The Palestinian Authority’s basic law and draft constitution states that “Palestine” is an “Arab” entity, that “Islam is the official religion”, that “Islamic Sharia” is the basis for its law and Arabic is its official language. Unlike Israel’s nation-state bill which defines the Jewish State as Jewish, there’s been no criticism of this PLO document. And the media has not labeled it as divisive or controversial.

The constitution of neighboring Jordan states, “Islam is the religion of the State and Arabic is its official language.” "The people of Syria are part of the Arab nation," Syria's constitution declares. "The religion of the President of the Republic is Islam; Islamic jurisprudence shall be a major source of legislation". That means Syria may only be ruled by a Muslim. "The official language of the state is Arabic."

Egypt's constitution declares it to be an "Arab Republic" and "part of the Muslim world". You will not be surprised to learn that, "Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language. The principles of Islamic Sharia are the principle source of legislation." These same statements, with minor variations, hold true for most of the Muslim countries in the region, and excluding Arabic, throughout the world.

All of Israel’s Arab Muslim neighbors very clearly define their countries as Arab and Muslim. Their religion is Islam, their identity Arabic, variations of the same document declare, their language is Arabic.

These assertions of Arab and Muslim national identity are not criticized by the same gaggle of organizations, governments and reporters tearing their hair out over Israel’s nation-state bill.

The nation-state bill defines Israel as the "the historical homeland of the Jewish people" and "the nation-state of the Jewish people". Hebrew is its official language with Arabic enjoying a special status. (No Arab constitution bothers offering Hebrew a similar status.)

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced the bill as “racist”. The state sponsor of Islamic terror complained that, “human civilization tends to celebrate diversity”. Qatar's own constitution declares that it is an Arab country whose "religion is Islam" and "Sharia law" is the basis for its laws.

So much for celebrating “diversity”. (But the Qatari constitution simultaneously claims that “its political system is democratic” and that “rule of the State is hereditary in the family of Al Thani.” The Qatari constitution also states that, "The Heir Apparent must be a Muslim of a Qatari Muslim Mother" and “there shall be no discrimination whatsoever on grounds of sex, race, language, or religion”.)

The Israeli nation-state bill speaks of the "cultural, historical and religious legacy of the Jewish people" and of Jewish "religious" self-determination, but unlike the Arab-Islamic constitutions it does not define Judaism as the official religion.

Virtually every media outlet described the nation-state bill as “controversial”. As everyone knows, the definition of a controversial issue is one that the left disagrees with. The Oslo Accords which killed and crippled thousands of Israelis and created an even greater threat to Israel’s existence than Iran’s nukes were described as “optimistic”. Dismantling Israel is “optimistic”. Believing in it is “controversial”.

But if Israel’s nation-state bill is controversial, then what of the PLO’s basic law, and the constitutions of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and nearly every Arab and Muslim country in the world? If Israel declaring itself to be Jewish is wrong, how can the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan declaring that they are Muslim and Arabic be right? The double standard is ubiquitous and has only one possible answer.

There’s nothing wrong with an Arab and Muslim country, but something wrong with a Jewish country.

But this time the criticism isn’t coming from the State Department. Unlike the Obama era where an Israeli sneeze occasioned an angry lecture from Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, and a snippy remark by the State Department spokesperson, America’s first authentically pro-Israel administration is on Israel’s side. Heather Nauert at State has repeatedly deflected media demands that she condemn Israel.

In early July, Nauert responded to media insistence that BDS is a “peaceful movement” and that Israel should be criticized for denying entry to an anti-Israel activist by stating that, “countries are sovereign. They have a right to either admit or deny admittance to individuals at their border, okay?”

Instead much of the furious outrage is coming from lefty anti-Israel groups and leaders whose pretense of being pro-Israel wears particularly thin at times when Israel shows the courage of its convictions.

The American Jewish Committee could not find the time to stand up for Jewish students in New York City being disadvantaged by racial quotas, but did claim to be “deeply disappointed” by Israel calling itself a Jewish country. Perhaps then the AJC should get the “Jewish” part out of its own name.

Rick Jacobs, the anti-Israel leader of the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced the bill for damaging "the legitimacy of the Zionist vision" and "the values of the state of Israel". He vowed to "fight back" by "forging new ties" with Arabs.

"Millions of us," he declared, "are united in our opposition to this new law."

Who those millions are is anybody’s guess. A rally against the bill in Tel Aviv sponsored by 22 organizations (including Socialist Struggle, the New Israel Fund and some pro-BDS groups) only turned out thousands. That’s in a city where you can get 100,000 to protest the price of cottage cheese.

