in Gaza is a warning that World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz has called it) is going to be long and hard. It is also a warning that the West is currently losing that war. These defeats are not a function of the courage and will of the American people. In a June poll sponsored by American Solutions, 85 percent of the American people said it was important to defend America and its allies. Only 10 percent were opposed. On an even stronger question, 75 percent said it was important to defeat America's enemies. Only 16 percent...

Meaning of 'jihad' focus of Fla. trial By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press Writer 24 minutes ago Defense attorneys in the Jose Padilla terrorism support trial are going to great lengths to suggest to jurors that jihad is not necessarily Muslim holy war and that mujahedeen could just as easily be freedom fighters as terrorists. The meaning of words, especially Arabic words, is center stage as federal prosecutors play hours of FBI telephone intercepts involving Padilla and two other defendants charged with participating in an Islamic extremist support network. Padilla, 36, is a U.S. citizen who was held for 3 1/2...

This photograph taken from a CD purportedly by al-Qaida militants in India shows a masked man sitting beside an automatic gun reading a statement by Abdul Rehman al-Ansari, purportedly the chief of al-Qaida Fil Hind or al-Qaida in India, received by Current News Service in Srinagar, the main city of India's Jammu-Kashmir state, on Friday, June 8, 2007. A group claiming to represent the al-Qaida terror network declared a holy war on India over its control over part of the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, Indian officials said Saturday, adding that they were taking the threat seriously. Word at the...

“We are our beliefs,” it is said. Beliefs steer people in life. Some beliefs are harmless, some are the motive force for good, and yet others are delusional, misguided, and even outright dangerous. Every version of the belief called “Islam” ranges from the delusional to the dangerous. Islam is a Grand Delusion, birthed by Muhammad’s hallucination he relayed to his first wife and employer, Khadija. Greatly frightened, he told Khadija that he was visited by jinn (devil) in the Hira cave. Khadija comforted the distraught man by assuring him that the episode was Allah’s way of choosing him as his...

Hillary Clinton recently said: "If I had been president in 2002, I would not have started this war." "If we in Congress don't end this war before January 2009, as president, I will." Both of these certitudes ignore the context and the realities. This may be because the Democrats by and large are in denial or believe that America is to blame for terrorism. If only America would stop oppressing the Arabs or stop favouring Israel, terrorism would greatly diminish. Even if they are prepared to accept that we are in World War IV with Islamists, staying engaged in Iraq...

With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed." She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust. Later, as a teenager in...

I don't want to sound alarmist here, but North Korea has just conducted its first nuclear weapons test. This is not good. Imagine Adolf Hitler with a nuclear weapon. That would be the moral equivalent of Kim Jong-il with one. There is no difference. Kim is a mass murderer, possibly on the scale of Hitler. The only difference, so far, is that Kim has killed millions of his own people through starvation, forced labor camps and executions – more in the style of Josef Stalin. But Kim's dream, like his Stalinist father's, remains reunification of his country through military force....

By stigmatising organisations such as Hizbullah, Hamas, there is no longer necessity to respect their constituencies, democratic mandates Lee Marsden Published: 09.21.06, 16:59 Today, the United States’ campaign to reshape the Middle East is an unmitigated disaster. The ambitious project to create a democratic region has resulted in the deaths of over seventy thousand people, mainly civilians, in the Middle East and beyond. Recent democratic elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Israel have resulted in more rather than less violence. For Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this may be the acceptable “birth pangs of democracy” but for...

Gazan Muslims Form Group to Attack Christian Targets 23:03 Sep 19, '06 / 26 Elul 5766 by Ezra HaLevi Muslims in Hamas-controlled Gaza have formed an ad hoc terrorist group promising to attack Christian targets to avenge the Pope’s choice of a quotation insinuating that Islam is prone to violence. The group, which calls itself the “Army of guidance,” sent an announcement to news agencies based in Gaza saying that “every place relevant to Christians will be a target until the cursed infidel – the Vatican – apologizes to Muslims.” Hardline Islamic groups were offended by the Pope’s citing of...

PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf today called for a ban on the "defamation of Islam" in a speech to the UN General Assembly in which he took a veiled swipe at Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks linking the Muslim faith to violence. "We also need to bridge, through dialogue and understanding, the growing divide between the Islamic and Western worlds," General Musharraf told the 192-member assembly. "It is imperative to end racial and religious discrimination against Muslims and to prohibit the defamation of Islam." In an indirect reference to Pope Benedict XVI, he said, "It is most disappointing to see...

ELEANOR HALL: A former CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) director and chief adviser to New York's Terrorism Preparedness Taskforce has described the conflict against al-Qaeda as the "fourth world war", and he predicts it will go on for decades. James Woolsey was director of the CIA under President Clinton and was an arms control negotiator under presidents Reagan and Bush Senior. He's critical of US administrations from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton for failing to tackle Islamic terrorism more robustly. James Woolsey has been speaking to Paolo Black. JAMES WOOLSEY: I think that war will go on for decades, like the...

To: National Desk Contact: Department of Justice, 202-514-2007 WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following fact sheet on anti-terrorism efforts was released today by the Department of Justice: The highest priority of the Department of Justice since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been to protect Americans by preventing acts of terrorism. The ability of the Department to identify and prosecute would- be terrorists, thereby thwarting their deadly plots, has improved dramatically over the past five years thanks to: a core set of structural reforms, the development of new law enforcement tools, and the discipline of a...

LONDON (EJP)--- Prominent British film director Ken Loach has called for a boycott of state-sponsored Israeli cultural institutions in response to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, and has encouraged others to follow suit. The 69-year-old winner of this year’s Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival has also refused an invite to attend this year’s Haifa Film Festival in protest against Israel’s actions during the recent hostilities in Lebanon. He said: “I support the call by Palestinian film-makers, artists and others to boycott state sponsored Israeli cultural institutions and urge others to join their campaign. “Palestinians are driven to call...

The uniqueness of the Holocaust was not the Nazi's determination to kill the Jews of Germany and even of neighboring Poland. Other genocides, such as those by the Cambodians and the Turks, sought to rid particular areas of so called undesirables by killing them. The utter uniqueness of the Holocaust was the Nazi plan to "ingather" all the Jews of the world to the death camp and end the Jewish "race" forever. It almost succeeded. The Nazis ingathered tens of thousands of Jews (including babies, women, the elderly) from far flung corners of the world--from the Island of Rhodes from...

Is it just me or does it seem like the nation was just days ago acting like it was September 10 all over again? Sure, the foiled airline terror plot in London yesterday seemed to recalibrate the terror-ticker in most Americans, but why did it need to? In all seriousness, how can any person with straight face make a political argument that Joe Lieberman was a terrible guy for the sole reason that he felt it was important to be vigilant about America's safety? Don't you think on Wednesday morning that more than half the state of Connecticut wanted to...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said recently that “we are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war.”  Citing fresh examples of North Korean belligerency, Islamic terrorism in India, ongoing fighting in Afghanistan, insurgency in Iraq, support for Hezbollah terrorism by Iran and Syria, the related fighting between Israel and Lebanon, and the arrests of terrorists aspiring to murder Americans, Gingrich analogized the current state of affairs to the Great War and World War II.  In politics, the term “war” is sometimes used metaphorically in ways that do not shed precise light on the...

I really try to avoid vanity posting but in this case I have to. I watched with fascination the documentary Obsession on Google video. The documentary about the Islamic war on the West quickly moved up the most viewed and rated films until it was removed by Google. I wonder if there is a connection that it was replaced with a Moonbat film titled 911 Cover Up which is now rated as #4 on the list. There is something very wrong here that people need to know. Below are the inks to Google's video home page and to the disgusting...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran has freed a son of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from house arrest, a German newspaper reported on Wednesday. Die Welt said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard released Saad bin Laden on July 28 with the aim of sending him to the Syria-Lebanon border. It linked the reported move to the outbreak of war between Israel and Lebanese-based Hizbollah.

