Daniel Greenfield

The Efficiency War

The modern West has some of the most inefficient governments in human history which are obsessed with making things more efficient. Along with the inefficiently efficient machine, we also have two crises. One real one and one imaginary. The crisis of government growth and the crisis of global warming. Governments insist that we must adopt austerity to cope with the imaginary crisis of global warming, while reform advocates demand that governments adopt austerity to cope with the tremendous piles of debt and unsustainable spending.

Bibi the Survivor

Thirteen years after he was sent packing by Bill Clinton's political consultants and a phony third party, Bibi Netanyahu has become a political survivor. The awkward politician constantly under siege by the media and at the mercy of domestic political squabbling, has become a veteran of Israel's turbulent politics.

Israel’s Peace Disease

For the last twenty years Israel has been swept into an obsession with few parallels except to the Dutch Tulip economy. Except instead of tulips, its commodity of choice is an even more insubstantial thing, the faint promise of peace.

Winning the War

The last President to have taken part in actual combat left office nearly twenty years ago. It's a little-remarked milestone buried amid a great deal of posturing by leaders who want to talk the talk without having walked the walk. Since then, we have gone from a draft dodger to a man who never had to bother dodging, a commentary on a generational shift from a period when military service was not alien to the Yale and Harvard campuses. Meanwhile, the country remains in a conflict without end.

Victories and defeats

The whole "Gutsy Call" narrative depends on the calculus of risk. In going after Bin Laden, the SEALs were risking their lives, but what was Obama risking? An ordinary leader would at least be expected to suffer political fallout from a failure. But does anyone really believe that a media, which failed to hold Obama accountable for his defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic disaster in Egypt and Libya, not to mention an economic crater, would have held him accountable if the operation had failed?

Everyone Booze Up and Riot

Riots are the exclusive domain of those who view themselves as outside the law. Whether they are outside the law because they are above or below it is a matter of perspective. The rioters may see themselves as the oppressed who are below the law while their victims tend to think of them as above the law, with the power to rob and kill, without paying any significant price for it. All that is true whether we are talking about Russian peasants killing Jews, Indonesians killing ethnic Chinese or African-Americans killing whites. The riot is usually directed at the authorities or some vulnerable group, sometimes both, but invariably one of them takes precedence. The authorities prefer that the rioters direct their rage at a conveniently vulnerable group and afterward the vulnerable group takes the blame for the violence directed at them. The rioters treat those few of their number who were killed in the looting spree as martyrs, while the rioted-upon pick up the broken glass and try to reopen their stores again.

The Forwardism Disease

The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it's "Forward", which is a compact version of that old classic, "Don't change horses in the middle of a stream" that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there's no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go. The left has always been enamored of "Forwardism" or "Progressivism" which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs. When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, "Vperod" or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It's Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it's The Forward, the venerable blotting paper of the Jewish left.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Israel

In times past the Forward newspaper celebrated the fast of Yom Kippur with a feast and in keeping with that tradition it celebrated Israel's Independence Day by rewriting its anthem to remove the word "Jew" from it. The linguistic purge from the notoriously anti-Israel paper was meant as a way to help Muslims feel better about singing the Israeli national anthem. The yearning of the Jewish soul becomes the yearning of the Israeli soul and the eyes turned east no longer long for Zion, but the generic "our country". The proposal made by a self-proclaimed linguist seems rather devoid of understanding when it comes to the origin and meaning of words. Purging Jewish souls from the anthem and replacing them with Israeli souls doesn't actually solve anything.

The Empire of Poverty

Controlling a large number of people isn't easy. The United States alone consists of 312 million people spread out across nearly 4 million square miles. Add on nearly 500 million for the population of the European Union and another nearly 4 million square miles of territory. Then pile on Canada with 34 million people and another 4 million square miles, Australia with 22 million and 3 million square miles and a few other stragglers here and there, and the postmodern rulers of the progressive empire have to cope with nearly a billion people spread out across 15 million square miles.

The Flying Car Culture

Every now and then a hobbyist inspired by splashy magazine covers featuring art deco cities and soaring vehicles full of the cheerful people of the future puts together a flying car. The result is noted chiefly for its novelty and then everyone moves along because we aren't a flying car culture. From the bottom up we might long to soar above the highways, but from the top down we are a light rail culture, a biodegradable house culture and a guard rail culture.

