Daniel Greenfield

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."

A Just War

With the War in Afghanistan dwindling in in the rear-view mirrors of an administration gunning for an exit in time for the election and a conflict in Syria cresting the hill just below the sunset, it may be time to revisit the just war. Whether a war is just or not has nothing to do with multilateral approval. An unjust war can be approved of by a hundred nations. A just war may be entirely unilateral. International parliamentary procedures are a process, and like all processes do not make a course of action just or unjust, they only make it legal under international law. Legal and just are not the same thing.

The Consensus Wants You

While terms like "The Marketplace of Ideas" are still tossed about occasionally like confetti out of a tenth story window, they mean about as much as the soiled mass of tape that everyone has stepped on by the time the parade is over. The age of ideas, when issues might actually be debated, instead of answered immediately with talking points derived from an inflexible ideology whose only two poles are outrage and guilt, ended some time ago.

How I Became a Hate Group

When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group. Being declared a hate group wasn't in my plans for the day, but, like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don't even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group.

The Blood Price of Afghanistan

The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone, is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent. There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat.

No Joy in Romneytown

Rarely have Republican voters made it as obvious that they would rather have anyone else than the inevitable nominee. Romney has the delegates summons all the voter enthusiasm of Taft and Ford combined. The establishment, as usual, isn't paying attention or pondering the implication of a situation where Rick Santorum is repeatedly beating out Romney, not just because of his message, but because any non-Romney is capable of doing the same thing. And has done it. The history of these primaries has been a list of alternative candidates to Romney who is winning because the candidates have either been personally destroyed by the media and/or the establishment, or because they have gotten in each other's way. Romney has not gotten this far on merit. Had he been up against a leading competent candidate all the way through, he would now be in the same position that he was in 2008.

A World of Refugees

The old paradigm that a country has the right to decide who enters it has been decisively overturned in Europe, it's under siege in such first world countries as America, Canada, Australia and Israel by the creed that says it's the human rights obligation of every nation to accept every refugee. Given a chance, a sizable portion of the third world would move to the first, a minority because of oppression and a majority because the opportunities and freebies are much better there. Even low ranked first-world nations still find themselves swamped with refugees looking to move in.

Over the Cliff We Go

It seems as if the Obama Administration will mainly be remembered for two things. Turning over the entire Middle East to the Muslim Brotherhood and badly mishandling the automotive industry.

The Ages of Purim

Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim commemorating a historical incident of little relevance to the present day, involving a plot to exterminate the Jewish people. It is one of those holidays that, like most Jewish holidays, is inconvenient for liberal clergy because it involves violence and nationalism. And unlike Chanukah, on Purim, the Jews did not wait around to be massacred for a decade or two before they fought back, instead they carried out a preemptive strike.

On WLIB, It’s 1984 on the Dial

What we think the talking heads are talking about when they condemn racism, misogyny or some other form of bigotry is entirely detached from what they are actually talking about. If you are reading this, the odds are that you define racism as an expression of racial bigotry. That is the formal definition, but it is as meaningful to the actual use of the terminology as reaching for a Latin dictionary or trying to make sense of the vocabulary of the Picts. That definition has long been as outdated as the steam engine.

The View from a Broken Bridge

Between the modern and the post-modern worlds, peace negotiations took on the fevered air of senseless enthusiasm that was once the sole preserve of wars. Once upon a time it was treasonous to oppose wars, now it is virtually mandatory to do so. Today it is treasonous to oppose peace processes, no matter how ill-founded, how senseless and how pointless they might be. The treason is no longer toward a country, but toward an ideal. What ideal is it that the peace process represents? The ideal that we are all basically alike, that we might speak different languages, wave different flags and have differently shaped borders, but that we are all basically alike. We all want peace and wars only happen when our jingoistic leaders mislead us into a conflict. Peace happens when ordinary people of goodwill under the leadership of a few enlightened peacemongers get together and realize how much they have in common and that any disputes they have can be settled over some coffee or tea.