WhatFinger


Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.

Most Recent Articles by Daniel Greenfield:

Protest as Identity

The assorted "Occupations" may be drawing to a close as even liberal mayors have lost patience with the occupation of public space and the budget drain created by aging radicals, wannabe hippies and random homeless people, hucksters, scammers and professional activists, but it isn't over because it never really began. To the left, protest is an identity, which is also why the Occupations never seemed to have much of a coherent message. The purpose of their protests is to protest, the romance of the protest is all the justification that it really needs. Creating permanent protest encampments turned protests from an occasional activity into a theme park, and that was what Zuccotti Park really was, a protest theme park for overgrown children too old to go to Disneyland, who instead tried to go back to the seventies.
- Sunday, November 20, 2011

Don’t Underestimate Iran’s Instability

Israeli leaders and generals certainly don't mind smiling knowingly every time a top Iranian commander meets an untimely accident, which has been happening surprisingly often these past few years, but the explanation is likely to be more complicated than Mossad secrets agents operating behind the scenes. The logistics of infiltrating people on the ground to carry out assassinations isn't easy, anyone viewing the chronology of the Dubai hit for one man in a hotel room, can only begin to imagine what it would take to pull off more complicated operations in Iran, which sees far less foreign travelers and has much tighter security.
- Thursday, November 17, 2011

Plan 9 from Washington Space

As the ObamaCare Mandate winds its way up to the Supreme Court, which will decide whether we still have the freedom to look after our own health in our own way without compulsion from the authorities, it's still only the tip of the positive rights iceberg.
- Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Rape and the Occupation

The multiple incidents of sexual assault in the Occupation tent cities are as ugly as they are inevitable. The absence of theft, assault and other forms of attacks is not a natural phenomenon, it is the outcome of a system that protects individual rights. The Occupy tent cities are not concerned with the rights of the individual, but with the grand collective right of the "99 percent" to demand private property on behalf of the government. And collectivist movements are notoriously unconcerned with what happens to the individual.
- Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Dangers of Legitimizing Muslim Grievances

There is no surer path to Muslim violence than through the legitimization of Muslim grievance. And once you accept the legitimacy of the grievance, then you are also bound to accept the legitimacy of the violence that follows. Violence begins with grievance. Grievance is the pretext for violence and the narrative for the violence. Liberals make a fetish of separating the grievance from the violence, emphasizing constructive means of resolving the grievance. But what do you do when the grievance and the violence are inseparable?
- Monday, November 14, 2011

The Devil’s Smile

imageSprightly Ahmadinejad tours nuclear facilities, having stolen an election he marches on as his police batter protesters. And everywhere he goes, he smiles his trademark loopy smile. The smile of a psychopath or a saint. Why is Ahmadinejad smiling? The answer is not a terribly complicated one. With every step he takes and every day that he remains in power, he discredits the most deeply held ideas of Western liberals about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and internal civil disobedience to achieve peaceful regime change. Despite years of diplomatic and hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets-- Ahmadinejad's grip on power remains as secure as ever.
- Sunday, November 13, 2011

Occupy Cain

What's the real danger of Islamophobia? Think of it as a license to kill.
the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, you have taken the first step to justifying violence as a response to that problem.
- Saturday, November 12, 2011

Islam, the Religion of Slavery

imageThe slow collapse of Dubai, a desert mirage built on oil money, human misery and the greed of Western businesses, reminds us once again of the fate of all slave economies in the end. But for all the skyscrapers in Dubai, the glittering avenues built by slave labor and the abundance of luxury American and European automobiles-- the story of Dubai and Saudi Arabia is very much an old story in a Muslim Middle East, of fat prosperous sheiks clutching their ill gotten gains to themselves and ruling over harems and companies of slaves, until the end comes.
- Thursday, November 10, 2011

The Professional Protester

imageContrary to their own claim that they represent the 99 percent and the media's ceaseless hype, OWS is about as representative of ordinary Americans as your average professional protester. Which is not very. Even opponents of the Tea Party could not seriously claim that it was a movement of professional protesters, but that's exactly what OWS is, leavened with assorted hippies, homeless people and bored students and aging radicals along for the ride.
- Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Price-Tag Attacks and Peace