Builders and Destroyers

We are more than who we are at any given moment. We are also who we aspire to be. Both Zimmerman and Martin were flawed men, but Zimmerman's writings and behavior showed a man who aspired to be something better, while Martin's showed that he wanted only to sink down. Martin can't be entirely blamed for that, he did not create and perpetuate the fake gansta culture. It's the mostly white entertainment industry that did that, often embedded in the same news corporations which organized the lynching of George Zimmerman.

Israel, A Nation Once Again

Israel's Jewish population is approaching six million. If current birth rates hold steady that significant milestone will be reached in time for next year's Independence Day. If there is to be one.

The United Nation’s Useless Genocide Trials

Last year I completed a pamphlet on 10 Reasons to Abolish the UN for the Freedom Center, which you can find at its online bookstore that explores the reasons why the United Nations is a threat to the United States and to freedom around the world. You can learn more about the pamphlet from this video and this excerpt below that discusses the failures of the UN not only at preventing genocide, but at trying those responsible. How effective is the United Nations at tackling genocide? When it happens or is about to happen, its peacekeeping forces usually find a good reason to be somewhere else. And the Security Council and General Assembly find some pressing Israeli matter to concentrate on. But what about after the fact?

The Savage Lands of Islam

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has ruled that ten year old girls can be married off, because in his words, "Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age." The Mufti, who also recently called for destroying churches in the Arabian Peninsula, is descended from Mohammed Wahhab who gave birth to Wahhabism and his descendants have controlled the Saudi religious establishment, which has given them control of Islam around the world. For all his power and influence, the Mufti is blind and hasn't seen a thing in the last 52 years, an apt metaphor for his entire religion.

The Universalist Holocaust

Everyone deals with trauma in different ways. Getting violently attacked on a street late at night. Watching a loved one murdered in front of your eyes. Feeling the fire on your skin as your home burns. It's not just the pain of the experience, it's realizing afterward how your world has changed and that your life will never be the same. There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself. I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world.

All the Morals of a Bulldozer

To be genuinely outraged about something, you need to actually believe in something. Without principles, outrage is just tactical anger, or bullying in plainer language. Principles, values and codes, are universal. That is if you are angry about a dog being mistreated by riding on top of a car, then you should at least be equally angry at dogs being eaten. If a man shooting another man after a confrontation and not being charged for it angers you, then it should anger you regardless of the color of his skin. For that matter, if racism or sexism offends you, then it should offend you regardless of whether it is directed at a woman or a black man who is a liberal or a conservative.

Afghanistan At Home

Last week I was able to observe some of the top police brass doing what they do and it struck me how similar Community Policing is to Counterinsurgency. Both are methods used to control violence in fragmented multicultural areas by building trust and winning over tribal leaders in the hopes of lowering their group's participation in crime and terrorism while getting them to cooperate with the local forces and act as informants on the bad guys.

Oprahism and the Church of Obama

Many people have noted that Obama's rhetoric often feels off, but fewer have looked into why that is so. A great part of Obama's success has been his ability to invoke values detached from belief systems. To break away symbols and ideals from religious and national value systems, and mix and match them into his own soundbites. Like the famous Hope poster, that mixed patriotic color schemes with socialist realism, or Obama's own logo, which mixed corporate branding with national politics-- Obama's "brand" was built out of a barely coherent mishmash of clashing elements. The only thing they all have in common is that they are bricks in the wall of Obama's image. They all combine together to promote him.

Israel 50 Years From Now

Last month I appeared at an event organized by the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the David Horowitz Freedom Center on the topic of "Israel in 50 Years" that explores how Israel will make it to 50 years from now. Below you can read some adapted excerpts from my talk and see the video of the remarks.

We Are All George Zimmerman

Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. What he neglected to mention was that they were just as likely to be infamous. Zimmerman had decorated his flyers and website with the famous quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is that good men do nothing." His activities reveal a man who took those words to heart, who put his time, money and safety on the line to become one of those good men who do something. But the problem was that Zimmerman had been reading Burke, when he should have been reading Kafka.