Free Republic

Syria's regime killed at least 28 people, mostly civilians, on Saturday when its warplanes dropped massive makeshift bombs on a town held by the Islamic State (ISIS) group, a monitor said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombs used in the attacks on Al-Bab, in the northern province of Aleppo, were three times more destructive than so-called barrel bombs, which have already drawn widespread international condemnation. "The army used 'container bombs' which are three times more powerful than 'barrel bombs'," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman. The barrel bomb was previously joined by the elephant rocket, another crude...

Claim White House ignoring human rights, working with murderous regime A group of Iranian dissidents and political prisoners have lashed out at the Obama administration, lambasting its ongoing diplomacy with Iran, according to two open letters sent to the White House in recent days. In each letter, the dissidents—most of whom are currently political prisoners in Iran—criticize the White House for ignoring the issues of human rights and democracy in Iran as they push to finalize a deal with a regime that the dissidents says is murderous and untrustworthy. Iranian reformers and those seeking a change in the country’s leadership...

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has cancer. After him are men even less likely to comply with a nuclear deal. ********************** Negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 powers led by the U.S. are racing against a March 31 deadline to conclude a nuclear deal in Lausanne, Switzerland. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters on Saturday that negotiators had made “genuine progress” but that “important gaps remain.” Yet what happens if the Iranian leadership that the U.S. and others are dealing with now is not in place to implement any agreement? Two recent developments suggest that the Islamic Republic may be...

The woes of Hillary and her run for president and are growing with every day that passes but I'm going to go outside the box of conventional thinking and posit my opinion of what could possibly be the truth behind her mounting political problems. In my opinion, the Clinton Machine and all their untold hundred of millions they have available is not going to enough to stop the disclosures of their carefully hidden corruption activities from the public.

American leftism has gotten an awful lot of mileage by monopolizing the moral high ground. It is the sole force in American that favors the poor. The sole enemy of racism. The sole comforter of rape victims. The sole protector of defenseless Muslims. The sole guardian of the environment, and so on ad nauseum.It all falls apart eventually--with friends like the left, nobody needs enemies. But often overlooked is that fact that it’s bogus from the start. Any prolonged glance at the left reveals it to be an ideology of power, its major tool violence, its goal revenge.Leftism has always...

Now that the ethnic-cleansing campaign of the Turkish regime has been "successfully" completed, and there are only two Jews left in Edirne, why is the governor of the city still so angry? The sweet little secret in both Turkey and Europe is that anti-Semites do not need the existence of a Jewish state to attack or threaten Jews. Hatred of Jews did not start with the re-establishment of the state of Israel. The truth is that those who carried out ethnic cleansing of Jews are the last persons who should whine about the non-existent Israeli "occupation." Israelis are not occupiers...

The Congressional Budget Office says ObamaCare is a job killer. But we already knew that, and have been saying so for four years. Now the Fed is catching up a little bit, yet losing 2-2.5 million jobs is the tip of the iceberg. “President Barack Obama’s healthcare law will reduce American workforce participation by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs in 2017, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday in a report…” What does the White House think of this horrible reality for at least 2 million people and their families? It’s just a “small percentage of the economy.”...

Hear ye, hear ye: Be it known that 60% of American Legal Voters do seek, and with historical reason, do expect protection from their US Federal Government from the devastating harmful effects of the Democrat's cruel unfunded mandate of Obamacare; AND since no effective leadership in the US House of Representatives has existed to serve and protect 60 % of American voters from the Democrat's cruel unfunded mandate of Obamacare; AND since only US Senators Cruz of TEXAS and Lee of Utah have shown a consistent understanding of the great harm soon to be imposed, by the very rapid total...

Hasan Rouhani's inauguration as Iran's president has renewed the Obama administration's dreams of rapprochement with Tehran. In a Sunday statement, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney expressed hope that "the new Iranian government will heed the will of the voters by making choices that will lead to a better life for the Iranian people." Should the Islamic Republic choose to engage, Mr. Carney added, "it will find a willing partner in the United States." Mr. Rouhani has already been "making choices" that the U.S. might want to take into account before becoming a "willing partner" in dealing with the regime....

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.

A senior Israeli official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering further military strikes on Syria to stop the transfer of advanced weapons to Islamist Hizbullah – and warned President Bashar Assad against any kind of retaliation against the Jewish state. The New York Times quoted the Israeli official who said, “Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hizbullah. The transfer of such weapons to Hizbullah will destabilize and endanger the entire region.” “If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he...