To the sort of people who think that a few teenagers living in a shack on a hilltop represent the greatest threat imaginable to the peace process and world peace-- the so-called "Price Tag" attacks in which local Jewish farmers strike back against Muslim attacks as a deterrent against further violence are an obsession.
- Tuesday, November 8, 2011

A Pakistani Love Story

It's still quite a while till Valentine's Day in the United States, but in Pakistan the day of love came early as a Romeo named Ahmed Yusuf threw acid in the face of his 9-year-old Juliet, his wife/cousin causing extensive burns over her body.
- Monday, November 7, 2011

Trickle Down Government Economics

Forget the sly jokes and sneers-- today everyone is a believer in Trickle Down Economics, the only divide is over where the trickle is supposed to be flowing down from. This administration has been an experiment in unusually aggressive trickle down government economics.
- Sunday, November 6, 2011

End the Occupation

imageThe big lie of Occupy Wall Street begins with its name. It isn't occupying Wall Street, it's occupying the resources of a city with a budget crisis on its hands. Wall Street has been locked down since after September 11 and the Zuccotti Park encampment and its associated barricades isn't doing much to impact the lives of the brokers and financial analysts the idiots in their best protest gear are braying about. The people who are being impacted are the small businesses adjacent to the protesters who are experiencing a return of the post 9/11 lockdown that wiped out so many downtown businesses.
- Thursday, November 3, 2011

The State of the Race

The race for the Republican nomination has all the appeal of a three-legged sack race by a bunch of blindfolded angry drunks-- and it's not entirely the fault of the candidates. Elections used to be events, now they're a permanent process that begins some time after the last election wraps up. The long round of debates is the slow long road to the primaries that succeeds in making everyone seem unequal to the task.
- Wednesday, November 2, 2011

The Education Bubble

Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic aren't complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as they're upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that don't actually exist. The fault here isn't Wall Street's, it's a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow.
- Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The Materialism of Environmentalism

imageThere is no understanding environmentalism without also understanding the function of religion as a means of infusing spirituality into the material. The politicization of consumerism is an attempt to mimic the religious dimension of life without a guiding deity. Environmentalism provides the believer with the grandiosity of a human centered existence, in which the actions of individuals can lead to massive catastrophes, floods, extinctions and hurricanes. It's the old biblical epic of Noah set in what pretends to be a rational scientific universe, but actually borrows the religious significance of human ethics placed at the center of life.
- Sunday, October 30, 2011


The White Aborigines of the Post-Racial Left

imageIf you thought that political correctness was insane in the United States, take a long plane trip over to Melbourne, Australia, where Andrew Bolt, a columnist at the Herald Sun, has been sanctioned by a judge of the Federal Court of Australia for "insulting, humiliating and offending" that group known as "fair-skinned Aboriginal people". Who, might you wonder, are these "fair-skinned Aboriginal people"? They are said to come from the Hiberian isle, the plains of Alba, the cities of Albion, the Teutonic forests and even the Hebraic tribes. They boast many fascinating arts and crafts, such as writing dissertations on the structural thematics of metaphor in aboriginal music and receiving aboriginal scholarships to compensate for all the suffering inflicted upon them by the European settlers.
- Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Insurgent Incumbent

imageObama's team is nothing if not creative. After running for his first term as a force of change, he's off and running for his second term as... the force of change. Don't like the last change, this will be the change from that change to a whole other change. "We Can't Wait" oddly echoes with Obama's old slogan, "We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For." Now after having waited for three for ourselves... we can't wait for another four years of the same thing. The problem with waiting for ourselves while waiting to vote again for the man who got us into this mess is that it means we'll be waiting a long time.
- Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Left’s Worst Crime in the Middle East

imageThe left's worst crime in the Middle East has been its support for the region's Arab-Muslim majority at the expense of its minorities. It has supported the majority's terrorism, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and repression of the region's minorities. Very rarely has it raised a voice in their support, and when it has done so, it was in muted tones completely different from their vigorous defenses of the nationalism of the Arab Muslim majority.
- Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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