Sometimes the DUmmies come up with a proposition so absolutely ABSURD that it falls into the category of the comical. In this case it is this PROPOSITION, "Should religion be outlawed as it seems to be at the epicenter of most of the worlds strife." Even FUnnier than the fact that a DUmmie made this proposal is that the other DUmmies have joined in the chorus of agreement. So let us now watch the DUmmies once again toss all reason to the wind in Bolshevik Red while the commentary of your humble correspondent, praying fervently that the DUmmies continue...

A Brief History of MADness Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. It is a doctrine that came into being during the Cold War. The superpowers on the world stage consisted of two nations: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The USA: a capitalist constitutional republic that believes that the government should serve the people, protecting the inalienable rights given to us by God. The USSR: a union of countries ruled by communism that believes that the government dictates what is best for the people, and that the government determines the rights of the people. Two polar opposites. Both were...

Iran's war to remove Israel from the Middle East has begun. In writing "Atomic Iran," I argued that a new World War began on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini prepared to leave Paris to return to Tehran. This week, that World War has entered a shooting phase. If we count the Cold War as World War III, we are forced to declare that this Iran-driven terrorist war to destroy Israel and the U.S. is World War IV. Apparently, Iran has given its surrogate terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, operational orders to launch rocket attacks on Israel,...

Decision Brief No. 06-D 15 2006-03-20 What we are fighting for (Washington, D.C.): The third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has been marked by anti-war demonstrations, polls suggesting evaporating public support for the effort to consolidate that country's liberation and paroxysms of doubt by America's finger-in-the-wind politicians. It seems like a good time to reflect anew on the true nature of the conflict -- and why have no choice but to wage it with tenacity and to a successful conclusion. A Film for Our Times Fortunately, we are greatly aided in that task by the timely arrival of...

The White House has given details of 10 major terror plots that President Bush says have been foiled by the US and its allies since the 11 September attacks. Mr Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech, designed to boost support for the so-called war on terror. They include a plot to use hijacked aircraft to hit the US East and West coasts and to attack Heathrow Airport. But the sketchy details provided by the White House make it hard to assess how serious or advanced the plans were. Most of the plots have been previously reported in some...

In commemoration of the victory over the Turks won by the Christian fleet, October 7, 1571. To the Immortal Memory of Don John of Austria!

The Arab press — not only what they are saying to the West, but what they are whispering to each other. We believe you will be sickened. But you will certainly better understand the war on terror and what we are up against The war against the West which was brought to the U.S. on September 11, 2001 has continued throughout the world in places such as Spain and London — which has been referred to by leading Arab writers as "a chapter in World War III". The attacks have included slitting throats, beheadings, blowing up planes, trains, and buses...

You’d probably think there’s no connection between the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “South Pacific” in 1949 and the murdering Muslims of the 21st century. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. That musical explains these events. The most obscure song from that musical is, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” It’s low popularity is probably due to its dark subject, the injection of prejudice into the minds of children. Here are two of its verses, which make the point: You've got to be taught to hate and fear You've got to be taught from year to year It's got to...

An incredible number of attacks by Islamic jihadists have been planned over the last 35 years. Although many have been averted, far too many plots have succeeded: Since 1970, jihadists carried out attacks in over 60 cities, in at least 41 countries, on five continents and Pacific islands. Jihadists have assassinated heads of state, ambassadors and military personnel, and killed thousands of men, women, and children of many ages, ethnicities and religions (including Muslims). They have sometimes deliberately targeted children and babies.The 78 incidents listed below should not be taken as a complete list, merely a representative one. The listed...

The "Fifth Column" is a term that refers to those individuals and organizations that, though they are nominally American, want the United States to lose the War on Terror - the war that Norman Podhoretz and James Woolsey have called "World War IV." The term "Fifth Column" was coined by a Spanish Civil War General named Emilio Mola. As four columns of his troops advanced on Madrid, he stated confidently that, within the city, he also had a "fifth column"of supporters - those who were aiding, from the inside, his military campaign against the government. Dictionaries generally define a fifth...

