Free Republic

SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend. How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up. As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected. Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an...

While the killing of innocent people is to be condemned without question, there is something rather repugnant about some of those who rush to renounce acts of terrorism. They rather remind me of trembling slaves all scuttling forth for the approval of the boss class in the hope of receiving a few crumbs from the big man's table ... oh, if only they knew how pathetic they really are. I was reminded of such a vision just the other day when family members of Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi renounced the terrorist leader after he claimed responsibility for the November 9...

Yvonne Ridley, the reporter imprisoned by the Taliban and then vilified by Fleet Street, found Islam and an unlikely supporter. But her new career at al-Jazeera has come to a mysterious end, she tells Julia Stuart It was a curious way to be given the boot. At 11pm a secretary from al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station, popped round to Yvonne Ridley's home in Doha, Qatar, and informed her that she was "terminated". Ridley, who had worked as a senior editor on the station's English-language website since July, was warned not to go back to the office and that security...

CHICAGO, August 27 (IslamOnline) - British journalist Yvonne Ridley has announced that she plans to convert to Islam. IslamOnline talked to Ridley about her religious background, her encounters with the Taliban, and her decision to convert to Islam. Ridley made international headlines last year when she entered Afghanistan and was held captive by the Taliban. She was eventually released and went on to write about her experiences in a book entitled In The Hands of the Taliban published by Robson Books in the U.K. Ridley told IslamOnline, “I was brought up a Protestant, in the Church of England. I sang...