"The law, which celebrates the fundamental Jewish nature of the state, raises significant questions about the government’s long-term commitment to its pluralistic identity," Jonathan Greenblatt, the former Obama staffer turned ADL boss, complained.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs expressed "profound disappointment". It whined that "this new law undermines Israel’s vibrant democracy comprised of diverse religious and ethnic groups".

Perhaps the JCPA then ought to stop undermining its own diversity and dump the “J” part of its title so that it can be better composed of “diverse religious and ethnic groups”. If it’s good enough for Israel, why isn’t it good enough for the AJC and the JCPA who monetize Jewishness while undermining it?

Defining Israel as Jewish is a dividing line that separates authentically Jewish groups from those that are Jewish in name only. The National Council of Young Israel (NCYI), Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and the Israeli-Jewish Congress (IJC) backed Israel. And other true Jewish organizations are joining them.

The scariest thing for a fake Jewish organization is a Jewish State. Establishment groups that have spent generations peddling lefty policy ideas to the clueless by calling them “Jewish” are deeply threatened by the existence of a Jewish State for whom the “J” part is not just a brand, but a meaningful identity.

Nothing threatens a scam artist like the real thing. And Israel, as idea and reality, has always threatened the scam artists of the left who peddle a bowdlerized Jewish history that began in the 19th century, whose messianic age is the Tikkun Olam of socialism and whose messiahs wave red flags.

Despite the clamor and the talking points, “controversial”, “divisive” and “unnecessary”, Israel’s nation-state bill is mostly symbolic. It doesn’t discriminate. It does however make a very clear statement.

And it’s that statement that has blown like a fierce desert wind through the houses of cards of an establishment that views Jewishness as a brand rather than a commitment. It is easy to find Jewish organizations that will sign letters for every lefty cause, from Muslim immigration to illegal migrants. But rarely, if ever, will these organizations stand up for a Jewish cause, even if, like the racial quotas being imposed on Jewish students in New York, the cause has absolutely nothing to do with Israel.

Israel, the “Palestinians”, the two-state solution and all the rest of it was never the issue. Jewishness is. The only people who are afraid of a Jewish State either hate Jews or hate being Jewish.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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"When you attack a Black woman for speaking out about injustice, and when you call for ‘civility’ in the face of blatant racism, you invoke a long history of white supremacist power.”

So reads a letter in defense of the call by Rep. Maxine Waters to harass Trump administration officials.

“The concept of respect is culturally mediated; there is no single, objective standard,” it concludes.

There are clear objective standards. They include not harassing the people you disagree with in their private lives. The only people who think that standard is “culturally mediated” are leftist thugs.

But the lefty letter, which claims thousands of signatories, is not unique. Nor is its message.

A New York Times op-ed declares that civility is the “misguided obsession” of “white America.” According to a CNN analysis, not being harassed while you’re having dinner is a form of “privilege”.

“Civility is a tool of white supremacy," a Samantha Bee writer tweeted.

According to Simran Jeet Singh, a Henry R. Luce Post-Doctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, civility is a "power play by those who feel that white supremacy is under threat."

If civility and manners are racist, then rudeness must be the new civil rights movement. But no amount of citing Martin Luther King in defense of harassing Trump staffers having dinner will change his speech to, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day be rude, obnoxious and entitled snowflakes."

Civility arguments predate the recent harassment of Trump officials. After being battle tested in online leftist forums where calls for politeness were denounced as “tone-policing,” they were deployed to college campuses where critics of racist harassment were attacked for imposing a “white -informed civility” on furious protesters.

Two sets of values were in collision. On one side were the basic norms of public behavior, and on the other was the great bigoted crusade against bigotry. It was inevitable that the norms of manners, decency and civility - like everything else that obstructed the great crusade - would be deemed racist.

White supremacy has been redefined as anything that interferes with the left. Beyond civility, the rule of law, equality, due process and freedom of speech have all been deemed the tools of white supremacy.

Racism is the new witchcraft. Just like witches, it’s everywhere and in everything.

"Milk, it has been argued of late, is the new symbol of white supremacy in America, owing to its hue," the Los Angeles Times discourses. At the University of Michigan, wood paneling was accused of marginalizing minorities. In Oakland, racist scooters are threatening the lives of black people. "Mathematics itself operates as Whiteness," a University of Illinois professor claimed.

Are civility, manners and decency racist? As much as milk, wood paneling, math and scooters.

When everything is racist, nothing is racist. And nothing is racist because the leftist obsession with race has nothing to do with black people. This use of racism or white supremacy exploits black people as props, but is actually only a thin pretext for the left to fight the wars that it wants to fight anyway.

