Daniel Greenfield

The Tyrant is Dead, Long Live the Tyrant

The tyrant is dead, and the head of Libya's Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, (who was also Gaddafi's former Justice Minister), has declared that Libya has been liberated. What a glorious day it is when a country is liberated from its justice minister by its justice minister. If only Gaddafi had been quicker on the ball, he could have staged a revolution against himself and liberated the country from himself. We mustn't laugh. Now that American troops are leaving Iraq, and Afghanistan has declared that it will back Pakistan in any conflict with the United States, we must have the highest hopes for Libyan democracy. Didn't we declare an undeclared war on Gaddafi to have a fallback position? Even if Egypt and Tunisia go down the tubes, and Yemen declares an official Bin Laden day, we'll always have Libya.

No Victory But Defeat

The most common justification for the Shalit deal is to wear it as a perverse badge of moral nobility. "What other country would exchange a thousand terrorists for one man." This is a close cousin of the argument that says the United States treating terrorists with kid gloves proves that it is nobler than them. Both of these insufferable arguments are symptoms of the moral decline of civilization.

Better Than Them

We are better than them. When all the other arguments for why we can't fight back have been exhausted this is the one that remains in the background presenting our moral exceptionalism as the reason we shouldn't fight to protect ourselves. "Fight back? But then we'd be no better than them?" If we waterboard then we are no better than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we profile then we are no better than the genocidal jihadists. If we treat our friendly Pakistani and Saudi visitors the way they would have been treated a century ago-- then we would be guilty of being un-American.

The Business of Government

Government is a business like any other. It is the company that, through the contract of the Constitution or the local contracts that cover the operations of states, municipalities, and communities carries out certain functions on our behalf. Officially government is a non-profit, and like most non-profits this status means there is no owner or group of shareholders that reaps an overall profit, but that its board and employees find working for it to be very profitable. And so like most non-profits, it is run for the benefit of its board and employees... and the friends and associates of the board.

Revolving-Door Terrorism

The Shalit deal will release some of the worst murderers in Israeli history, including those responsible for the Dolphinarium disco bombing which killed over a dozen teenagers, the Sbarro pizza bombing which wiped out an entire family, the lynchers of two Israeli reservists and the Passover Massacre at the Park Hotel.

The Age of Accounting

All week I have been getting requests from protesters looking for Wall Street. Like the anecdotal New Yorker who when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall replies "Practice", I've been tempted to reply with "Get a Series 7 License". But the reputation of New Yorkers for rude helpfulness isn't unearned and so I point them the right way. The ones who are asking are very obviously not New Yorkers. Rarely even are they from this coast. Not only do they usually manage to walk the wrong way, but their dazed expressions and social awkwardness scream Portland or Pot in equal measure.

The Trouble With Muslim Democracy

The ultimate symbol of Muslim Democracy may not end up being the purple fingers of the Iraqi ballots but the smoke from burning churches and dead Coptic Christians in Egypt. While Iraq was tenuously balanced between Shiites and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds, there is no such balance in Egypt. The average Egyptian is a Sunni Arab and thinks Christians are dogs. Church burnings are as close as Egypt is ever likely to get to democracy and we should be happy for that. The Muslim world is so enthusiastic about democracy because it allows the majority to slap around the minority-- at least more so than it's already doing. And when there isn't a clear majority to sit in the driver's seat, they throw in musical chairs coalitions of different ethnic and religious factions in between bouts of civil war.

Winning the System

Christie has endorsed Romney and Perry has turned out not to be as far to the right as people wanted to believe. Cain leads until the next slip. Palin will be courted by the front-runners and she will likely step forward to campaign for one of them. The big money is still on Romney who knows that he can wait out all the broken hopes and dreams to accept the nomination with a plastic grin.

Goodbye Columbus and Goodbye America

Columbus Day, once considered a major event, has been undergoing a decline in recent years. Its parades have met with protests and some have been de-emphasized or outright eliminated.

Killing You Softly

No sooner did Anwar Al-Awlaki, former go to guy for mainstream media heads in need of a quote about the peacefulness of Islam, go to his virgins courtesy of a beautiful aerodynamic drone, then the State Department called the family of one of his co-terroriststs to offer their condolences and apologize for not calling them sooner. And if they had only called sooner, the nearest and dearest could have been treated to a condolence countdown. You are about to be bereaved in 5-4-3-2-1... our condolences.

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.