Daniel Greenfield

From Slavery to Freedom

As another Passover comes to an end and the cycle of the year continues its brief spin, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem, some of us are already there now, but will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh and the last sight of his pyramids and armies?

Bread and Racial Circuses

Forget the bread. The economy is in the toilet and unless you know someone who ponied up for a front row seat at an Obama fundraiser, it's staying there. 'Better together' is the slogan, which means it only gets better if you stay together with The One. And I don't mean vote for him, I mean get the hook up. Just ask Warren Buffett, economic reform crusader, billionaire class warrior and inside dealer.

Better or Worse?

All politics are the politics of the future. The one cause that we all champion, regardless of our political orientation, is the cause of the future. All that we fight for is the ability to shape the future.

The Red Lorelei of Gunter Grass

A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge.

In Green We Trust

Feral children deprived of language develop their own forms of communication and it may be that societies deprived of religion develop their own belief systems. Religion is, at its core, a means of explaining the world and it becomes absurdly easy for science to slip into the habits of religion. To break down religion to its essence is to say that there is a creative force which has given us life and that the proper way to live is to be in harmony with this creative force. Sinfulness consists of acts which disrupt the life-giving activity of the creative force creating a disharmony which manifests itself in destructive events around us. These destructive events may build to an apocalyptic crescendo that will separate the faithful from the infidels and transform our way of life to a purely harmonious one.

One Hundred Broken Mirrors

Old wars never really go away. Thirty years after Falklands, Argentina and the UK are still facing off over the islands. Bananas are going for a pound each and there's an egg shortage among the native population.

The Stories We Tell

The story of the Naked Emperor is one of the most powerful stories we have because it is about the nakedness of our fictions, it is a story about the stories we tell, stories so widely accepted that they make the most naked lies possible. Our bookstores and libraries have fiction and non-fiction sections, tightly delineating the difference between the two, and while it is polite to admire the authors in the fiction section for their inventive storytelling, it is riskier to go up to a New York Times journalist and compliment him for the same thing. But it is riskiest of all to treat a story that the media is telling us as nothing but a story.

The Democratic Party and Jewish Anti-Semitism

There's a thin line between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. That's true of Muslims and the left, but it's also true specifically of the Jewish left, whose hatred for Israel manifests itself in a general contempt for Jewish religion, culture and tradition. Take the Jewbags case of Danielle Gilbert, a staffer for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who had been appointed the DNC's Jewish outreach liaison. In a social media mishap, Gilbert posed along with her friends in a photo that she captioned "JEWBAGS" and that a friend of hers captioned as "Jew cash money team."

The Liberal Jewish Eunuch

The verdict is in on the Tolouse killings of Jewish children and the villain is that old standby, "Failure to Integrate". What it comes down to is that Mohammed Merah did not kill Jewish children because he hated Jews, because he had breathed in the foul poisonous vapors of a creed which believes Jews to be subhuman devils whose destruction must come to pass before the golden age of Islam finally arrives. Mohammed Merah killed Jews because he was unhappy and it was France that made him unhappy.

Christian Blood on Obama’s Hands

On Christmas Day of last year, Muslim terrorists set off bombs in churches across Nigeria. It was one of the worst attacks by Boko Haram, which is determined to continue its reign of terror until the country is ruled by Muslim law. Christian pastors have been beheaded by Boko Haram and a spokesman for the group has openly stated that their interim goal is "to eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country."

Utopia’s Free Lunch

Lunch is a nice meal and a free lunch is even nicer. The problem with free lunches is that someone always has to pay for them. Lunches don't grow on trees, unless they're fresh fruit, the ingredients have to be gathered, processed, shipped, mixed, prepared, packaged, shipped again and put on your plate by a waiter working in an establishment that has to pay rent, heating, electricity and salaries.

The Bankrupt Race Card

The Trayvon Martin case is a wholly familiar one to residents of any major urban city. If you live in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, then it's only a matter of time until an incident between a law enforcement officer, or more rarely a civilian defending himself, and a member of a minority group flares up into a citywide grievance theater complete with angry reverends on the steps of City Hall, women with stony faces holding up banners calling for justice and a media-driven debate about police tactics and racism.

The Total Power of the Mandate

The only real lesson of the ObamaCare defense is that if you define the macro broadly enough, you are entitled to completely control every aspect of the micro. Everyone can be compelled to buy health insurance because health care is no longer a service bought from a doctor, it is a national market which everyone by definition participates in. The market is then divided between good consumers who buy health insurance and the parasites who don't. Alternative possibilities such as people who pay as you go, choose alternative health care or reject medicine entirely for religious or political reasons don't figure into a macro equation which sees people in the macro, not as individuals.