Not only is Barack Obama a liar but he is a coward. Yes, I will continue to call the Oval Occupier a liar so long as he insists on this asinine concept that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. And I will also throw in the word “coward” because his focus on the evil rich and the Buffett Rule is two-fold: It is a distraction from the true failures of his presidency and it demonstrates his unwillingness to reform our “broken” tax code. His own administration admits that it is “broken.” So their solution is the call for taxes...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Supreme Court, what's going on. It doesn't appear -- and you really can't make any judgments, final judgments on this. But the oral arguments do not appear to be going well for the regime. The regime's solicitor general is being laughed at on occasion, and the justices are poking holes in many regime arguments up there. But, as I say, oral arguments, you never know what indicator they are. It's like trying to read a jury. But still, it's entertaining and it's instructive and we'll pass it all on to you. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Oral arguments...

Iran has arrested filmmakers, bloggers, minorities and lawyers and imposed limits on the public's use of the Web to try to squelch dissent and contact with the outside world ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections on Thursday, the human rights group Amnesty International reported Monday. Iranian authorities have detained more than 10 journalists, writers and bloggers, as well as members of religious and ethnic minorities since campaigning began, apparently to dissuade people from criticizing the government or participating in protests to mark the anniversary of "Arab Spring" uprisings around the Mideast, Amnesty said in a 71-page report. The authorities also...

JERUSALEM — Iran is not our enemy. The regime that enriches itself while murdering, oppressing and impoverishing ordinary Iranians, the regime that incites genocide against Israel, threatens its neighbors in the Persian Gulf and vows to bring about a "world without America" — that is our enemy. This was one of the key points driven home by a trio of extraordinary individuals gathered for a dinner in Tel Aviv last week. At the table were Bernard Lewis, for my money the greatest living historian of the Middle East; Uri Lubrani, Israel's envoy to Iran before the fall of the Shah...

Ali Akbar Salehi: Iran's foreign minister...and future president? After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic's new leaders confronted the dilemma of what to do with the remnants of the Pahlavi monarchy. One such remnant was the partially constructed nuclear power plant located in the southeastern city of Bushehr along the Persian Gulf. Construction of the plant by a group of German companies had begun just four years earlier, under Mohammad Reza Shah. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the creation of a five-person fact-finding committee to investigate the Bushehr plant and advise on its status. One of its members was a...

Why, despite the growing danger posed by Iran's nuclear program, have the United States and other nations restricted themselves to negotiations, economic sanctions and electronic intrusions? None of those tactics has been particularly effective or produced enduring changes. The main argument against military action is that it would set Iran's nuclear program back only a few years, and that Tehran would retaliate directly and via surrogates, drawing the U.S. into another unwinnable war. Many fear also that Iranians will rally behind their regime with nationalist fervor, dashing hope of regime change for decades and turning Iran's largely pro-Western population against...

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards soon could have nuclear weapons. In 1979, journalists and diplomats reported from Iran on a revolution against the shah. They were mistaken. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers were thinking bigger. Their goal was a global revolution — a revolution against the United States and other “oppressor” powers. The ayatollah famously called America the Great Satan. This, too, was misunderstood. His intention was less to insult than to describe: He knew that freedom, the rule of (man-made) law, peace, and equal rights for both the servants and enemies of Allah are seductive ideas that could...

Iran's Assembly of Experts is calling on officials to institute gender segregation in Iranian universities, prompting Iran's Minister of Science and Technology to announce: "Women's Colleges will be established all across Iran" Kamran Daneshjoo told Fars news agency yesterday that "women's colleges" will be established in every province, adding: "This is about keeping Islamic customs and limits, and the Islamization of universities will go much further than this." He said: "Prior to the Revolution (1979) there was one women-only university, which was renamed the Al-Zahra University after the Revolution. Thirty-two years after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, we do...

The rotting bodies of 30 men, almost all black and many handcuffed, slaughtered as they lay on stretchers and even in an ambulance in central Tripoli, are an ominous foretaste of what might be Libya's future. The incoming regime makes pious statements about taking no revenge on pro-Gaddafi forces, but this stops short of protecting those who can be labelled mercenaries. Any Libyan with a black skin accused of fighting for the old regime may have a poor chance of survival. The atmosphere in the Libyan capital is frighteningly uncertain a week after the sudden collapse of Gaddafi's forces. Nobody...