And the black people who show up are taking part in a Marxist minstrel show.

Rep. Maxine Waters hoarsely urged a mob, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

But on the video, the mob being hectored by the world’s oldest millennial is a sea of white.

Aside from Waters, there is one other black person in front of the camera. The rest appear to be mostly older white people from the upper middle class who look like they just stepped out of a mall. Their clothes run to business casual. It’s as far from a crowd of oppressed minorities as you can get.

But that’s typical for Waters whose phony #resistance shtick is sucker bait for angry white lefties who, like the political dumpster diva, are far away from her minority district. Racializing Waters’ call to white lefties to terrorize political opponents is typical of how the left uses minorities to justify its violence.

Dozens of media spin pieces tried to cite Martin Luther King to justify Waters’ rhetoric. That’s not civil rights. It’s political blackface. The issue isn’t race, it’s ideology. The left manufactures a crisis to create a sense of urgency. The norms, legal and social, cannot be allowed to get in the way of the urgent crisis. The petty preoccupations of the bourgeoisie with manners, property, legal rights or their lives can’t be allowed to interfere.

With this same tediously murderous logic, the left took millions of lives in the name of its urgent crises.

Civility and manners aren’t racist, but they are counterrevolutionary. Revolutions kill by urgency. They upend everything, declare an endless national crisis and settle down to solving it with decades of genocide. And there’s no room for civility or manners when your jackboots are full of blood.

The revolutions of the left unleash political terror against those who disagree, then those who insufficiently agree, then those who agree out of thoughtful conviction rather than mindless obedience.

Once upon a time the left used class to justify violent purges by its upper middle class leadership. In the United States, the left uses race to justify violent purges by its upper middle class white leadership.

Otherwise the rhetoric, the predatory crocodile tears for the oppressed, the violent outrage that purports to be rooted in political empathy, when it’s actually based on personal ego, the calls for violence on the behalf of the empathy props, is the same. The left pretends that its hatred is empathy, and the empathy of those who still believe in social norms is actually a form of cruelty.

If you don’t believe in terrorizing those you disagree with, where is your compassion for others?

Political blackface needs its Marxist minstrel show radicals. Auntie Maxine hoarsely bellowing at the population of a Gap store is as silly as anything from the Madea movies. It’s hard to believe that Rep. Maxine Waters (D – Anywhere But Her District) isn’t just a character that Tyler Perry invented.

Maxine Waters, who doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t involve her husband’s bank, is a pretext for white lefties to attack white conservatives in the name of civil rights. Despite winning elections by 70% margins, she’s raised $707,986. Waters doesn’t need the cash to win her inevitable elections.

Using black people as a cover for leftist violence isn’t a new tactic. But leftist violence doesn’t come from the oppressed. It’s perpetrated by the oppressors using social justice as a false flag for their violence.

When you hide your thuggery behind black people, you can denounce civility as a racist conspiracy against black people. But civility isn’t racist. White lefties wearing political blackface to claim that black people are physically incapable of having manners or conducting civil protests are as racist as it gets.

Political blackface is racist. And political violence by any race is terrorism. And a crime.

Civility isn’t racist. The left is.



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

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The huge dirty secret of recycling was also one of the world’s worst polluters.

Every branch of government from Washington D.C. to your local town council had spent a fortune convincing people that recycling is a magical process that turns your old pizza boxes into new pizza boxes while creating those imaginary “green jobs” in the community. The reality was a lot dirtier.

All of America’s industries, including trash sorting, had been outsourced to China.

And recycling is just a fancy lefty way of saying "trash." All that recycling, which children in progressive communities are taught to sort as the closest thing to a religious ritual, was really being dumped by the ton on dirty ships and sent over to China. We weren’t recycling it. The Chinese were.

But now China is banning foreign recycling because it’s bad for the environment.

Even the Communists got tired of sorting through the trash of American socialists. The recycling scam shipped garbage on dirty ships for dirty industries while pretending that they’re clean and green.

There was never anything clean about it. And only the money it brought in was green.

Now the recycling party’s over. Plastic recycling imports were banned early this year. Even fiber has trouble getting in to the People’s Republic. China’s mixed paper standards mean that most of the recycled cardboard and paper no longer passes muster. Instead it’s piling up in the United States.

The recycling scam used to be an easy trade. China shipped its cheap products made from recycled American junk and scrap here. The empty vessels used to dump Chinese junk products on America were then filled up with tons of recycling for the return trip back to China at minimal cost.

We sent them junk, they sent us junk. As the trade deficit grew, recycling was one of its many parasites.

