Daniel Greenfield

Murdering While Muslim

Recently a nice Muslim fellow from Chicago by the name of Mohammad Alkaramla was convicted of sending bomb threats to a Jewish High School. Like most serial killers, his neighbors described him as peaceful and friendly. Just the sort of chap you want to invite to a barbecue or a bombing. His defense was that he wasn't threatening to kill Jewish students because he was the follower of a bigoted religion, but because he was upset over his ex-wife leaving to return home to Jordan.

Obama’s Great Airwave Robbery

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has been making noises again about the inadequacies of American Journalism, and the need for a "public value test" to save it from "its hour of grave peril." This follows the same line taken by self-appointed critics of cable news like Jon Stewart. But if Stewart mocks cable news, Copps is playing with fire by hinting at using government regulation to control the content of what news organizations broadcast.

The Leaking Roof of the Global Order

The Wikileaks mess is a reminder that the enmity of the International Left did not die when the Soviet Union did. It sends the stark message that we have political enemies who are using the internet to organize their attacks in new and dangerous ways. From Soros to Assange to Chavez, the International Left is a highly active and dangerous foe, and it is working to aid Islamic terrorists.

A Holiday of Resistance

The first night of Chanukah marks the beginning of a holiday that for many of its celebrants has no identity, that celebrates 'celebration', with no thought to what it is celebrating. For many Americans, Chanukah appears to overlap with Christmas. But there is no similarity between the two other than the season. The more appropriate analogy is to the 4th of July overlaid with Thanksgiving, a celebration of divine aid in a military campaign against tyrannical oppression. The overt militarism of the Chanukah story has often made it an uncomfortable fit for both religious and secular Jews. And both have found it easier to strip away its dangerous underlying message. The message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can't win. And then a war must be fought, if the soul of the nation is to survive. Because there are worse things than death and slavery, the fates waiting for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed. The fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar's Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the dynasty of Herod.

Won’t You Please Hug a Terrorist?

The working theory among the think-tanks, academic campuses, newsrooms and diplomatic offices is that terrorists are just like us. Except depressed and insecure about it. Filled with self-loathing and in desperate need of anger management classes. If only some kind soul could plop them down on an analyst's couch and stuff them chock full of Prozac or Paxil, hug them without letting go, while reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull-- then they'd be just as right as rain. And twice as wet.

It Just Isn’t Christmas without a Muslim Bombing

Mistletoe. Egg nog. And now Muslim terrorism. Last year's Christmas bomber was an African Muslim who stuffed his underwear full of plastic explosive and tried to detonate it on Flight 253. This year it's another African Muslim who tried to get an early start on Christmas terror by trying to car bomb a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. Last year's Christmas terrorist hailed from Nigeria. This year's mad Muslim bomber comes from Somalia. And they bring with them tidings of a new season. A season in which holiday shopping now comes with massacre plots mixed in with the radio jingles and cheer.

No, I Don’t Miss Bush

The billboards ask me if I miss George W. Bush, and my honest answer has to be, "No, I don't." I do miss Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. I miss John Bolton. But I don't miss Bush. I appreciate that Bush, who found himself suddenly leading a country at war, said most of the right things, and even did some of them too. But he didn't say the most important things of all. And that's the problem. Bush looks best against the background of Obama. But that's setting the mark fairly low, because there is hardly an occupant of the White House in the last 60 years who doesn't look pretty good compared to Obama.

Thankless in Obamaland

This is one Thanksgiving weekend which finds Americans with little to be thankful for. The economy is sliding badly and the dollar is endangered, which could potentially wreck the nation's economy long after Obama is gone. Flying was a more unpleasant experience due to the TSA's aggressive insistence on harassing American fliers, rather than Muslim terrorists. Then there's the worldwide chaos, which now threatens to open up a whole new war in Asia.

Why Airline Security Doesn’t Work

Three men go on a camping trip. On the way there they're told by a park ranger to be careful because their campsite is located near some dangerous animals. What dangerous animals? The park ranger won't say, because that would be profiling. "Just keep in mind", he tells them, "that people who camped there in the past never made it back alive." As the sun goes down, they pick up their hunting rifles and stand watch for dangerous animals. But they don't know what dangerous animals, they're watching out for. And they don't want to profile. So they keep watch for crickets as much as for bears, and for deer as much as for mountain lions. A rabbit, an owl or a bullfrog all equally frighten them out of their wits. They open fire on mosquitoes and stand watch against monstrous raccoons. By the end of the night, they can hardly see anything or react to danger. That morning, a pair of mountain lions stroll lazily into their camp and find them snoring away.

