Daniel Greenfield

A Special Message from Barack Obama

-Satire Hello American Voter,

Muslims and Moral Handicaps

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants an investigation into Koran burning. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that this form of free speech could be banned. Senator Lindsey Graham is also looking for ways to limit free speech, saying, "Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war". Free speech is more than a great idea, it's a fundamental freedom untouchable by legislators. But all it takes is a few Muslim murders-- and Reid, Breyer and Graham eagerly hold up their lighters to the Constitution. Free speech has been curtailed before in the United States during a time of war-- but only free speech sympathetic to the enemy. During WW1 a suspected German propagandist filmmaker was jailed. But could anyone have imagined anti-German propagandists being jailed? The Wilson administration was behaving unconstitutionally, but not insanely.

Mr. Obama’s Libyan Adventure

It's a lot easier to start a war than it is to finish it, as Mr. Obama is learning on his Libyan adventure. That is why wars are generally entered into after some consideration of the situation on the ground. There is only one excuse for a rush to war-- and that is either an imminent threat or in response to an act of war. Such was the case after September 11, and yet even then the United States waited longer to begin bombing the Taliban-- than we did before bombing Gaddafi. Obama rushed in when bombing Libya was popular, and now when it hasn't he's rushing out again. The US is ending combat operations almost as soon as it began them to avoid being associated with the failure of the Libyan intervention. Or rather to avoid associating Obama with its failure. Obama was happy to take credit for the fall of Mubarak until the Muslim Brotherhood stepped up to succeed him. He was happy to take credit for toppling Gaddafi until he realized that it wasn't going to happen without a full bore invasion. The Arab Revolt was cool, but now it isn't anymore. And Obama doesn't want to be associated with it anymore. Suddenly it's last year's Keffiyah lying in the trash.

Bully for You

(See these and other American Legion covers at Today's Inspiration)

In New York, Osman Daramy, a 12 African boy was charged with a 'hate crime' because while bullying a number of kids in the school, one of the kids he bullied was a Muslim girl. And in between punching her, he tore off her Hijab. The message is that it's okay to bully kids and to beat them up, so long as you don't touch the Hijab.

"This child is a terror. He goes around terrorizing staff and students," said a teacher at Dreyfus. On Monday, Osman raised hell in one class when he ran amok wielding scissors after using them to cruelly lop off a girl's hair, sources said. But instead of being booted from school or arrested, Osman was merely "suspended in-house," a teacher said.

- Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Unsolved Problem of Labor

Both national and local newspapers have made a great show of commemorating the Triangle Waist Company fire, a horrifying event in which women working in a sweatshop burned alive or fell to their deaths. The Triangle fire was not the only example of sweatshop abuses, but it was the most horrifying, and even a 100 years later it is being used by labor advocates to make a point. But that point may not be what they think it is.

The Known Unknowns of Libya

The Libyan war may be dumbest war we have ever stumbled into. It is a war where the Secretary of Defense has admitted we have no national interest, a war where we don't know on whose behalf we're fighting or why we're even there. A war that the White House did not bother to run by either congress or the American people, except after the fact. A war that appears to be fought at the behest England, France, their oil companies, and a motley collection of Libyan rebels ranging from former regime thugs to Al Qaeda.

Sitting in the Dark

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of going to see a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment. For all its pretentious activism, environmentalism is a movement that promotes inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its commandments. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now. Slacker morality at its best.

Saving 1 Billion People from Themselves

The West is almost as in love with improving the world, as the Muslim world is with conquering it. These two contradictory impulses, the missionary and the warrior, intersect in the Clash of Civilizations. The Muslim world has two approaches to the West, underhanded deceit and outright terror. The former are considered moderates and the latter extremists. The West has two approaches to the Muslim world, regime change and love bombing. With regime change we bomb their cities to save them from their rulers and with love bombing we shamelessly flatter and appease them in our own cities.

The Massacre of Meaning

When terrorists planted bomb in a bag near a bus station killing a Scottish Bible translator studying ancient Hebrew, and wounding dozens more including six Americans -- Reuters decided it was time to explain to its audience what that peculiar Hebraic term, "Terrorist Attack" meant. Police described the explosion as a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike," Reuters elucidated. Reuter's term for a terrorist attack turns out to be "Palestinian strike", which suggests a labor rally by terrorists demanding more virgins in paradise and more euphemistic media coverage. If such were their demands, then they got their wish.

The State of Dysfunction

Obama's Libyan adventure has thrown a confusing wrench into the gears of the liberal reelection machine. Up until then it had been a fairly straightforward campaign, with the media touting an imaginary economic recovery, blaming a Republican congress for obstructionism, flirting with a government shutdown and organizing a labor pushback against economic reforms. Maybe taking some credit for Cairo. Simple enough. But Libya complicates things.

The Second Time as Farce

It was Hegel who said that history repeats itself because nations and governments fail to learn from it, but it was Karl Marx who added that history repeats itself a second time as farce. Which makes it all too appropriate that Obama is repeating the Bush era as farce. For years American liberals accused George W. Bush of being dumb and unserious-- only to elect a man who actually is dumb and unserious. Who announces a war in between his NCAA picks and a trip to Rio. Who has spent more time playing golf, than directing the war effort. Who spends more time in front of the mirror and the camera, than on policy.

