Free Republic

However they resolve the continuing wasteful spending in Washington? What happens next month (October) should interest us all the trip by Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho to China, Japan and South Korea... The latest Ukraine War talking point is fascinating the "Military Industrial Complex" seems hell-bent on turning Ukraine... The ugly pants down world of politics indeed President Ronald Reagan called politics... Chris Christie wanting to call President Trump Donald Duck I have some exclusive video... 50 Years Ago-The Yom Kippur War... Illegals Moving From The Border Into The Workforce... 1970-1973 My Days...

As Barack Obama’s number two man, Joe Biden took part in many policies that were damaging to Israel but his duplicity concerning the Jewish state began in his first year in the Senate when he visited Israel. Depending on which version of events he tells, Biden takes credit for transmitting disinformation to the Israeli government in an effort to help Egypt kill more Jewish soldiers, or, as he now tells it, Biden withheld vital information that could have helped Israel defend itself. In 1973, a freshman senator named Joe Biden was sent on his first overseas trip to visit Israel....

HONG KONG — Chinese President Xi Jinping met with veteran U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger in Beijing on Thursday, calling him an “old friend,” Chinese state media reported. Xi said the visit by Kissinger, who has been to China more than 100 times and recently turned 100, had special significance because of the two “hundreds.” Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, made a secret trip to China to 1971 that laid the groundwork for a historic trip by the president the following year and the formalization of relations between the United States and China in 1979. “It not only...

At 99, Henry Kissinger is a living demonstration that you’re never too old to learn new things — or to unlearn wrong old things. The former secretary of state has implicitly acknowledged that he dramatically misjudged Russia, its war against Ukraine, and the qualities of Ukraine’s leaders and population. After Vladimir Putin described the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its repressive empire as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” suggesting it should be reconstituted, Kissinger urged America to “show greater sensitivity to Russian complexities.” After Putin invaded Georgia, Kissinger stated that “isolating Russia is not a sustainable long-range...

US elder statesman Henry Kissinger said that Russia’s invasion shows there is no longer a point to keeping Ukraine out of Nato, the long-held aspiration of Kyiv that he had opposed. The 99-year-old former secretary of state and apostle of realpolitik has for months advocated a ceasefire in the Ukraine war that would in effect accept some military gains by Russia. But speaking virtually to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kissinger said that Nato membership for Ukraine would be an “appropriate outcome”. “Before this war, I was opposed to membership of Ukraine in Nato because I feared that it...

She has played the Queen and a gangster’s moll but her latest casting has sparked controversyNobody is quite what they seem. And actors? Well, for actors that’s the job. Dame Helen Mirren, as well as being herself for 76 years, has by now notably been Lady Macbeth, a London gangster’s moll, a thief’s wife, an alcoholic cop, an action hero, Prospero and also a British monarch at least four times. Now she takes on Golda Meir, the late prime minister of Israel, in a new biopic, and the casting has caused controversy. The choice of a non-Jewish actor to star...

Internet trolls are attacking Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren for playing Israel’s first female Prime Minister Golda Meir in the upcoming biopic, Golda. Social media users branded Mirren “racist,” and called her a “well known Zionist and Israel-worshipper” after the actress took on the role of the wartime prime minster in the new film — set during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Arab nations attacked Israel. “How sick making a biopic on criminal Golda Meir and yes no surprise Helen Mirren the racist is happy to portray the pure distorted version of a disgusting individual,” complained one Twitter user,...

In the summer of 1973, the junior senator from Delaware Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. visited Egypt and met with local officials – not the first tier ones: the highest-ranking among them were the country’s Minister of Propaganda, alongside Hassanein Heikal, editor of the semi-official daily Al-Ahram. Following his Cairo visit, Biden, who had just been elected the previous year, met in Israel with then Prime Minister Golda Meir and passed on the Egyptian disinformation. Biden told the Israeli prime minister that of all the Egyptian VIPs he had met, not one denied Israel’s absolute military superiority, and they all reassured...

This continues my attempt to bring noteworthy books to the attention of Freepers. Vanity? Not really, but it is a way for me to organize in a short review the main points of relevant books to our current economic, military, or political issues. "Armies of Sand" is an analysis by former CIA analyst and AEI scholar Kenneth Pollack. Although this was in part his doctoral dissertation, he has gone on to write many books about the military and especially the Middle East. He begins by looking at the Six-Day War and Arab/Egyptian military ineffectiveness, noting the AE military superiority of...