All the Pravda

For a man so in love with the technology of image, the camera, the microphone and the teleprompter, the leader of the increasingly less free world has a natural tendency to put a little too much faith in it. This is the second time that an open microphone has let Obama down, the first time it recorded him stabbing an ally in the back, the second time it recorded him stabbing a few dozen more in the back. Medvedev, whose bosom buddy just managed to cling to power with a stolen election and brutal suppression of protests, surely understands how O feels. Photo ops with tigers and sunken treasures, not to mention skiing, martial arts, and even rap, did not keep the Big P in smooth with the Russian public when the economy headed south.

It Doesn’t Matter If You’re Black or White

"It doesn't matter if you're black or white," Michael Jackson sang, even as he embarked on a journey to crudely transform himself from one to the other through plastic surgery. Around the same time a biracial man who had grown up in a white family was protesting on behalf of a vehemently racist black professor. That man, who would later make it to the Senate and then the White House, chose to identify as black. In the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, its columnist, Leonard Pitts Jr., insists that George Zimmerman is white because race is a construct and whiteness is not color, but privilege, making it completely indistinguishable from class. To indict Zimmerman, who is Hispanic and part of a multi-racial family structure, as a white racist, Pitts is forced to argue that race isn't race. Anyone who is of the "oppressed of the earth" is really black and anyone who is privileged is white.

The Crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism

Every now and then the left discovers someone who tells them what they already think, but puts a glossier edge on it, and elevates him to the status of "Serious Thinker". This is the office for which Peter Beinart has been briefly nominated. The chief prerequisite for becoming a serious thinker on the left is to state what is obvious to the left without actually seriously considering its obviousness. This is what Peter Beinart delivers by providing an indulgence for leftist Israel bashing by telling the bashers that they aren't bad Jews, it's the Israelis who are bad Jews, bad Democrats and bad people all around.

The New Nazis

There was a time when Jewish children were hunted down and killed in France. Their killers believed themselves to be members of a superior group that was destined to rule the world and enslave or exterminate members of inferior groups. The cowardice and appeasement of the French authorities allowed them to operate freely, to kill Jews and launch attacks on other countries. What was then is now again. The occupying army doesn't wear uniforms, it wears keffiyahs. It doesn't speak German, it speaks Arabic. It doesn't believe that it is superior for reasons of race as much as for reasons of religion. It does not view all others as Untermenschen, but as infidels. It looks forward not to a thousand year Reich, but to a thousand year Caliphate.

The Socialist Apprentice

The fundamental question that a people must ask is whether they want to be independent of their government, or dependent on it? Is government to be a tool that we use when we need it and put away when we don't, or a master that oversees our affairs and uses us as its tools. The question is not a new one, though it continues to be asked over and over again, as each generation comes into its own, and examines what it is they want of government. Most people want there to be limitations on government, but at the same time they want government to carry out certain functions for them.

Gordon Gekko in Red

Radical theorists never really go away. The debates over what Machiavelli really had in mind still continue, but they are almost irrelevant because it is not what he meant that matters, but what The Prince has meant to actual leaders and rulers as a guide for taking and holding power. The scribblings of every halfway notable leftist scribe drawing out a theoretical society built on some perfect method are still around, no matter how much they have been discredited in practice. Alinsky is the last of them, not the truly last one, but the last of them with anything meaningful to say about applying leftist politics to the modern state, far less interested in how an ideal system should work and far more interested in how to realistically seize power in a modern state with open elections and all the other aspects of a free society.

The Tao of Warmongering

A day after Barack Hussein Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, he gave a press conference and responded to a question of what would happen if sanctions on Iran fail (more than they have already) by denouncing "those who are suggesting, or proposing, or beating the drums of war". On cue, the Pravda press rushed to their iPads to begin tapping out the appropriate denunciations of Republican candidates, Netanyahu and American Jews for their warmongering. However, at that same press conference, Obama was careful to draw a distinction between Syria and Iran. When asked whether his "window of diplomatic opportunity" and serious face remarks about the "costs of war" applied to Syria as well as Iran, the peacemonger suddenly became the warmonger, asserting that, "What’s happening in Syria is heartbreaking and outrageous, and what you’ve seen is the international community mobilize against the Assad regime. And it’s not a question of when Assad leaves -- or if Assad leaves -- it’s a question of when."