A Little Energy is a Dangerous Thing

he word has come down from on high, and the word is "No More Nukes". By 'on high', I mean the editorial page of the Washington Post, and by 'word' I mean the unconsidered acknowledgment of a popular impulse. Nuclear power is as dead as offshore oil drilling was after the BP gulf leak. As dead as politicians want to make it. But you can't kill an idea, just pass it on to someone else. While the Washington Post wrings its black and white hands, China explores Thorium reactors. Thorium may not be the solution, but giving up certainly isn't.

Bin Laden is Winning

Osama Bin Laden's 1996 fatwa against America was the first domino in a chain of events that was meant to accomplish three goals.

1. Unify Muslims in a war against Western civilization
2. Topple the governments of the Muslim world, and replace them with fully Islamist regimes.
3. Build a regional and then global Muslim Caliphate

The Plot to Destroy the US Military

In two generations we have gone from General Patton telling his troops to grease their tanks with the enemy's guts to an extensive purge of Navy command officers over a series of raunchy video skits. Slowly but surely we are turning the greatest armed forces into the world, into the most politically correct disarmed forces the world has ever seen. The USS Enterprise crackdown, like the firing of General McChrystal and the push to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", completely ignore military realities for political objectives. A political military is also a useless military. Stalin's purges of the Russian Army's commanders left the Soviet Union completely unprepared for the Nazi attack. And the US military is being shaped along the same lines into a political military overseen by men whose chief credential is that they share the same politics as the politicians whom they serve.

It’s About the Power Struggle

Bad ideas are a dime a dozen. It's when political systems are based around bad ideas that the problem begins. You can argue with a bad idea, but you can't argue with an institution. All you can do is argue around the institution. Wisconsin gave us a showdown between a state facing a cash crunch and a public sector union. It was not a battle of ideas-- but of power. The modern American union gives the left a cut of every unionized business. It forces the employees and indirectly the owners, to put money into the party coffers, vote for their causes and donate to their candidates. The union is sacrosanct to the left because it shifts power from the owners to them. If unions actually shifted power over to the workers, the left wouldn't bother with them. Unions that did that would be their worst nightmare. The Democratic party values unions as organizing machines, not out of any romantic notion of workers' rights.

Wag the Libyan Dog

 So now we have a No Fly Zone resolution on Libya. And the man who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008 as being the candidate who wouldn't have gone into Iraq, is now running in 2012 as the candidate who will go into Libya. Hypocrisy is a beautiful beast and politics is a petting zoo.

The Muslim Terrorist War against Israeli Families

The brutal murders of the Fogel family, including the beheading of a 3 month old baby, stabbed a 3 year old twice in the heart, murdered both their parents, along with an 11 year old brother who was staying up late reading in bed, have shocked the world. But the Muslim terrorist tactic of massacring families is not a new one. It has been a signature move of the PLO in its various phases, especially the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Many of us would like to think that men who murder children are an aberration even in a terrorist movement. That perhaps the terrorists who murdered the Fogel family did not deliberately target children. It would be nice to think that we live in a world where such acts are an aberration rather than a tactic. Sadly that isn't so. We live next door to evil. And it is vital that we see that and not look away.

The Post-American Liberal Culture

Even as an NPR associate was admitting that it had marginalized itself by targeting a liberal culture elite (which she generously estimated at 11 percent of the country), David Brooks was making the case that America needs PBS to provide it with a common culture. So which is it. Is public broadcasting the realm of a liberal culture elite or a defining common ground for what being an American means? Liberals have over time successfully redefined liberal values as American values.

A Crisis of Unsustainable Consumption

The budget stalemate between the right and the left comes down to a basic difference in economic views, the left feels that we need to tax more in order to consume more money, and the right believes that we need to consume less money in order to tax less. Whichever side of the argument you come down on, it's not hard to see which of these positions is fundamentally unsustainable. And it is amazing that the same people who can and do lecture for hours on environmental sustainability, seem to have no grasp of economic sustainability. If you tell them that the solution to high fish prices is to catch more fish, they will tell you right away that you'll fish out the lake. But tell them that the deficit is too high and their immediate solution will be to tax more, never considering the possibility that it's possible to tax human resources, as much as natural resources.

An Open Letter to Harvey Weinstein

On the same day that a family of five were being murdered in their home in Israel, Harvey Weinstein ran a self-congratulatory promotional piece for his company's terrorist propaganda flick, Miral. The photos stand out. The fat smirking face of Harvey Weinstein contrasted with the sleeping baby, the smiling little boys and the earnest couple who were their parents. They are all dead, and a Harvey Weinstein lives on to smirk another day. So it is with perpetrators and victims. The innocent children and the fat ugly men who profit from trafficking in the narrative of their killers. Harvey Weinstein denounces Peter King and urges him to go watch Miral. But perhaps it is Harvey Weinstein who should drive to a small town lost in the Samarian Mountains and retrace the steps of the murderers in the name of the nationalistic mythology that movies like Miral glamorize.