Daniel Greenfield

Soak the Rich

"You're either one of the 99 percent of one of the 1 percent," reads a sticker on a lamppost near my house. The implication being that if you're not one of the 1 percent, you should be packing your class warfare kit of cardboard signs, camping gear and iPods loaded with a copy of Paranoid Android and head on over to Wall Street. Soak the rich isn't an original slogan, but in this age of NGO's and a massive white elephant civil service, who are the rich exactly?

Alone in the Muslim World

Leon Panetta visited Israel to warn about its "growing isolation" and he is half right. Right about the isolation and wrong about the growing part. Israel is isolated in the Middle-East, but its isolation is a constant reality, not a growing phenomenon. It is not isolated because of its policies, as its critics claim, but because its identity is at odds with a region dominated by Arab-Muslims whose national identities is closely tied to ethnicity and religion.

Due Process With a Bullet

A GI in the hills of France takes aim through a rifle scope at a German soldier. Snow cakes the ground and a few bare trees cling to the ground like bony fingers. At the last moment, the German soldier sees his attacker. “Wait,” he cries out in a passable accent, “Ich bin an American citizen.” The scenario isn’t a particularly implausible one. Any number of Germans did leave to fight on behalf of their country in the first and second world wars. And there was no question of due process on the battlefield. Members of enemy forces who fought against the United States were killed and any precedent set in that regard was set long ago.

The Power of Weakness

Weakness is one of the greatest forms of power imaginable in the modern West. Weakness grants irresponsibility for personal actions and more importantly in a collectivist society, it provides freedom from for the collective burdens of society and civilization.

Another Imam Bites the Dust

November 2001, Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki of the Falls Church Mosque was busy answering questions for Washington Post readers on its website. Al-Awlaki did his part to assure WaPo readers that Islam was a religion of peace. "The greatest sin in Islam after associating other gods besides Allah is killing an innocent soul." "I have no sympathy for whoever committed the crimes of September 11th," Al-Awlaki said, and in a Washington Times interview said that, "We want to bring those who had done this to justice."

Days of Rage, Hours of Opportunism

The last time I passed the Days of Rage protesters in downtown Manhattan, amid their litter of expensive camping equipment, iPhone chargers, mobile hotspots and handwritten cardboard signs, they reminded me of people who walk up to you in bars pretending that they just discovered a new brand of beer they want to share with you. Those people are plants, so are the people with torn cardboard signs surrounded by a few thousand dollars of equipment. There are people who have reason to be enraged at Wall Street, but they rarely show up at rallies. They are too busy working a second job in their seventies or sitting outside a factory that was shipped off to China. And the people who do show up at rallies invariably have nothing to do with Wall Street and are financed by billionaires who made their money, directly or indirectly, in the stock market.

Politicizing Energy Independence

Three years after energy independence and alternative energy measures had bipartisan support under the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has not only succeeded in politicizing alternative energy until it became a divisive issue, but with the Solyndra scandal, it may have also tarred the entire alternative energy field with another Enron.

The Trash of Islam

Two years ago the Egyptian city of Cairo, the largest city in the Arab world and the "timeless city" of Obama's Cairo speech, the heart of the Arab Spring, was suffering from a garbage crisis. The crisis had a very simple cause, the pigs that used to eat the garbage were killed to prevent the spread of Swine Flu. The pigs living in "Garbage City" had served as both organic garbage disposals and food sources for the Zabaleen, families of marginalized Christian Copts who made a living by collecting the garbage, reselling the inorganic garbage and feeding the organic garbage to pigs. The system worked fine so long as there were pigs, but without the pigs, Cairo's streets are filled with giant mounds of rotting garbage.

Replacement Theology

In the Washington Post's "On Faith" section, a story asks; 'Judaism without God? Yes, say American atheists'. You can have Judaism without G-d, much as you can have an "On Faith" section without anything to have faith in. It's all a matter of definition. If you define Judaism by its covenantal document as a binding agreement between a people and the Creator of the universe, then an atheistic Judaism is a contradiction in terms. But if you define it as a cultural experience that calls us to social work and spirited debate, then it makes no real difference what you believe, so long as you volunteer at the Tikkun Olam soup kitchen.