But China is out of the recycling dump business. And the recycling business depended on it. No other market pays what it did. And no other country has the industrial scale to handle this much recycled trash. The American market is flooded with recycling that no one wants and trash prices have imploded.

And that’s having an immediate impact on the progressive recycling programs in the United States.

California’s trash is going right back to landfills. 62% of exported materials used to go to China. But no more. California’s Department of Resources Recycling sent a letter cautioning that the “economics of recycling” had become “unfavorable” thus “challenging what recycling means to Californians.”

It also warned recycling facilities that, “public health and safety should be their number one priority”.

In Massachusetts, mountains of trash recycling are piling up and there’s talk that trucks may stop picking it up. In Pennsylvania, a "recycling crisis created by China" was blamed for a refusal to accept paper. In Seattle and Phoenix, recycling is going into landfills. Fees are going up in Portland. In Pasco, recycling was abandoned before its start. In a Kansas City plant, one out of four items is going into a landfill. In Sacramento, where all of California’s recycling rules are made, most recyclables no longer are.

Fort Worth’s recycling brought in nearly a million last year. Now, it’s expected to cost $1.6 million.

Recology used to be the epitome of the reinvented garbage hauler, merging San Francisco urban politics with progressive PR about ending waste. But zero landfill talk has given way to a blunter reality, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”

Environmental regulations had already turned garbage collection in California into an expensive disaster, but this is an entirely unprecedented mess complete with mountains of trash and mountains of bills.

Recycling has become economically unsustainable, but that doesn’t mean it’s going away.

There’s too much money in environmental scams. And recycling is the biggest of them. The China crisis is being met with the three R’s of progressive policymaking; rent-seeking, regulations and robbery.

Some homeowners are already seeing higher trash collection fees. Those will only get worse. Especially on the West Coast where the China option helped dull the painful costs of recycling. But the costs will hit everyone as politicians resort to mandating higher levels of recycled content in everyday products.

Want to sell soda, tissues or milk? Pay the politically connected recycling companies for the privilege of using their trash. As recycling costs go up, content mandates will force companies to create an artificial market. And the costs will be passed along to consumers who will have to pay more for everything.

Like higher trash fees, tightened recycling regulations have also only begun to arrive. If you live in a blue state or city, expect to spend a lot more time sorting your trash, cleaning your cans and removing plastic from your envelopes so that they meet China’s new high standards for imported trash.

China will no longer be sorting American trash. So progressives have decided that you will.

We hear about the jobs that Americans won’t do. But this is a job that the Chinese won’t do. And that Americans will be forced to do for free. As China becomes more capitalist, America turns Communist.

Or as a video on the Recology site prompts, “How to be a better recycle because China demands it.”

Environmentalist municipalities have already begun rolling out condescending campaigns berating homeowners for their foolish and lazy recycling practices. ‘Wishcycling’ is a charmless portmanteau you will see more of. But what it really means is that homeowners who are already being taxed to death are being hectored by the environmental activists they subsidize who have never worked a day in their lives.

Will all of that save the recycling scam?

No, but it won’t matter. Most homeowners have no idea how much of their recyclables go into landfills anyway. The dirty business of municipal waste contracts will continue on uninterrupted. The extra fees and costs will be another one of the left’s thousand cuts that are bleeding the middle class to death.

Homeowners will be taxed harder so that crony cash can flow to even bigger recycling operations. You will pay more for everything you buy to subsidize politically connected, but uneconomical enterprises.

Recycling is not a reality, but an idea. Like Communism, it can never be achieved, but must be aspired to.

Smaller towns and cities will be forced to dump their recycling programs. And more conservative areas will be dissuaded from getting on board as the profit margins from recycling turn into pools of red ink. But blue states and cities will never abandon recycling. And if Washington D.C. goes blue again, the dictates of crony socialism and green fanaticism will roll out new compulsory standards nationwide.

Recycling is in crisis. But the environmental scam is too big to fail.

The ships carrying most of the blue state and city “green” trash will no longer be allowed into China. But there are other countries and continents desperate enough to take their socialist trash.

The dirty secret of recycling is that it depended on the willingness of Third World countries to greenwash our trash so that progressives could pretend that their moral garbage was saving the planet.

The smaller countries of Southeast Asia don’t have the capacity to take up China’s slack, but the People’s Republic has progressively been colonizing Africa. Some African countries were already being used to recycle and dump e-waste. The shipping won’t be as cheap, but recycling’s next stop is likely to be Africa where environmentalists will turn it into a trash heap… to protect the environment.



