Daniel Greenfield

Friday Afternoon Roundup - You Never Know

I have gotten the occasional request to read an article or two in a podcast, but while I never got around to acting out one of my articles, Glenn Beck did. For anyone who wants to see one of my articles acted out with props and cameras, watch the video. It's nice to see my work up on that blackboard and to know that it influenced the political process.

The One True Anti-Romney

While other candidates were busy rising and falling, sinking and swimming, reaching out to experts and promoting themselves to insiders, Rick Santorum did things the old fashioned way. He campaigned. And the candidate whom the insiders ignored and disdained, came within a hair of winning Iowa. So now it's another round of Pile on Santorum. After the previous round of Pile on Gingrich. Which is how we ended up with a match between Romney and Ron Paul. What exactly is the point of destroying Santorum I have to wonder? These attacks aren't really based on ideological opposition. Not for the most part. The war on Santorum in being waged to clear the way for some other candidate. And so every non-Romney candidate is being destroyed to make way for the one true Anti-Romney.

Islamophilia and the Israeli Question

The dominant theme of the Islamophile foreign policy narrative is that America's troubles with Islamic terrorism and the violent instability of the Middle-East somehow derive from our excessive closeness to the Jewish State. In this narrative, which is prevalent among diplomats, journalists and assorted talking heads who are neither but pretend to be both, the terrorists are really just critics of our foreign policy. Except instead of penning smarmy New York Times columns like Thomas Friedman or Nick Kristoff, they plant bombs and ram planes into buildings not for the greater glory of Allah, but to prove the theses of Adlai Stevenson III and Zbignew Brzezinski.

The Genocide Doctrine

Whether or not Ron Paul actually said that he would not intervene to stop the Holocaust, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about this position. The United States has never intervened to stop a genocide. Not in WW2 and not since when several genocides have taken place, most notably in Africa, without any military intervention.

The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Most of the Middle East

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate.

Primary Punishment

IOWA ROLL Santorum is finally getting a look from Republican voters, if only a partial one, and it took long considering that he's far more consistently conservative in his positions. Is he electable, that's another issue.

The Dry Arab Spring and the Lost Left

All it takes to understand why the Arab Spring was doomed to turn into an Islamic Winter is that Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa were being asked to choose between a Socialist left and an Islamic right. The left has consistently lost open elections in Europe and America, it lost the battle of ideas in Russia and China, and unsurprisingly it also lost the Arab Spring. The left wields power in the West only because it has managed to seize control of political and cultural institutions. Those institutions are used to maintain a death grip on the national dialogue, to criminalize dissent and to feed money to its supporters who are often literally paid to continue supporting it, whether in government contracts, welfare checks or organizational benefits. If the left did not have its media, its unions and its flow of supportive immigrants, then it would be just another bunch of cranks.

Soros’ Latest Israel Project

If you have been seeing coverage of gender segregation issues in Israel then you may not be aware that you are actually seeing another Soros project in motion. The name of the game, as usual, is divide and conquer. Soros funded NGO's embed themselves into a society and leverage its weakness to create confrontations that empower its activists and agendas. While Israel does have neighborhoods in Jerusalem where a few Anti-Zionist cults practice their own form of intimidation and thuggery (if you have seen men in black protesting outside Israeli events, then you have seen some of these people at work) this particular crisis is the work of Soros funded NGO's who have their own agenda, and it isn't gender equality or women's rights.

The Paul Pot and the Paulestinians

The masses weeping over the death of Kim Jong Il and the frantic online defenders of Ron Paul have something in common, it isn't the man they care about. It's what he represents. The course of events that took a cranky Texas congressman and turned him into the made man of a motley crew of online gambling entrepreneurs, racists, conspiracy theorists and the whole big circus tent filled with offshore accounts, UFO landing sites and copies of the Turner Diaries is an odd one, but not a completely unusual one.

Between Mecca and Jerusalem

Forget Athens and Jerusalem, the new dialectic is between Mecca and Jerusalem. On one side is support for the spread of a repressive theocratic ideology across the region and around the world through violence and intimidation, on the other side is the rise of indigenous states from the pre-Islamic era employing technology and ingenuity to transform the region. Every time a politician pays tribute to Saudi Arabia, a journalist endorses the Arab Spring and a diplomat goes on about how Israel must make concessions to Islamic terrorists or it will destabilize the region, you see a man used to raising his arse and bowing his pate to Mecca.

