Daniel Greenfield

The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on US Taxpayers

While millions of Americans cut back on what they can spend on their vacation, Michelle Obama is concluding her last vacation with a new vacation trip along with 40 guests to Spain billed at a cost of 300,000 dollars a day. If Michelle Obama wants to go for a swim, an entire beach in Spain must be closed. Considering her busy working scheduleof appearing on talk shows and then appearing on magazine covers, I think we can all agree that nine vacations is very modest. And the real tab gets much higher when you consider how many of the other unstated expenses are being picked up by "friends", which is usually a fancy way of saying people who expect favors in return, again, at taxpayer expense.

Religion of Peace

Words are tricky things. Virtually every tyrant, no matter how bloody, has talked about his plans for conquest in terms of "peace". For example in 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a declaration in which they described their conquest of Poland as creating "a sure foundation for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe". The same year that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he delivered a speech at the Amman Summit in which he insisted that; "the Arabs seek peace and justice throughout the world". And how can one argue with peace?

Albion and Israel - In the Same Boat, or Running Aground

The British press is naturally outraged that Shimon Peres dared suggest that the British political establishment was pro-Arab and anti-Israel, and that MP's cowardly courted Muslim votes first. Peres has already been forced to apologize for his understatement. And an understatement it is, coming in the same week when British PM David Cameron visited Turkey, a Muslim country that has over 10,000 political prisoners, and continues to occupy Cyprus-- yet his only mention of human rights was to condemn Israel for defending itself against a Turkish provocation.

Group A and Group B

Suppose we have two groups. Group A believes that women are human beings, just like men are, and that they should be equal partners in their society. Group B believes that women were created by the devil to tempt men, that they have no human rights, and that they must be used to have as many children as possible. If Group A and B live in different parts of the world, each region will develop in a way that reflects their different ways of life.

Congress of Children

Obama and the Democrats are still running the country, but they're swiftly passing the point of no return with the public. They still wield power, but without public support, their power comes without any legitimacy attached. The media has been ignoring that sticking point for a while, but no matter what the Jornolist folks thought, the media doesn't actually control elections.

Cameron’s Despicable Toadying to Turkey

It is sadly unsurprising that Prime Minister Cameron's highly publicized trip to Turkey went with no mention of that country's continued denial of the Armenian Genocide, and its suppression of Kurdish and Armenian minorities. Indeed when Turkish leader Erdogan discussed his threats of ethnically cleansing Armenians in the UK, Gordon Brown made no more comment on the matter than if Erdogan had been discussing his favorite television programs.

Is Fighting for Smaller Government Racist?

When the NAACP allowed itself to be used by the Democratic party to try and smear a grass roots movement for smaller government as racist, the resulting controversy shone a light on more than just racism by individuals associated with the NAACP, but with the organization's inability to delink class warfare from racism. If there is one thing that both the white media elites at Jornolist and the NAACP leadership agreed on, it's that fighting for smaller government is racist.

What the Left Really Thinks of Hitler

Oliver Stone's comments about a "Jewish dominated media" exaggerating the Holocaust have shocked some people, but they shouldn't. Like the rest of Stone's tirade about Western bankers and Hitler being a product of his time, it's copy and pasted from Soviet history textbooks. Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Oliver Stone's "Secret History of America" is the USSR's version of American history, backed by some domestic sources.

Fourth Try at a Two State Solution

At a joint press conference with Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that we "desperately need a two-state solution". German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly downbeat about the prospects for a Two State Solution, but insists that it is the only "reasonable solution". J-Street, the radical left wing anti-Israel group intimately tied up with the Obama Administration, has released an ad praising Congressman Joe Sestak, one of the "Hamas 54", for his support of a "Two State Solution". Alan Dershowitz responded with an Op Ed insisting that he had always been in favor of a "Two State Solution" and denouncing J-Street for daring to imply otherwise.