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

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On April 25th, thousands in Berlin rallied for the "Berlin Tragt Kippa" or "Berlin Wears a Kippah" march. The march had been called after an Israeli Arab Christian had worn a Kippah, a Jewish religious head covering, to test the level of anti-Semitism only to be violently attacked by a Syrian Muslim refugee screaming anti-Semitic slurs. The video of the attack went viral and the march went viral too.

People of good will wore kippahs, took selfies and no one was assaulted by a Syrian refugee.

In June, the perpetrator, Knaan al-Sebai, pled guilty to the attack. He claimed that despite screaming “Jew” in Arabic at his victim, often used as a slur in the Muslim world, he wasn’t anti-Semitic. Instead he blamed hashish and exhaustion. Despite being 19-years-old, Al-Sebai was sentenced to 4 weeks in juvie.

In Germany, if you’re under 20, you too can be treated as a juvenile after a violent anti-Semitic attack.

The Syrian-Palestinian migrant "fell out of the nest too early and had not yet learned to properly fly," Judge Günter Räcke tenderly summed up the violent assault by the adult man.

Judge Räcke diagnosed the violent criminal with a bad case of frustration. Jews were just an outlet for his “bad mood”. The job center had cut off his support. When he attacked the man he thought was a Jew, he “felt that he was in the right. That’s a powerful thing.” Indeed it is. Just ask any Nazi.

Knaan al-Sebai had assaulted his victim with a bottle and a belt. He would later claim that despite the assaults, "I did not want to beat him, I just wanted to scare him." He also screamed anti-Semitic slurs at the Arab Christian veterinary student. When a local German woman told him that you can’t behave this way in Germany, he had shouted back at her, “I don’t give a damn. I’m Palestinian. "

Instead of sending him to jail, Judge Räcke sentenced the anti-Semitic thug to take a tour of the House of the Wannsee Conference; the lavish mansion that hosted the Nazi conference plotting the extermination of the Jews. A location frequently visited by Jewish tourists.

“It’s not an extended civics course,” Judge Räcke said. Just so he’ll understand why everyone is so upset.

“I made a mistake and I have learned from it,” the Syrian refugee told the court. “I hope not to end up in this situation again.”

Any Jews or Christians whom he may or may not attack in the future share the same hope.

Since El-Sebai had been held for two months before trial, he walked away with time served. And now he’s suing for compensation over the extra days that he was held in custody while awaiting trial.

The Syrian refugee would like 950 Euros or approximately $1,000 from Germany. And he’s also appealing the conviction.

Since his original viral assault, there have been a number of anti-Semitic attacks in Berlin.

10 Syrians were arrested in early July for attacking a man wearing a Star of David while screaming anti-Semitic slurs. In June, a Jewish teenager was attacked at a Berlin train station for the music he was listening to. “I don’t want to hear this Jew s*** here! This is our town, our turf. If I see you here again, I’ll slit your throat, you f***ing Jew.”

When a German friend tried to defend him, he was met with the rejoinder, "You lousy Germans. You don't have a right to say anything.”

One of the weapons of choice of the Arab Muslim attackers was a broken bottle.

Also in June, a 14-year-old Jewish girl was murdered by a Muslim refugee in Germany.

Last year there were 1,453 anti-Semitic attacks in Germany. There are only around 100,000 Jews in Germany. Many of them have only a limited Jewish ancestry, don’t identify as Jewish and wouldn’t be likely to be singled out for anti-Semitic attacks. The official Jewish community in Berlin numbers 10,000.

It’s when we compare 100,000 Jews to 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents that we can see the problem.

The United States averages fewer anti-Semitic incidents per year, in a country with between 4 to 6 million Jews, than all of Germany.

Even in the UK, there were 1,382 incidents in 2017 in a country with 263,346 Jews.

Why is Germany so much worse? The court case of Knaan al-Sebai and its aftermath, the Kippah march and Judge Räcke, along with Merkel’s open borders policy for migrants like Al-Sebai, hold the answer.

The kippah worn by the Arab Christian veterinary student when he was attacked was put on display in the Jewish Muslim of Berlin. It’ll become part of the museum’s permanent collection.

And like the kippah march, the resort to virtuous symbolism misses the real point.

Anti-semitism isn’t an abstraction. It’s not a theory or a symbol. It’s what happens when violent thugs like Knaan al-Sebai are given a pass for attacking Jews. The museum’s new permanent display will open in 2019. But El-Sebai was out in a few months and may yet end up making a thousand bucks out of it.

Last year, a German regional court ruled that an attempted firebombing of a synagogue by three Muslim men wasn’t anti-Semitic, but had been carried out to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict”.