$335,906 is the Price of the Constitution

When Senators give speeches, they will say that you can't put a price on freedom. But as it turns out you can. You can actually put an exact dollar amount on the Constitution. And that amount is $335,906. That's the amount that Hollywood gave Senator Patrick Leahy. And in return, Leahy gave them COICA. That's not the same of some new disease, it's the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.

Unfair Game

Imagine North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il financing an Anti-American movie to be released in thousands of theaters. Well you don't need to imagine it anymore, because with Fair Game, we have the next best thing. Fair Game is an Anti-American movie financed by Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a company owned by the UAE royal family, and the chief difference between North Korea and the UAE is better PR. Both are brutal dictatorships ruled over by vicious little men which built ridiculous resorts and gargantuan projects for their own self-glorification. But unlike North Korea, the UAE has managed to get gullible Westerners to show up to their Dubai slave paradise without asking any inconvenient questions.

The Liberal Solution to Terror has Failed

The chief liberal critique of the War on Terror has been that George W. Bush wrongly treated 9/11 as an act of war, rather than a criminal act. Instead of passing the Patriot Act, invading Afghanistan, torturing terrorists and trying them under military tribunals, he should have just made a nice speech, and then turned the rest over to the FBI, holding civilian trials and moving on-- the way Bill Clinton did.

Chaos Reigns

In the wake of the election of 2010, the defining element is chaos. Obama's bumbling international trips, Pelosi's return to power, MSNBC purging yet another anchor to try and show that it's apolitical or centrist or something anyway, and international Democratic infighting have given way to sheer lunacy.

Obama’s Jerusalem Apartheid

When Obama attacked Israel for building housing on Jewish owned land in Jerusalem, he was doing more than just pandering to his Muslim hosts with an obligatory dose of Israel bashing. He was diving once again into the ugly pool of bigotry, that first surfaced when he used Joe Biden as a proxy to launch a hate campaign against Israel over the same issue back in March.

Want Human Rights? Leave the United Nations

Good news, everybody. Saudi Arabia now has a seat on the women's board at the United Nations. That's right, a regime where it's illegal for women to drive or leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian, where girls were pushed into a burning building because they were trying to flee without covering their 'obscene' female faces... will be a key player in the international effort to empower women. I don't know what contribution the Saudis can make to the project, since in Ridyah, empowering women usually means strapping them into an electric chair. But in the Muslim world, human rights is usually read to mean banning criticism of Islam under the guise of Islamophobia.

Cable Liberals Face a Crisis of Definition

Olbermann's suspension mini-drama was a direct product of the 2010 election which has made cable liberals wonder about their place in the bigger picture. Olbermann had found his place on MSNBC as in the run-up to the War in Iraq liberals felt increasingly emboldened to attack the Bush Administration. And the touchy sports anchor used it as an opportunity to reinvent himself as a cartoon of Edward R. Murrow, that has more than a little in common with Stephen Colbert's performance, and channel liberal anger toward the Bush Administration.

Breaking the Siege Mentality of Airline Security

The debate over the TSA security measures comes down to two options. Either subject everyone to strip searches or accept the possibility of being blown out of the sky. The authoritarians champion the first option and the libertarians champion the second option. But there is another way. A third option.

The Jewish People vs George Soros

I spent yesterday evening in the company of a man whose grandfather spent much of the Holocaust dressed in a Nazi uniform. The difference between him and George Soros, is that he used that uniform as a disguise in order to find Jewish refugees and lead them to shelter. And that difference is a profound one. It is the difference between a perpetrator and a rescuer. Between a collaborator and a hero. Soros did not wear a Nazi uniform, but he might as well have, because he aided in the persecution of the Jews of Europe, without compassion, without guilt and without regret. Various excuses have been made for his actions, and none of them hold the least bit of water.

Into the Iraqi Night

Good news. Apparently there is no such thing as Muslim terrorism after all, because Al Qaeda have been redefined as "Pre-Islamic Pagans". Lisa Graas, who has been providing extensive coverage of the murder of Christians in Iraq, picked up on this bizarre claim by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. The redefinition of Al Qaeda as "Pre-Islamic Pagans" is surreal to most Westerners, but this kind of constant editing and re-editing of history has become commonplace in the Muslim world. If Muslims can insist that Abraham and King David were Muslims and that Jesus was a Palestinian, it's a hop and a skip to claiming that Bin Laden's followers are somehow pre-Islamic.

The Left Gives Up On Democracy… Again

While grief counselors are once again being rushed to congressional offices, the left is throwing a full blown temper tantrum. After spending two years warning about the threat of right wing extremism, MSNBC featured Ted Rall calling for a violent takeover of America. It's easy enough to write off MSNBC as a collection of television losers who exist only to cater to their own class of angry disenfranchised liberals with six figure salaries, but it doesn't end there.