Serfs in Warrenville

If nothing else, Elizabeth Warren's campaign for Commissar of Massachusetts deserves to be credited for getting at the heart of the issue. And the issue is private property.

Israel’s Lose-Lose Scenario

No matter the outcome of the statehood bid for the Palestinian Authority, the only sure loser in this scenario is an Israeli government which has once again allowed itself to react to events, rather than dictating them. The price for defeating the statehood bid is almost certain to be more concessions. Whether Abbas gets his UN vote or gets blocked at the gate by Obama, he can still count on more Israeli territory extracted under pressure.

It’s Time to Tax the Trillionaires

Obama says that it's time to tax the rich. I agree, but while he wants to limit the tax to millionaires and billionaires-- I want to advance it to trillionaires. Forget Warren Buffett and his secretary and the rest of the small timers, let's look at where the real money is going-- to the trillionaires. Who are the trillionaires? They're the people who spent and spent until we ended up with a 15 trillion dollar deficit. Now it's time to make them pay their fair share. Politicians, public sector unions, crony capitalists and the rest of the rotten body politic that left us with a debt so big that it can't be repaid without selling an entire state. It's time to make the trillionaires pay.

The Pyramid of Positive Rights

The fundamental difference between a free society and a nanny state, is that in a free society, negative rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and the individual and other individuals. In a nanny state, positive rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and both positive and negative rights are maximized between the individual and other individuals.

The End of Palestine

In the spring of 1964, while the Vietnam War was underway, the space program had brought close up photos of the moon, and the Beatles were topping the charts; the Arab League convened to try and find a way to complete the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. They had tried it once before in 1948, with incomplete results. Back then, the Arab forces had managed to capture and ethnically cleanse the eastern half of Jerusalem, as well as seizing and annexing the West Bank and Gaza. But for 16 years, Israel had managed to frustrate their designs by stubbornly continuing to exist. What the Arab governments wanted was a terrorist organization that could cross the border and carry out attacks inside Israel. And they wanted plausible deniability so that Israel and the UN couldn't hold them responsible for those attacks. And so cloaked in a lot of smoke and mirrors about "Palestinian Arab nationhood", the Palestine Liberation Organization was born.

Another “Us” Crisis

"The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves?" -- Theodore Roosevelt “We can’t just leave it up to the parents," -- Michelle Obama

The Sun That Shines on NY-9

WALNUTS AND PEANUTS What conclusions can we draw from the shellacking in NY-9? 1. The Reagan Democrats are back in a big way, while the media is trying to spin this as a single issue vote about gay marriage or Israel, and while those were certainly factors, it was very much a backlash about the whole Obama package.

Our Canine Heroes and Islamic Dogophobia

Kalb, or dog, is one of the worst possible insults in the Muslim world. Call a man Kalb or Kalb ibn Kalb, if you want the knives to come out. In Afghanistan, those who fled the Taliban and returned to help the Coalition rebuild the country are called "Sag shouey" or "Dog washers" since Americans are infidel dogs and the Afghans who cooperate with Americans are menial servants of the dogs. Mohammed, in addition to his affinity for pre-teen girls also had a compulsive hatred of dogs. Some Hadiths quote him ordering the killing of all dogs, others show him to be moderate ordering that only "'black dogs" be killed. Which gives a special edge to the not uncommon description in the Muslim world of Obama as a "black dog".

The Wages of Terror

When Obama set off to visit the victims of Hurricane Irene, instead of visiting the American victims who had lost their homes and possessions-- he headed off to Patterson, New Jersey. Patterson is known as 'Patterstine' for a reason, it's home to the second largest Arab community after Dearborn, and while most of its residents are not yet Muslims, concentrating his visit there sends a message. And it's the same message that has been sent over and over again. Muslims come first.

Another Day

Father's Day, Mother's Day, Veteran's Day, President's Day, Grandparent's Day (which also happens to be on the eleventh of this month) and finally September 11. A day when we discharge our obligation to remember and honor something very important and move on.

Ten Years of War

Like a ship pulling away from shore, time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh ten or twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. This is something that the statisticians in Berlin, Moscow, Tehran and Riyadh know quite well when they count up their numbers. But compound death is not a statistic, it is incomprehensible. The banality of the media coverage of September 11 reveals the struggle of grappling with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.