The anti-Semitic arsonists, two Muhammads and an Ismail, blamed alcohol and marijuana, and received suspended sentences.

The Knaan al-Sebai case wasn’t atypical, it’s typical of what happens when the occasional anti-Semitic Muslim attacker is actually put on trial in Germany. His lawyer invariably blames drugs and alcohol. A sympathetic judge finds every possible excuse for the attack and lets him off with a slap on the wrist.

But not before the judge condescendingly urges the thug to understand the morally superior position of Germany on anti-Semitism, while at the same time excusing him for not yet adapting to German mores.

Judge Räcke sending Knaan al-Sebai to learn about anti-Semitism at the House of the Wannsee Conference is typical of the preening moral superiority and the anti-Semitism of the authorities who want to be seen as condemning anti-Semitism even while they actually collude with anti-Semites.

That doesn’t only happen in Germany. But it has become ubiquitous there.

The Knaan al-Sebai attack has become a symbol of the hollow self-righteous posturing and its ugly aftermath. The German authorities pay lip service to symbolic events like the Kippah March even as the attacker who was behind it was quickly set free and may even yet be rewarded for his crime.

Germany condemns anti-Semitic violence in word and condones it in deed.

Anti-Semitism is widely condemned and condoned in Europe. It’s hard to find any mainstream European politician who won’t condemn anti-Semitism, at least in the abstract, but finding real enduring consequences for anti-Semitic Muslim attacks short of outright murder is often equally elusive.

European politicians condone every display of anti-Semitism up to actual physical violence. And European courts condone anti-Semitic violence up to actual murder. And sometimes even then.

The attack by Knaan al-Sebai has become a symbol of overt anti-Semitism in broad daylight. But it’s also a symbol of covert anti-Semitism. And we cannot understand the one without the other.

Muslim anti-Semitism is not organically part of Europe. It was covertly brought there. It was covertly cultivated there. And it is being covertly protected, as Knaan al-Sebai, was protected. When Muslim migrants swarmed into Europe, the authorities promised that they would do the jobs that Germans didn’t want to do. Very few of these refugees have taken on gainful employment. But refugees like Knaan al-Sebai are hard at work doing the jobs that Merkel and some other Germans don’t want to do.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

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“How did we get into this mess?" Obama asked Putin.

It was the summer of ’09 and the two men, one a former community organizer and the other a former KGB officer, were sitting on the veranda of Putin’s dacha. While Obama noshed on three types of pricey caviar, Putin took a bite out of his junior colleague by delivering an extended denunciation of America.

Obama listened without a word of protest to Putin’s attack on America. According to Michael McFaul, his point man on Russia who has been attacking Trump prominently in the media, "the history lesson was even rather helpful because it enabled him to emphasize to Putin: well, I'm different, I'm new."

Putin’s litany of American foreign policy crimes was cunningly fitted to the politics of the left. On that summer day, Russia wasn’t an enemy, but a victim of the Bush administration’s cowboy diplomacy. And Obama was seeking common ground with Russia, Iran and the Brotherhood against the Republicans.

By different, Obama meant that he didn’t care about traditional alliances or national interest. Selling out American allies like Poland had gotten Barry a taste of Vladimir’s beluga. The cost of the caviar was missile defense for Eastern Europe. America wanted it there and the Russians didn’t.

The caviar followed Hillary Clinton’s comically disastrous reset button push. Both Hillary and Obama needed these photo ops. Putin didn’t need the photos. He wanted concessions. And he got them.

The betrayal and abandonment of Poland was only the first of Obama’s many concessions to Putin.

The architects of Obama’s appeasement of Putin have been some of the most militant voices denouncing Trump. McFaul among them. Trump has been accused of making concessions to Putin. But, unlike Obama, Trump made zero concessions to Putin. Not on missile defense. Or on anything else.

Instead President Trump has steadily reversed Obama’s tide of concessions to Putin.

The media is outraged over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But when that happened, Ukraine asked for weapons and the only aid that Obama offered their country was MREs. It took months for Obama to come through with boots and tires. Meanwhile Trump has delivered actual weapons.

Why did Obama refuse to provide Ukraine with weapons? According to senior officials, to avoid antagonizing Moscow. Trump isn’t afraid of Russia. Obama however was shaking in his loafers.

While Trump approved anti-tank missiles for Ukraine, Obama slow-walked shipments of boots, putting them on trucks instead of planes so that they took months to arrive, so as not to upset the Russians. Meanwhile the Trump administration cut the red tape by dipping into its own European stockpiles.

In the time it took Obama to ship boots to Ukraine, Trump shipped Javelin missiles.