Future Biographies by Former Members of Congress

Congressmen, if there's one thing they do well, it's take your money. But once they're out of office and deprived of the power to make bad laws for good money-- they'll have to find another way to do it. And the easiest way is the biography. Because who doesn't want to read a sanitized and ghost-written account of a man or woman who spent 20 years not showing up to votes without being bribed first. Especially if it doesn't include the names of some of those who bribed him or her. But with midterm elections coming up, many current Senators and Representatives will be finding some free time in their enforced retirement to write their biographies. And here are a few possible titles we might be seeing shortly.

Changing the Conversation

The entire Breitbart-Sherrod-NAACP-Tea Party mess is a lesson in how the left tries to sabotage and undermine conversations that don't suit it. It's a real time event version of what the Daily Caller chronicles in the Jornolist archives show about the media strategizing against Palin.

A Fourth Approach to the Muslim World

American policy toward the Middle East has been traditionally split between the Stabilizers and the Radicals. The Stabilizers were old foreign policy hands in the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA, sometimes tied in with the oil industry. They advocated maintaining stability in the Middle East by putting American support behind "our friends", the dictators.

A Dying Media Writes its Own Obituary

Most people think of the news media differently than the participants in it think of themselves. While most people think that the job of newspapers, news radio stations and television newscasts is to report on events, those on the other end of the wire, the printing press and the cable, think that their job is not to report, but to advocate.

British is the New Un-British, Islam is the New British

There's a widow in sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the Pabeng River, A grave that the Burmans shun; And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri Who tells how the work was done. --The Grave of the Hundred Head Rudyard Kipling

How the Media, the UN and the Diplomats Saved Hamas 18 Years Ago

For the past two months the media has been consumed with talk of Hamas ruled Gaza and the flotillas meant to break the Israeli blockade. But how one might ask did Gaza come to be overrun with Hamas terrorists. The answer is that the world forced Israel to let them in.

The Immorality of the Moral High Ground

Throughout the War on Terror, liberals have been lecturing us on the virtue of holding on to the "Moral High Ground", which is their way of saying that we should forgo trying to defeat terrorists military, and instead show them up with our superior civil liberties. Yes, Abdul, you may have a suitcase nuke, but if we catch you, we'll still  pay for your legal defense. Torture our soldiers if you will, Mohammed, but see if you aren't impressed when we TIVO your favorite team's soccer matches for you in that horrible 19 million dollar hellhole of misery and degradation at Guantanamo Bay.

The Inhuman Government

One of the great errors of big government liberalism is its belief that inhuman systems are superior to human beings. This form of mechanical thinking is a commonplace error in a scientific age in which we have become used to using mechanical systems to solve problems. But people are not machines, and trying to turn people into gears in the great machine of government leads to tragic results. The embrace of big government in the United States was driven by the belief in scientific government as a perfectible system. This creepy worship of elitist technocracy lingers around the more idealistic liberal administrations, from FDR to JFK to Obama.

A Special Relationship- Jews, America and Israel

Three months after Obama deliberately snubbed Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel was invited back to put on a good show of friendship before the midterm elections. There were smiles all around, reassuring sound bites and even some waving. The idea was to assure everyone that things were back to normal. At least until the mid-term elections delivers the Jewish vote. Just another cynical round in a very cynical administration.

The Way of the Cuckoo

The common cuckoo has a very simple reproductive strategy. It lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, which then drive out the chicks of that bird's own species. Instead the bird raises the cuckoo's young as its own. The name for this sort of behavior is brood parasitism. Which is a name that we should be very familiar with as our society has fallen victim to it.

Learning from Christie and Brewer How to Confront the Problem

The most important lessons for the Republican party aren't coming from any of the retired politicians doing their speaking tours right now. They come from two sitting governors, Governor Christie of New Jersey and Governor Brewer of Arizona, and what they're doing is very simple. They're confronting the problem. When Christie won an election, like so many other state governors, he was thrust into the middle of an impossible budget nightmare which was full of impossible problems. State budgets had been bulked up by entitlements and their attached public sector unions. Cutting them meant a battle with the unions. But not cutting them meant serious tax hikes. Most governors chose to walk some kind of middle path, negotiating with the unions with the least political fallout, and raising taxes, to create a compromise that everyone hated.