The Light Above

For the eight days of Chanukah, it is common to see a candelabra with eight lights and one light above it, shining here and there, in the windows of stores and hallways, in people’s homes and even on intersections. Some are filled with oil, while others are topped with candles. Some tower high overhead and some are child sized. But all have eight lights and one above it, and all commemorate the same occasion. Many nations have religious holidays and days of national liberation and independence, however rarely do the two come together quite in the way that Chanukah does. That is because Chanukah is a commemoration of national liberation from the rule of the Syrian-Greek empire ruled by Antiochus IV and a commemoration of the hand of divine influence in inspiring and accomplishing that liberation.

When they stop even trying to lie to you

At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin bizarrely praises Romney for not even promising to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. She is correct that Republican presidential candidates who got the big job promised it and then broke their promise, but is there something praiseworthy in Romney refusing to even promise something as basic as that?

Between Responsible and Irresponsible Isolationism

There is one fundamental element that is absolutely necessary for an isolationist foreign policy. Isolation. Isolationism without physical isolation is as much good as belligerence without an army to back it up. American isolationism might have been feasible during WW1 when its neighbors were either friendly or no threat, there was no danger from the Pacific and a fleet crossing the Atlantic seemed unlikely. Though it wasn't so unlikely even then.

The Light That Burns

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. 120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of a Roman Idumean governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom. The revived kingdom was a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

Unlimited Muslim Entitlement

In addition to being exempt from satirical cartoons, airline security procedures and human rights-- the chattering media classes in all their wisdom have decided that Muslims should also be exempt from the laws of economics. Forget welfare, Muslims are now entitled to media welfare. When normal religions want to put on a show promoting their religion, they build themselves a cable channel. Sadly, Bridges TV, the Muslim cable channel dedicated to challenging stereotypes, hating Jews and promoting Islam ran into some trouble when its founder and president beheaded its co-founder, who also happened to be his wife.

Mr. Islam’s Blindfold and Machete

Islam is peaceful. At least that is the likely defense of Rafiqi Islam, a loving husband, who told his wife that he had a present for her, blindfolded her to make it a surprise and then cut off her fingers. Then the rest of the Islam family mopped up the blood, while Mr. Islam threw her fingers into the trash, and after a few hours took her to the hospital where they warned her to tell the doctors that she had an accident.

Should We Intervene in Syria?

Forget all the talk about democracy and a revolt against tyranny, the choice here isn't being a tyrant and a populist movement, it's which species of Islamists will come out on top. On one side is Iran and on the other are the Gulf States and the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is not an Islamist regime, except to the extent which all Muslims countries incorporate Islamic law into their legal and social systems, but it is the pawn of Iran, a Shiite Islamist state. On the other side are Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulfies, Turkey and the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

A letter from Goebbels

The Republican race is more muddled than ever as Gingrich's numbers fade a little without anyone to take his place. Either Gingrich recovers, Perry surges or it's Romney all the way. The establishment backing Romney had to damage Gingrich to limit the fallout from their backing of Romney. This way they chose between two evils, rather than choosing the man that they were always going to choose.

Know Your Enemy

"The right wing extremist strains of Israeli Judaism are threatening to turn that ignition into a conflagration." That quote comes from Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, the same Rabbi now being widely quoted for his bizarre Tim Tebow column. Or rather there are numerous articles quoting the column without mentioning his name or who he is. This is not the article that I had planned to run tonight. That article has already been written and sits waiting. It may be timely, but it will have to wait until next week, because this is timelier and it needs to be said.

Anyone But Obama

A year ago today few of us probably thought that the primaries would come down to debating whether Romney or Gingrich are more conservative. It's a rather thankless and pointless debate currently being settled by cherry picking statements on single issues. The bottom line is that neither man is particularly conservative, certainly neither man is a small government conservative. But the odds of anyone like that getting to the finish line were never very good. The only two consistently conservative candidates in the race, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann were ridiculed off the stage by a "conservative" media which never gave Santorum a chance and rushed to drown Bachmann the moment that Perry took the stage. Now that media is racking up pageviews on Romney vs Gingrich, tearing down both candidates for fun and profit.