Daniel Greenfield

Leave Me Alones vs Make It Betters

The two streams in American politics are not liberal vs conservative, they can be roughly defined as "Leave Me Alone" vs "Make It Better". Leave Me Alone seeks personal independence, self-reliance and freedom from interference. Make It Better believes in the progressive betterment of society through regulation, intervention and education. Most people associate the "Leave Me Alones" with conservatism and the "Make It Betters" with liberalism. That's partly true, but not entirely. The hijacking of liberalism and the Democratic party by the radical left has them into the standard bearers of a ruthless "Make It Better" agenda. But "Make It Better" is found often on the right as well. The loss of the cultural war to the left has pushed conservatives into a defensive position. And the ascension of the left has moved it into a state of permanent aggression.

Mad Media and Jewish Dogs

Last week the BBC reported that a Jewish court in Jerusalem had ordered a dog be stoned to death. Shortly thereafter they modified the story slightly to say that the court had actually called animal control to have it taken away to the pound. As stories go, this is obviously a dog of another color. There is no word on whether the dog was sent off to keep company with the GPS Shark, that Egyptian media claimed had been trained by Israel to attack swimmers. But it wouldn't surprise me at all. Those Zionists are capable of anything.

Get Well, Hugo

Reports say that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez may be seriously ill. In Dictatorspeak, seriously ill means seriously dead. And seriously dead, means there's a revolution coming up shortly. But whether Hugo Chavez is dead, sick or just vacationing in Cuba for his health-- there's no reason for him to feel down. Even if Hugo Chavez is dead, his brother Adan Chavez has vowed to use force to stay in power. And that is the true socialist way. If you can't win an election or keep your strongman seated upright on his throne without stuffing him full of hay, then bring out the army and show the rabble who's really in charge. Nothing proves you're a man of the people like ruling through armed force.

The Progressive Reactionarism of the Postmodern Left

The absurdity of the postmodern left is that it is a chimera crossbred of contradictions mixing together technocracy and environmentalism. Hunting through the trash for discarded food and triumphantly blogging about it on a 500 dollar device. Big government projects and making your own shoes. Stand up to the man and tell him to appoint more bureaucrats. Read Dawkins and then blog about visiting a Middle Eastern mosque. Reject materialism in the latest carefully branded 200 dollar shoes made from recycled rubber tires.

Good News From Libya

The good news is that victory is all but assured in Libya. Just don't ask for whom, or how or why. Or any other questions for that matter. Ten years ago, liberals howled in outrage when President Bush said, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." They wanted a third option like remaining neutral. Or a fourth option of being with the terrorists, while still having the patriotic credibility of condemning any action against Muslim terrorists as "Un-American".

No Muslim Terrorism To See Here

What's your mental image of prison. Breaking rocks, risky showers and listening to trains go by where rich folks are eating from a fancy dining car?

A Long Walk Through New York

Yesterday I walked across half the width of the city. To walk across New York City is to see a study in contrasts. The ambitious skyscrapers of the real estate bubble and the declining working class neighborhoods being eaten away at by Halal markets and mosques. It is also to witness the prolonged death of the progressive vision for the city.

Technocracy Isn’t Policy

The celebration of the Arab Spring is built on faith in the redemptive ability of enhanced communications technologies to create a transparent global culture. To the true believers on the New York Times editorial page, it is axiomatic that cultural revolutions driven by communications technologies will be liberal. That anything which breaks down barriers must be liberal.

A Two State Solution for Turkey?

Imagine a European Union member nation which represses an ethnic minority that makes up a fifth of its population. Now imagine the EU being forced to take sides in a domestic civil war within its own union in which ethnic cleansing is the order of the day. That is the fate awaiting the EU if it admits Turkey as it is.

How Environmentalists Cause War and Repression

No other group has done as much to keep America dependent on foreign oil as the environmentalists have. After leading successful campaigns against nuclear power and domestic drilling, the green movement may lecture on "oil wars", but it is responsible for most of them.

America in a Chinese Mirror

Five months ago Chinese leader Hu Jintao held a high profile state dinner with Obama. Since then Obama has premised his policy proposals on a competition with China. Yet if he learned anything from that visit, it isn't at all obvious. For Hu Jintao, his American visit was a chance to reaffirm China as the world's second greatest superpower. Like Soviet Premier Khrushchev's extended tour of America, this visit was not about diplomacy, but a way of showing all the folks back home and around the world that there are only two nations worth mentioning in the same sentence.