America’s strategy in WW I and II was offensive. America’s strategy in WW III was a global defensive based on ‘containment.’ It was genius. Nuclear weapons established a Mutual Assured Destruction standoff. Wars on the periphery and by proxy were won and lost by both Superpowers. Yet, eventually, as expected, the internal contradictions of Marxism, its inherent lies, caused its economic and political collapse. Likewise, America’s strategy in WW IV should be a global defensive — for this phase. The war, like all wars, will change over time. Someday, America might be on the strategic offense, perhaps in Europe. WW...

George W. Bush is the center of attention this week, and properly so. On Monday, the networks each showcased an exclusive interview with the president done in the White House Library. Flicking from ABC to CBS to NBC it seemed possible to catch them all, and not surprising that all pondered similar questions. They bore on the tactical question of Iraq (How are we doing?) and the strategic implications of Iraq (Where else are we likely to do the same thing?). One questioner was pretty blunt: Since Iraq was not in fact deploying weapons of mass destruction, what reason do...

Commentary February 2005 The War Against World War IV Norman Podhoretz --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Second-Term Retreat? Will George W. Bush spend the next few years backing down from the ambitious strategy he outlined in the Bush Doctrine for fighting and winning World War IV? To be sure, Bush himself still calls it the "war on terrorism," and has shied away from giving the name World War IV to the great conflict into which we were plunged by 9/11. (World War III, in this accounting, was the cold war.) Yet he has never hesitated to compare the fight against radical Islamism, and...

Will George W. Bush spend the next few years backing down from the ambitious strategy he outlined in the Bush Doctrine for fighting and winning World War IV? To be sure, Bush himself still calls it the "war on terrorism," and has shied away from giving the name World War IV to the great conflict into which we were plunged by 9/11. (World War III, in this accounting, was the cold war.) Yet he has never hesitated to compare the fight against radical Islamism, and the forces nurturing and arming it, with those earlier struggles against Nazism and Communism. Nor...

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Tours, in which the Franks under Charles Martel stopped the Moslem advance into Europe. A turning point in history. See Victor Davis Hansen, Carnage and Culture, which was also on the reading list for the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto last Thursday.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571, in which a Christian navy under Don John of Austria defeated the Turks. Commemorated in G K Chesterton's poem Lepanto. An excerpt...as Don John approaches, Mohammed ("Mahound") speaking to his demons... "But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago: It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter when he...

The bloody siege of a Russian school by Chechen rebels brought widespread condemnation and soul-searching in the Islamic world yesterday. Arab newspapers and television broadcasts were full of dramatic photographs of the children killed and injured in the siege by Islamic rebels demanding Chechen independence from Russia. Commentators and clerics put a harsh spotlight on those who kill and maim in Islam's name. "What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Egypt's top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, asked during a sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version August 20, 2004, 12:28 p.m. The War We Are InWhere do we go from here? Back home in Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz has written a mighty essay, descriptively titled, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win." Podhoretz is careful in his use of language, so that when he writes of World War IV he isn't just using a racy metaphor. We are at war, nothing less — with radical Islamic individuals and aggregations. We are contending with...

We are presently fighting World War IV. So say a number of scholars and military experts, particularly former CIA director James Woolsey. He says the Cold War between the Western democracies and global Communism was actually World War III. The Korean and Vietnam wars were combat theaters in this larger conflict, which included guerrilla wars in Latin America and Africa, espionage and counterespionage, diplomatic and ideological warfare, all conducted in the shadow of a nuclear standoff. The current war on terrorism is also global in scale, with a multitude of fronts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; the Pakistan-India...

<p>Shortly after Sept. 11, Prof. Eliot Cohen coined on these pages the term "World War IV," to describe our current struggle against terrorism and rogue regimes. The Cold War, he wrote, was World War III, and our current war may substantially resemble it -- requiring a long and heavy commitment and the defeat of a totalitarian ideology. Some scoff at any such parallel and consider the Cold War analogy overblown.</p>