Obama shelved missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic. Trump cut a multi-billion deal for selling Patriot missiles to Poland. When Obama provided Patriot missiles to Poland, he neglected to mention that the batteries would not actually contain missiles. The ambassador to Poland, had noted, "The Poles have not been told that the battery will rotate without actual missiles... but it will also not be operational, and certainly interoperable... this will be a question of basic definitions for the Poles: is it a Patriot battery if it doesn't have live missiles?" Trump’s missile deal comes with actual missiles.

When Obama’s old foreign policy hands crowd the green rooms of CNN and MSNBC, when they pen editorials for Foreign Policy and the Washington Post, accusing Trump of betraying Eastern Europe to Russia, remember these are same people who sent fake missiles on Poland to go with the fake news.

Every new president is entitled to the occasional foreign policy blunder. But sacrificing Poland to Putin wasn’t a singular event. Three years later, Obama was caught on a hot mic assuring Medvedev, Putin’s political flunky, that he needed space on, “missile defense” until the Republicans were defeated.

“This is my last election," Obama wheedled. "After my election I have more flexibility.”

“I understand," Medvedev offered. "I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Obama was conspiring with Putin against the American people. He was assuring Putin’s man that he would have more flexibility to appease Russia after he had fooled America.

The media has been screaming that Trump was a traitor, when it was their man who sold out to Putin, while President Trump held the line on missile defense without caring about what Moscow thought.

And it wasn’t just missile defense in Eastern Europe.

Obama’s obsession with dismantling our national defenses led him to ignore Russian violations of the INF treaty. Not only did Obama ignore the violations which had been going for an entire term, but he and his political allies helped cover them up. The motive was a mix of appeasement and cover-up.

“We’re not going to pass another treaty in the U.S. Senate if our colleagues are sitting up here knowing somebody is cheating," John Kerry said.

Obama officials lied about Russian treaty violations to Congress while pushing new treaties with Russia. Then they went on to pull the same trick over their fake WMD deals with Russia’s allies in Syria and Iran. Each time, violations were ignored and a fake agreement was trumpeted by Obama for political gain.

The caviar conference in ’09 set the template for eight years of Obama’s sellouts of America.

The Obama administration hid the Russian violations, not only from Americans, but from NATO. When a former Obama official piously lectures Trump about the importance of NATO, he ought to be asked why his administration put Putin ahead of NATO. The media ought to be asked why it ignored the violations.

In the winter of last year, the media buzzed with stories about Russia deploying a new cruise missile in violation of the INF. And, as the New York Times put it, “challenging Trump”. But when Russia was violating the INF under Obama, the media accepted the Ben Rhodes spin about smart diplomacy. All the smart appeasement in the world though failed to get compliance or punish the Russian violations.

Instead Obama sold out America by unilaterally complying with a treaty that the Russians were violating.

The Russians rolled Obama on the INF and START treaties. Then they rolled him on Assad’s chemical weapons. And then they went for a triple score by rolling him on Iran’s nuclear program.

That’s how we got into this mess.

Obama did not care about missile defense. The diplomatic outreach of the newly selected leader traded resets with enemies for the betrayal of allies. In Egypt, Obama would abandon Mubarak to the Muslim Brotherhood. When democracy protests broke out in Iran, Obama urged waiting for the dust to settle. The resets were paid with the blood of Iranian protesters, with Christian churches in Egypt and with the Russian expansionism that would lead to the loss of Flight MH-117 and the annexation of Crimea.

The media has spent a day losing its mind because of what President Trump said or didn’t say. Yet Obama not only obsequiously praised Putin, “I am aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people in your previous role as prime minis-, uh, as president, but in your current role as prime minister,” not only failed to stand up for America when Putin lashed out at the United States, but betrayed us in deeds.

We are being lectured on appeasement, treason and weakness by the very people who dismantled our nuclear defenses, who sold off our uranium to Russia, and who rewarded Iran for its nuclear program.

None of their speeches will wash away their appeasement, their cowardice and their treason.

Unlike Obama, President Trump sold weapons to Ukraine. Unlike Obama, he bombed Assad and took on Russian mercenaries. Unlike Obama, he provided Poland with working Patriot missiles. Unlike Obama, he didn't base his foreign policy around fearing to offend Moscow. Unlike Obama, he stood up to Russia.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.

Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.

There has never been any evidence that the DNC hacks swung the election. The vast majority of people never even heard of them. Only a handful of political insiders and watchers, already deeply and unpersuadably committed to one side or another, could name the contents of a single email.

When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.

The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.

