Daniel Greenfield

Failed State Colonization - The Greatest Threat of Our Time

Let's compare two countries side by side. Country A has a sizable middle class and economy, social welfare benefits and a low birth rate. Country B is a failed state where thugs run amok in the street, a few families control the economy and the birth rate is off the charts.

Scarecrow Empires and Broken Alliances

Prime Minister Netanyahu's address to congress was less about the contents of his speech and more about the familiarity. Like Tony Blair, he was startlingly at home here. His presence an instinctive reminder of an alliance based on commonality and fellowship, weighed against the realpolitik of multinationalism. The warmth in his tone countering the cold counsel of foreign policy hands demanding more pressure. The chilly reception that Gordon Brown and Benjamin Netanyahu received on their visits from the Obama Administration are post-modern fracture points in the old friendships. The instinctive kinship that Blair and Netanyahu called on are completely alien to Obama who feels far more warmth toward Egypt or Indonesia, than England and Israel. But Obama's foreignness to the old traditions is only a small fracture point in the larger break.

How the Left Went Wrong on Islam

What makes the creeping political correctness on Islam so startling is its very newness. It wasn't so long ago that the right and the left both agreed that as a religion and a political movement, it was dangerously backward and violent. From Winston Churchill, "Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance" to Karl Marx, "Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever", leading figures on the right and the left held a realistic understanding of Islam. They dismissed it as violent, barbaric, ignorant and dangerous. The right saw Islam as a threat to the Western Christian hegemony. The left viewed it as a reactionary movement of superstitious fanatics. They might praise Arab generals or scientists, but not the creed itself.

Three Cheers for Terroristine

We need a terrorist state. Where the politicians are terrorists, the police are terrorists and even the men sitting at the desk when you come in to drop off a form are terrorists. There are states that support terrorists, and give safe harbor to them, but that's not good enough. We don't want another Pakistan or Iran. We're not half-assing it this time. What we want is the genuine article. Terrorists from the top down. Terrorists everywhere. A state where every branch of government and the entire country is nothing but terrorists.

End of the World

The media has been having a prolonged belly laugh at a group that had the temerity to suggest that the world would end today. Of course it's ridiculous when Harold Camping predicted that the world will be over today, but not when Al Gore predicted that the North Pole would melt in five years. True believers in Gore would say that's the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don't follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?

Peace In Our Weekend

Haven't you always wanted to send your money directly to imprisoned terrorists? Well now you can thanks to cooperation between the Obama Administration and the Palestinian Authority which will now be paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists. The PA doesn't have much of a tax base, except the Americans, Israelis and Europeans who serve as their tax base.

A law published in the official Palestinian Authority Registry last month grants all Palestinians and Israeli Arabs imprisoned in Israel for terror crimes a monthly salary from the PA.

The latest US contribution to the PA budget\Adopt a Terrorist is a quarter of a billion.

The Ghosts of America Haunt Social Security

In a country with a life expectancy almost as long as the lines at the offices of its bureaucracy, the scale and scope of health care spending is nothing to marvel at. But it is not so much the entitlements themselves that are expensive, as the cost of the liberal social policies that surround them.

A People’s Approach to National Security

Two recent incidents, a tweeted photo of TSA agents examining a baby and a man shouting pounding on a cockpit door while shouting "Allah Akbar" being subdued by passengers, remind us of the absurd fictions of airline security. The biggest fiction of airline security is that it is secure. The second biggest fiction is that it is even meant to be secure. The TSA and its naked scanners don't exist to provide security, but to provide plausible deniability when an attack does happen. It was created to answer the question "Why did you let 9/11 happen". And the answer is if something happens again, this time we did everything we could short of poking sharp objects into passengers orifices or profiling Muslim as potential terrorists. But the TSA's breast milk and baby follies are a side effect of a law enforcement culture which is less concerned with public safety, than it is with public order. Where public safety works to identify threats, public order concentrates on enforcing the rules. Public safety looks for the wolf in the fold, public order treats everyone like the wolf.

Nakbacide

Imagine if every year on the 7th of May, Germans held an annual commemoration of the defeat of the Nazi state, complete with Swastikas, anti-Jewish chants and slogans, and a historical narrative claiming that the Volksdeutsche expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were the real victims of WW2. That disgusting spectacle is exactly what takes place on May 15th as Arab Muslims chant and riot to protest their unsuccessful genocide of a regional minority.