No Telling Where To Go Next

Meet Obama's new appointee to promote religious freedom around the world.

Obama has announced the appointment of Azizah al-Hibri to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Al-Hibri (full name, Azizah Yahia Muhammad Toufiq al-Hibri) is a Muslim professor and the granddaughter of a Sheikh, who claims that the Koran inspired Thomas Jefferson and the Founders and that the Saudi criminal justice system is more moral than the American one because it accepts blood money from murderers.

The Liberal Apocalypse

Ideologies can be roughly divided into the moral and the economic. Moral ideologies seek to guide people in their individual behavior as they seek resources. Economic ideologies are concerned with collective control over how resources are gained and employed. Revolutionary movements are often linked with economic ideologies because resource redistribution is a primary motivator for political upheavals. The left is both a revolutionary movement and an economic ideology, using the pretext of inequities to seize power in order to engage in economic redistribution. However the modern left's actual agenda goes well beyond only seizing and redistributing material goods and financial holdings. Its goal is to completely control all human interactions in every form through political, cultural, social and economic tools.

Never Again

Never again. To Jews it means a refusal to give genocidal bigots another go at them. To Obama, it means refusing to ever again have to listen to an Israeli leader explain why his country cannot commit territorial suicide in order to appease a gang of genocidal bigots. When the Jews who fought among the crumbling walls of the Warsaw Ghetto finally made it to Israel, they came just in time to load up their guns and fight once again for their people's survival. The survivors of one genocidal ideology bent on making someone pay for its sense of humiliation came just in time to fight off another version of the same thing.

Loughner and the Insane State

As Gabrielle Giffords continues her recovery and Jared Loughner winds his way through the justice system, it is worth taking a look back five months at the consequences and implications of that day in Arizona.

Redistributing Freedom to Tyranny

There are frayed nerves in Silicon Valley at the prospect of the United Nations asserting a growing role in internet governance. But why indeed should that be? The United Nations is generally beloved the further left of center you go by people who agree that American power, wealth, productivity and decision making should be turned over to international bodies, most notably the UN. And if the UN is so wonderful and so much better than any government chosen by the American people could ever be, why not turn over the internet to it?

The “Muslims First” Foreign Policy

In France, American embassies and consulates have been directed to "empower" Muslims and push for the passage of "social reforms" that will benefit them. In the UK, American diplomats were directed to again "empower" Muslims and made outreach to them a top priority. In Israel, the US consulate in Jerusalem caters only to Muslims and does its best to pretend that Jews and Israel don't even exist. And when Obama visited Greece, what else did he do but push the political and religious authorities to open more mosques and Islamic schools. America's own interests and our obligations to our allies have been put aside to focus on a single goal of overriding importance. Pandering to the Muslim world. It's as if we have no other foreign policy goal anymore beyond keeping Muslims happy.

What Does It All Mean

The end of decency has been proclaimed over and over again throughout the 20th century. There's no way to pin down just when that line was crossed, but in public discourse it was crossed long ago. The last week or two are testimony to that. The slow death of the newspaper has not put an end to the tabloid spectacle. Instead it universalized it. Self-degradation turns into a public media orgy, in which all the participants, the promoters, the reporters and finally the readers become degraded. One man walks away completely disgraced from Weinergate, but all of us have been degraded in the process.

Beer, Ham and Muslim Shoes

The UK Home Secretary has warned about complacency in the face of Islamic extremism. But there are no worries about complacency when it comes to things that irritate Muslims. As a drunken fellow from Bristol found out when decided it would be funny to stuff pieces of ham into the shoes of mosquegoers. Twenty years ago this might have made for an amusing limerick. Today it's a possible two year jail term.

The Rise of the Post-American Empires

When the Utopians of the left talk about a Post-American world, they mean a great borderless globe ruled over by international law, where there are no more citizens or nations, just people who happen to enjoy working and living in New York, Shanghai or Islamabad. This digital jet setting globocratic version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' is their envisioned outcome of globalization. No more governments. Only one single world girdling government. But what the Utopians have never realized is that this vision is not universal, it springs from a Western liberal messianism that is big on faith in progressive government, and disdains national and tribal identities. And that means it is a vision that most of the globe does not share. And is never likely to share. The Utopians want an end to national power and cultural imperialism, but their globalist vision is cultural imperialism backed by national power.