Daniel Greenfield

The Light and Dark Sides of the Obama Administration

The Obama Administration has both a light side and a dark side. Its light side is the shallow media frenzy commonly referred to as Obama's Cult of Personality, while the actual mechanism of the policy agenda represented by Obama's czars, advisors and assorted organizations such as ACORN integrated into the system, remain hidden on the dark side.

Give Me Ten Dollars and I’ll Tell You Why Capitalism is Evil

The advance promotion and interviews for Michael Moore's latest agitprop movie, Capitalism: A Love Story are well underway. The message of the movie, produced and distributed by the millionaire capitalists at Paramount, the Weinstein Company and TCI cable company spinoff Overture Films has as its message, what else but the evils of capitalism. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good.

Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Every now and then bewildered Israeli politicians and outreach professionals call conferences to wonder why the Hasbara is failing and why Israel can't get its story across. They are given the usual advice of hiring more PR firms, finding innovative ways to get the message through, using the internet in smarter ways and of course that all time favorite, rebranding Israel. Naturally they follow this advice, only to call another conference a year later wondering why nothing has changed.

The Trash of Islam

The Egyptian city of Cairo, the largest city in the Arab world and the "timeless city" of Obama's Cairo speech, is suffering from a garbage crisis. The crisis has a very simple cause, the pigs that used to eat the garbage were killed to prevent the spread of Swine Flu.

Are Politicians Serving Us, or are We Serving Them?

There's a lot of talk about "service" these days from the government, but where public service traditionally meant the government serving the people, today it seems to mean the public serving the government. Serve.gov, rolled out by the Obama administration as part of the "United We Serve" initiative, has as its mission directing everyone into public service, either as an ad hoc community organizer or as a volunteer "on a path to sustained service". The goal being to get the public to do all the things that even Obama's out of control spending budget can't afford to pay anyone to do.

Obama Sells Out the Liberated Nations of Eastern Europe

The big story at the close of the week is Obama's abandonment of the missile defense shield. To understand the implications of this, imagine if Walter Mondale had won in 1984 and had decided to abandon SDI aka Star Wars. The result would have been a decisive American retreat in Europe, one that would have seriously strengthened the Soviet position and might have prevented the collapse of the USSR.

Opposing Obama is not a Hate Crime

It is the ninth month of the year 2009 of the reign of what was supposed to be our post-racial administration, and racism is a more common topic than ever. Where before racism applied to individuals, now opposing government policies has itself become a racist act. Politicians and pundits spend enormous amounts of time analyzing the racial implications of Obama posters at rallies, and former President and active bigot, Jimmy Carter crawled out of his cage to proclaim that Congressman Joe Wilson's famous shout of "You Lie" was motivated by racism. Which is frankly quite obvious. "You Lie", is there any phrase more obviously racist than that?

Peace is a Dead Road in the Middle East

Right now Sunni and Shia are busy fighting with purist Sunni Islam represented by the Wahhabist Al Queda and purist Shia Islam represented by Iran's Mullah. So too within Israel, Hamas and Fatah are fighting as well. But what they are fighting over is who will lead the Arab\Muslim world and their main form of competition is less about killing each other and more about competing to see who can kill the most Americans\Israelis.

Obama’s Failure of Credibility

The cause of Obama's freefall in the polls can be reduced down to one simple word, "Credibility." Credibility is the board game of politics and the rules are fairly simple. Politicians begin their terms with a certain amount of credibility points that they can spend either on policies that will benefit the public or their own pet projects, hopefully both.

The Future of the War on Terror, is the War on Islam

George Will's column calling on the US to withdraw forces from Afghanistan and rely on smart strikes using drones, cruise missiles and special forces insertions, reopens a now old debate about the tactics we should be using in the War on Terror. Will's approach would revert the US back to before the days of the Bush Administration when smart strikes were used for a series of attacks that accomplished absolutely nothing.

9/11, Just Another Day

It is that time of year again when flags fly at half staff and faces are lowered. When wreaths are tossed on the barren ground and the passing of a plane overhead meets with ominous dread. September is the cruelest month, the end of summer, when light fades and darkness comes early, shadows creeping through the concrete canyons with the cold eastern wind.

I Do Not Know Any Liberal Jews

Lately there has been an outbreak of articles asking the old question, "Why are Jews Liberals ?" Personally I don't really know any liberal Jews. Of the three synagogues I go to, only one man voted for Obama, and hardly a day went by without that sole fact resulting in heated arguments with the regulars that often seemed on the verge of breaking out into fistfights.

Three Left Wing Myths About Israel

Myth 1: "Israel was created because Europe felt guilty about the Holocaust." This left wing myth has been widely repeated, most recently by Desmond Tutu. While blatantly false on a level that even the most serious anti-Israel historian can recognize, it persists because its function is to delegitimize as the product of post-war colonial guilt, rather than longstanding Israeli national aspirations.

Obama to America’s Children, “Hey Kids, You’ve Got Debt.”

(The following is a speech that Obama might have given, if he were willing to actually be honest with America's schoolchildren.) Hey Kids, This is me. Barack Obama. You might know me from a lot of magazine covers. Also I helped Spider-Man fight crime and I keep interrupting American Idol to give speeches that no one listens to anymore. Well just try turning me off now. That's right, you can't. Because you're in school, which means you have to listen to me.

Obama vs. The People

Obama is falling and contrary to what anyone might have expected, it was not the marginalized Republican party under the inept leadership of Michael Steele or its stable of Congressional Republicans providing nothing but token opposition, who gave him that big push. While the official Republican leadership sat in the corner, information flew back and forth between bloggers, activists and talk show hosts and the result was an authentic grass roots movement.

The Muslim Wolf at Feminism’s Door

More than 5,000 women are victims of honor killings each year. Most of those women are Muslim, and while most of them are killed in Muslim countries-- more and more of them are being killed in Europe, Canada and America. A 2007 study by Dr. Amin Muhammad and Dr. Sujay Patel in Canada's Memorial Hospital observed that honor killing spreads when those whose who practice it emigrate to Western countries.

Is Islamic Terrorism Reactive or Proactive?

In the conventional politically correct narrative, terrorism is a kind of desperate activism taken in reaction to oppression or some form of action taken against it. So for example, Osama bin Laden carried out 9/11 in reaction to US foreign policy. A Fatah or Hamas suicide bomber blows up an Israeli bus in reaction to the assassination of their leader. In reaction to their participation in the War on Terror, Spain and England suffered bombings.

Who Will Mediate Between Israel and Obama?

At the end of September, Obama is set to mediate a summit between Israel and the PA's Abbas. But the real question is who will mediate between Israel and Obama?

Socialism’s Losing Bet

Humans are at their very basic nature, capitalists. We buy and we sell, and when we do that we try to sell at the highest price and buy at the lowest price. Underlying every economic system, from laissez faire capitalism to communism is the reality that the underlying human nature of the people within that system will not change, they will only adapt those same tactics to function within that system. Economic systems may come and go, but people do not change.

The Real Root Cause of Terrorism

In the conventional political narrative the root causes of Islamic terrorism usually run the class warfare gamut from the generic oppression to outrage at Western foreign policy or more esoteric issues of globalism. And naturally like most people who look into a mirror to find the cause of someone else's anger, their reflection only repeats back to their own agenda.