Free Republic

Once upon a time, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with the strongman President Bashar Assad. She considered her willingness to engage all sides of the country’s bloody civil war to be an important step toward peace. For this bold action, she was widely pilloried at the time and considered by some an authoritarian apologist or outright traitor. The claim was repeated again recently by the ever-so-mainstream California Sen. Kamala Harris, a fellow Democratic presidential hopeful. The attacks on Gabbard’s Syria record have been quite regular among Washington insiders, who considered the congresswoman foolish. But was she?...

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxVPCjbKuEQ Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said in an address at the Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah that the "Palestinians" cannot be removed from their homeland and that every building built by the Zionist occupation will be destroyed and thrown in the garbage bin of history, reports the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). ..... In the video, uploaded to to Abbas' Facebook page on August 10, he claimed that the "Palestinians" are the Canaanites who have lived in Palestine for 5,000 years, and he rejected the conferences in Warsaw and Manama as unacceptable to the "Palestinian people". He...

Friday, President Donald Trump met in New Jersey with his national security advisers and envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who is negotiating with the Taliban to bring about peace, and a U.S. withdrawal from America's longest war. U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, in a war that has cost 2,400 American lives. Following the meeting, Trump tweeted, "Many on the opposite sides of this 19 year war, and us, are looking to make a deal -- if possible!" Some, however, want no deal; they are fighting for absolute power. Saturday, a wedding in Kabul with a thousand guests was...

Christian parents in China have shared how their schoolchildren are being taught that Christianity is an “evil cult” and encouraged to “hate God” as the officially atheist country continues to tighten its grip on religion. According to Chinese persecution watchdog Bitter Winter, since the Regulations on Religious Affairs legislation was implemented last year, schools around China have adopted “unprecedented measures” to keep students away from Christianity. Schools in China are government-controlled, and therefore Communist in ideology.The policy has resulted in difficult situations for families as children are encouraged to question the beliefs of family members and report those closest to...

“The neocons in the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu have created a situation where it is going to be very difficult for President Trump to avoid a war with Iran," she said. "They have built all the building blocks, placed the dynamite and lit the fuse. It is going to be up to Donald Trump and his leadership whether or not he is going to cut that fuse and say, 'Hey, we need to get back on track and put the interest of the American people in our country first.'" The Iraq War veteran also criticized Trump's recent...

WASHINGTON - Tulsi Gabbard is willing to go out on a limb. The Democratic U.S. congresswoman from Hawaii was one of the first Democrats to support Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and now she is one of the first Democrats to meet with President-elect Donald Trump. Gabbard met with Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Monday morning, but Trump spokesman Jason Miller said it was “premature” to discuss Gabbard’s potential role in the Trump administration.

11/21/16 Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon contacted Tulsi Gabbard to arrange Monday’s meeting with the president-elect...Many in the media raised their eyebrows when the news broke that Trump was meeting at Trump Tower Monday morning with Hawaii’s Democratic congresswoman. But for those who know Bannon best, there was no surprise at all. Bannon, who hates the entrenched two-party system, has long admired Gabbard. She’s an Iraq War veteran with an independent streak. Bannon, a navy veteran, was drawn to her when she began publicly excoriating the Obama administration over its plan to defeat ISIS. “He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves...

Liberal billionaire businessman George Soros and libertarian billionaire businessmen Charles Koch have teamed up to form a nonprofit centered on advancing pacifist foreign policy. Known as The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the new organization was named after former president John Quincy Adams, who championed isolationism, according to a Boston Globe story published Sunday. According to its website, the Quincy Institute says that it seeks “a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” “Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in...

BESIDES BEING BILLIONAIRES and spending much of their fortunes to promote pet causes, the leftist financier George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers have little in common. They could be seen as polar opposites. Soros is an old-fashioned New Deal liberal. The Koch brothers are fire-breathing right-wingers who dream of cutting taxes and dismantling government. Now they have found something to agree on: the United States must end its “forever war” and adopt an entirely new foreign policy. In one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history, Soros and Charles Koch, the more active of the two...