New Book Demolishes Arab Armies of Sand “Arab armed forces consistently underperformed, and underperformed in the same ways time and again, regardless of who they fought or where, the state of their politics, or the relative state of economic development between them and their foe.” So concludes scholar Kenneth M. Pollack in his magisterial book on the cultural roots of disastrous post-1945 Arab military performance, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness. Pollack presents an encyclopedic, withering critique of Arab militaries across decades in numerous varied conflicts, to substantiate the conclusion that: Arab militaries were...

Escape from Cherbourg Dec. 24, 2009 ABRAHAM RABINOVICH , THE JERUSALEM POST Forty years ago this Christmas eve, five small boats showing almost no lights slipped out of Cherbourg harbor into the teeth of a Force 9 gale which kept even large freighters from venturing out. Built for the Israel Navy, the vessels had been embargoed at the beginning of the year by French president Charles de Gaulle. Their empty berths on Christmas Day and the absence of any announcement about the embargo's termination prompted media inquiries, which failed to elicit convincing explanations. "Where are they?" asked a banner headline...

Israeli missile boat flotilla on maneuvers. (Israel Government Press Office) On New Year’s Eve 1970, Israel Radio reported the arrival in Haifa of five newly built Israeli patrol boats which had escaped from a Cherbourg shipyard where they had been embargoed by the French government for political reasons. The brazen getaway on Christmas Eve into the teeth of a Force Nine gale raging in the English Channel galvanized the international media. News organizations sent up planes looking for the boats during the coming week as they raced for home. I had joined The Jerusalem Post just a few months before...

On the first day of the Yom Kippur War, an Israeli photo reconnaissance plane, flying well inside Sinai to keep out of range of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles across the Suez Canal, scanned the Egyptian deployment on the far bank. The Israel Air Force commander, Maj.-Gen. Benny Peled, would not see the photographs until days later. They showed Egyptian tanks, fuel and supply trucks, troop carriers, and other vehicles lined up for miles, packed together virtually bumper to bumper on narrow desert roads waiting to cross into Sinai on pontoon bridges being assembled in the water. Had he known of this...

President Richard Nixon was drunk during the height of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, according to veteran journalist Tim Weiner writing for Politico magazine. Weiner’s book, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, makes the charge. The former New York Times reporter claims that a call recorded by Henry Kissinger proves Nixon was drunk on the fifth day of the crisis after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel which caught their Intelligence agency by surprise. It became clear in the hours after the 1973 Yom Kippur attack that the Arabs had surprised Israeli forces...

Remembering The Yom Kippur War: An American's StoryBy Joel Leyden Israel News Agency / Israel Forever FoundationAs I write the diary below memories begin to pour back along with the anxiety and tears that we all experienced at the time. For many of us, the scars of war will never heal. Nor should they. image Israel was unprepared for a surprise attack by Syria and Egypt. The Yom Kippur War took the lives of 2,688 Israeli troops. Sitting in the relative safety of a suburban Long Island home, I first heard news reports of Arab armies attacking Israel on October...

Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to warn that the Egyptian and Syrian armies were about to attack Israel. Elazar urged a preemptive strike; six years earlier, in the Six-Day War, Israel’s preemptive strike had proved highly effective. But Meir and Dayan, who were under...

The world watches the war of words between Israel and Iran. President Ahmadinejad’s call for the annihilation of the Zionist regime has lost its edge because of overuse. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reply that Israel has the right to defend itself is as expected as the sun rising in the morning. However, tensions rose to a new high last week with the comment by Iran’s Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi that “of course this confrontation has always continued; however, since we are in the era of The Coming, this war will be a significant war” (Mashregh news). He was referring to Imam...

Years ago at a conference in Amman, a few Israelis and Egyptians were sitting together chatting. One of the Israelis was asked when he had last visited Egypt. "On October 16, 1973," he answered, somewhat humorously. "And without a passport. I crossed the Suez Canal with my unit until we withdrew a few months later. But now we have peace; I don't mean to insult anyone." A minor commotion ensued. That never happened, some of the Egyptians responded. One of them, a retired general, said to his friends: "Technically, the Israeli is not lying. We drew them across the canal...

A VOLUNTEER REMEMBERS THE YOM KIPPUR WARBy JOEL LEYDENSitting in the relative safety of a suburban Long Island home, I first heard news reports of Arab armies attacking Israel on October 6, 1973. It was not exactly clear what was transpiring in the Middle-East. News reports were censored and the media was not overly kind to Israel. I heard my father say that Israel’s UN Ambassador Abba Eban was to address the United Nations General Assembly. I did not know of Abba Eban, I was expecting an Israeli to speak with a thick Israeli accent that most would not understand....

"The Muslim Brotherhood is a mortal enemy of our civilization, they say so openly, their slogan says so openly, their way is Jihad, their method is death."