Daniel Greenfield

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.

The Price of a Koran

What does a Koran cost? You can get a full color one for the Kindle for only 99 cents, just don't expect it to feature any pictures of Muhammad. If you want to go deluxe, you can get a hardcover edition that runs three different translations side by side for around 40 bucks. But if you want to be more practical about it, the price of a Koran is the lives of six American soldiers.

Never Give Up the Ball

Modern political warfare is a battlefield in which small battles give way to the larger conflict for national rule and succession. In feudal times such conflicts might be settled with a coalition of lords aligned one way or another. In the modern colonial territories between the Atlantic and the Pacific, populated by a fragmented collection of states, races, religions and classes, the coalitions are assembled out of those groups.

Dying to be Green

Some 8,000 people die in the UK every year due to what is being called "Fuel Poverty", or more simply when it costs too much to heat your home. Naturally the left is already on the case, staging "Die-Ins" outside energy companies and demanding that carbon credits be used to make homes "super-energy efficient". Left out of the equation is that rising fuel prices can in no small part be attributed to the environmental mania which is at the heart of the movement. It isn't oil and gas companies that are killing the elderly with high fuel prices, it's carbon mania and environmentalism. Energy companies are not run by saints, but they don't have an interest in making oil and gas prices out of reach of ordinary people. It's hard to sell home heat to the dead or the destitute. On the other hand, environmentalists do indeed have that agenda.

Saving Muslims From Themselves

After September 11 the reasonable thing to do would have been to take steps to save ourselves from Islamic terror, instead we went on a crusade to save Muslims from themselves. The latest stop on that crusade is Syria, where the foreign policy experts responsible for decades of horrifying misjudgments tell us that we are duty bound to save the Syrian people from their dictator. Rarely do we ask why it is that Muslims so often need saving from their dictators. Or why a party that campaigned on improving America's reputation by promising not to bomb Muslims anymore, is now improving America's reputation by bombing so many Muslims and so often that it makes George W. Bush look like a tie dyed hippie.

The Very Last Picture Show

Once again the movie industry is throwing itself a lavish party, one in a series of them, even though there is surprisingly little to celebrate. Movie attendance in 2011 hit a fifteen-year low and while the industry isn't doing as badly as its counterparts in the music industry, beneath the greasepaint and glamor, it is panicking every bit as badly. There's still plenty of money to be made, but the industry has the clear sense that it has lost its audience. And it has.

Islam Uber Alles

The first law of human affairs is force. Before all other laws, the ballot box and appeals to reason is that primal law that enforces submission through violence. Islam is a religion built on that first law, forcing everyone to choose whether they will be the oppressors or the oppressed, whether they will be a Muslim or a Dhimmi. The organizing force of Islam can be seen in urban gangs which react in much the same way to being 'disrespected'. When your religion is little more than an entitlement to be a thug, to elevate your way of life over that of everyone else, violent outrage over even the most minute sign of disrespect is to be expected. And when your beliefs are little more than an excuse to hate, rioting over a slight is the sacrament of your faith.

Uncivil Rights

The civil rights movement is a success story, so much so that any and every movement has found that it can borrow the narrative and tactics of it to ram through whatever measures it likes. And so we come to the year 2012 where civil rights means men in dresses having the right to use the ladies room and the right of terrorist groups to be free from police scrutiny-- among many other equally insane "rights".

The Idiot-Cousin Theory of Government

The first and foremost purpose of government is to create government jobs. Going back to the early days of American history a time-honored tradition of newly elected politicians was to obtain positions for their friends, their nephews and assorted cousins. In those more innocent times appointing someone an inspector of something was a cordial way of repaying a favor. But the problem with inspectors is that they inspect things.

When Positive and Negative Rights Collide

The birth control battle is another reminder that entitlements and freedoms do not coexist well, even if we set aside the economic issues, because entitlements end up intruding into the spaces of freedoms. As the United States undergoes the process that replaces the negative right to be left alone with the positive right to be taken care of in every way possible, these conflicts will only worsen.

The Cult of Warm

At the end of last year the media widely trumpeted the "recantation" by Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley. Muller's confession of faith was met with the unreserved glee of fanatics who believe that conversion equals validation of the True Faith. Now Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a prominent German chemistry professor and Green activist announced that he is coming out with a book breaking with the Warmist view. Naturally this recantation wouldn't receive nearly the same prominence, except when the inevitable stories kick in about Vahrenholt being a tool of the oil companies. But set aside the partisan bickering and one professor accepting a view he had formerly rejected, while another rejects a view he had formerly accepted is all part of the normal scientific debate. The journey from hypothesis to rock solid consensus is a long one and it doesn't end just because Al Gore makes a documentary or a few ads show crying polar bears. Positions are argued, minds change and then a century later the graduate students have fun mocking the ignorance of both sides. That's science.