First, take a deep breath. Now take a look at the Wall Street Journal. The otherwise fine newspaper editorially on Saturday blasted President Trump. For what? For not killing Iranians and blowing up Iranian targets to show how super our American power is. The president acted humanely and rationally, weighing proportionality in response to Iran’s downing of our spy drone over international waters (we say) or Iranian waters (they say). The WSJ, of course, is an authority on the subject of territoriality and sovereignty and the respect thereof. The newspaper for years insisted that the United States should have no...

RUSH: Donald Trump recently, President Trump just signed really, really, really Draconian sanctions against Iran, including sanctions that will deny the supreme leader, the head mullah, the grand pooh-bah ayatollah, will deny him access to financial instruments. We have sanctions that are so pinpoint, they’re aimed at a guy, the supreme leader of Iran. And Trump, just I mean moments ago, signed this executive order. There’s video of it happening right now. That’s pretty precision point when you deny the grand pooh-bah access to his financial instruments. Meaning, it’s gonna be tough for the guy to move money around and...

Sparks will fly in Washington as activists torch an American flag to protest President Trump's July Fourth "Salute to America," which Trump claims will be one of the largest events in city history. Longtime flag-burning activist Gregory "Joey" Johnson of the Revolutionary Communist Party told the Washington Examiner, "I'm going to be there in D.C.," and "that rag of empire and oppression is going to burn." Johnson is well known for winning a 1989 Supreme Court case that invalidated state laws against flag burning. He declined to share the time and location of next week's protest or say how many...

Politics stops at the water’s edge, as Arthur Vandenberg famously asserted during the Truman administration. But apparently not if the water in question is the Strait of Hormuz. And not if the politician in question is Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D – CA 43). After President Trump pulled the plug on the Iran counterstrike, you’d think that the move dovish Democrats would all be breathing a sigh of relief. (At least for a little while.) But Waters decided that she would lay into the President, claiming that the confrontational situation was our fault in the first place. Trump, you get...

The Senate voted to block President Trump’s Saudi arms deal on Thursday, paving the way for a veto clash with the White House. The Senate voted 53-45 on resolutions to block two of the sales, with GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kansas), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Todd Young (Ind.) joining Democrats. They voted 51-45 to block the additional 20 arms sales. Murkwoski flipped to vote for the sale, while Lee did not vote. The 22 arms sales, estimated to be worth more than $8 billion, would provide weapons to...

Palestinian leadership said Saturday that White House adviser Jared Kushner's proposed economic plan was a non-starter unless it came coupled with a political solution for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Reuters reported that leaders of both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the West Bank and Hamas, the Islamist militant party that controls the Gaza strip, dismissed Kushner's proposal for a $50 billion plan that includes a global investment fund meant to improve economic opportunities in the Palestinian territories.

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday shrugged off the brutal dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, just days after a United Nations report described how a team of Saudi assassins called Mr. Khashoggi a “sacrificial animal” before his murder. The U.N. report urged an F.B.I. investigation into the slaying. But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump said the episode had already been thoroughly investigated. He said the Middle East is “a vicious, hostile place” and noted that Saudi Arabia is an important trading partner with the United States. “I only say they spend $400...

Media hysterics take note. Honest commentary on the Trump administration's 2019 diplomatic, economic and military clash with Iran's vicious dictatorship requires historical context. Here's critical historical Fact One: Since 1979, the year the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his initially broad coalition toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the revolutionary Islamic Iranian regime Khomeini established has been at war with the United States. My sources include Khomeini and his fanatics who commandeered dictatorial power in 1980 after marginalizing non-Islamists in the anti-Shah coalition. Contemporary sources include the disgustingly corrupt clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps officers who mastermind regime rackets, graft, oppression, war-making...

Iran is making good on its threats. Last Thursday’s bombing of two oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz was just the latest in a string of attacks that have taken place in the maritime choke point in the past month. Thirty percent of global petroleum exports transit the Straits of Hormuz annually. On April 22, Alireza Tangsiri, the Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval force, announced that if the U.S. went ahead with placing a full embargo on Iranian petroleum exports, Iran would close the Straits of Hormuz. “If we are prevented from using it, we will...

President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump's reelection. It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 million people, three times as large as Iraq. It would become the defining issue of his presidency, as the Iraq War became the defining issue of George W. Bush's presidency. And if war comes now, it would be...