Liberalism’s Rape Corps

Two years ago the left launched a major assault on Haliburton over its mishandling of two sexual assault cases by or against its civilian contractors. Al Franken successfully introduced a bill to bar defense contracts from going to companies who behave likewise. Left wing media boasted that they were the defenders of rape victims, while Republicans support rape. Now for the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, it's been revealed that over a 1,000 female volunteers have been raped in the last decade. Numbers that are positively 9/11 in scope. And that the idealistic Peace Corps leadership acted like the evil Haliburton leadership, blaming the victims and discouraging them from seeking legal action. There are no cries that Democrats support rape. No bills to defund the Corps, that awkward legacy of New Frontierism. This time it's Republicans, like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, stepping up to demand accountability. And it's the Democrats who are standing in the way.

Allahu Akbar

No sooner does a Yemeni Muslim begin hammering on the cockpit door shouting "Allahu Akbar", then the media speculates that he must have gotten confused looking for the bathroom. And on September 11, four groups of Muslim men with boxcutters got confused looking for the nearest post office. The lead is invariably buried. Paragraphs fly by until it's mentioned that the confused fellow may have been a Muslim. If it's mentioned at all. And his cry of Allahu Akbar is translated as God is Great to render it more acceptable to readers. But like so many Islamic translations, it's right enough to be wrong. Allahu Akbar doesn't mean Allah is Great, in a "Isn't 'Allah and the Virgins of Paradise' a great band". It's more like Allah is Greatest or Superior. And if you're on the right side of the cockpit door, the one doing the shouting 'Allahu Akbar' means that Allah is superior to your country and to you. And one of his followers is about to do his best to show you why.

The Long Election March

So Romney gave his "I'm going to be the nominee and there's nothing you can do about it" speech. His assertion that he's going to win without having to bother playing up to the Tea Party. And what else would you call a defense of the mandate, something that even many liberals dislike.

The Bullied Nation

When Obama inaugurated a conference on bullying by announcing that he too had been bullied, he made the one confession that no world leader should ever make. At least not a world leader who ever hopes to be taken seriously. But by this time it was doubtful that there was a world leader who didn't know that Obama could be bullied. Many of them had been rather successful at bullying him already.

A Few Good Political Opportunists

First term elections usually bring out two types of candidates. The obligatory candidates and the unexpected candidates. The obligatory candidates are men dry and stale as old toast, who have packed in enough favors to be party stalwarts. They aren't really there to win, but to place. To remind everyone that the Republican party still exists and isn't so bad really. Not the people you might want to choose this time around, but keep your eye on us next time when we really decide to give it the old college try.

Who Can Count the Dust of Jacob

"Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel" Numbers 23:10 The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking arms and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day.

The King of I

Obama's predilection for turning his speeches into 'I' flavored confections is his unconscious and unselfconscious communion at that holiest of postmodern institutions, the cult of the self. It is a religion without faith, stripping away the deity and theology, leaving behind only the crisis of self-esteem. The great existential question of the cult of self is how to be happy. The resolution is invariably self-love.

Muslims Ragefully Mourn Bin Laden

European media elites are sniffing their hardest over the barbaric Americans celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden.

Killing the Bin Laden Within

A group of Navy SEALS may have stormed a Pakistani garrison town and taken off the top of Bin Laden's head, but he still lives on in the heads of the political establishment. The big Bin Laden has gone to feed the sharks, but it is the little Bin Laden who dictated that he receive a Muslim burial, forbade the release of the death photos and warned off the town of Virginia Beach from celebrating their hometown heroes. It was never the big Bin Laden that the West was afraid of, but the little one. A small turbaned figure that sits in the heads of the establishment and drives its officials and legislators to wonder if they have somehow upset the Muslims this day. The big Bin Laden could never have imprisoned an American in his own country for even thinking about protesting a mosque. Not with any amount of death or carnage. The big Bin Laden could never have gotten newspapers to refuse to print the Mohammed cartoons. He could kill us, but he could never make us censor ourselves.

Patriotism is the Last Refuge of a Liberal

The man who came into office promising multilateral engagement, no more torture and a civilian justice system for terrorists, now has only accomplishment to his name. A unilateral invasion and assassination based on intelligence gained through enhanced interrogation, carried out by men whom his supporters had once condemned as a secret assassination squad. What a failure Obama is that even the one success to his name is a testament to the failure of his own ideas.

Al Qaeda’s Next Wave of Terror

The death of Osama bin Laden is important only for its symbolic message, because Bin Laden had long ago ceased to be a figure of any operational importance and become a symbol of the Jihad. As a 'martyr' he will be just as useful. Perhaps even more so. His death is not a period, but an anticlimactic comma in a run on sentence whose full length still remains unclear. For Americans it's a chance to celebrate the death of the man who became a symbol of Islamic terrorism. For Muslims it means a day of mourning for the death of a new Saladin. No matter how dead he is now, he achieved his goal of becoming a symbol of the Jihad for an Islamic world order. And that Jihad will not be buried in the ground with him.