Russiagate’s fervent conspiracy theorists spin an unlikely scenario in which Moscow had picked Trump early on, and then abandoned him in a crowded field against 16 candidates, while assuming that he would naturally triumph. Instead of leaking Jeb Bush’s campaign emails or Marco Rubio’s, they bided their time and waited to release Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s and John Podesta’s emails.

That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.

Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election. They had set up fake Facebook sites aimed at the left on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to the pipeline protests. That is not the behavior of a foreign intelligence operation that wanted Trump to win and the left to lose. Instead the Russians appeared to have allied with the left to push the Democrats even further to the left.

Targeting the DNC’s infrastructure also pushed the Democrats further to the left. The email hacks and leaks didn’t elect Trump, but did shake up the DNC. Bernie Sanders reemerged as the figurehead of a leftist movement to take over the DNC. Bernie’s boy, Keith Ellison, claimed the No. 2 spot at the DNC. And Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, the left’s current crush, is the latest triumph for that machine.

The socialist left were the biggest beneficiaries of the DNC hacks. The stolen emails confirmed claims by the Bernie campaign that the process had been rigged against them. It justified their campaign to clean up the mess by taking over the DNC while wiping out key Democrats who had been opposed to them.

The left was also the political movement with the richest and deepest connections to Russian intelligence. The media claims that Putin and his old KGB comrades are the natural allies of the right, but the alliance between the far left and Russian intelligence agencies dates back almost a century.

Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. It’s hard to find a Marxist dictatorship backed by Russia that the elderly socialist hasn’t praised and supported at the expense of our national interests. Bernie praised Castro, he supported the Sandinistas, and his foreign policy was little more than a KGB wish list.

Certainly Russian intelligence services would have been aware of Bernie Sanders as a political sympathizer and maintained a file on him. On a visit to the Soviet Union, he would have interacted with KGB personnel or those reporting to them: as was true of any important foreign visitor at the time.

Is it really farfetched to believe that a lefty politician, who had a history of visiting and supporting Communist and Marxist countries, and their agendas, didn’t receive some support from Moscow?

The political movement that Bernie Sanders emerged from was notorious for its Russian ties.

As Discover the Networks notes, Sanders had worked as an organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWU) which was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for its Communist ties. An article in Class Struggle magazine described UPWU as one of the "communist led or influenced unions". Sanders had also spent time at a pro-Soviet Kibbutz.

While the media pursued Trump over his ties to Russian businessmen, Bernie had direct ties to organizations controlled directly or indirectly by Russian intelligence agencies.

Bernie flew a Soviet flag outside his office. As Paul Sperry noted, “Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to ‘the triumph of Soviet power in the US.’”

Given all this, is it really implausible that the Russians were trying to help Bernie Sanders?

The media made a great deal out of a memo by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory, allegedly claiming, “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump--we support them.)” This memo likely had more to do with the Agency’s objective of blending in on the left and the right to embed pro-Russian content than with Moscow’s larger political objectives, but the media quickly skips over the Sanders part of that memo while treating the Trump part as damning.

But if the Russians were trying to back a politician, would Trump or Bernie have been their choice?

Trump favors a strong foreign policy based on our national interests. Bernie boasts of opposing our national interests. Trump wants a strong America; Bernie wants an international socialist alliance.

But the Russians didn’t believe they could rig an election. They wouldn’t have believed that they could make Bernie president or even a presidential nominee. However they may have rightly thought that they could push the Democrats further to the left and boost their political allies within the DNC.

The Democrat hacks did little for Trump, but they gave Bernie a shot at taking over the DNC.

If we assume that Russia’s project was well-planned, proportional and successful, which considering the track record of their operations in this country is a sensible assumption, then that is what happened.

The post-election Dems are obsessed with Russia, but they’ve also moved further to the left. And, regardless of the rhetoric, the Russians spent generations building up ties with the American left.

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein or any of the other socialists, the DNC hacks weakened the Democrat establishment and strengthened a movement that Russia once used as its hand puppet.

The Democrats have made plenty of cracks about Trump as a “Manchurian Candidate”. But the movie’s Manchurian candidate was publicly opposed to Russia while secretly benefiting from Russian election interference. That doesn’t describe Trump. It could describe Bernie Sanders. Or many others on the left.

Jill Stein, who initially cashed in by raising money for an election recount, fell afoul of Russiagate and is using recount cash to pay for the legal expenses of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian election interference. The money is going to the Partnership for Civil Justice, part of the International Action Center, and allegedly a front for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.

The left has been crying, “Russia” and “Treason” on every network and in every newspaper. It might want to consider what a real investigation of its ties to Russian intelligence agencies will turn up.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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"Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal," Bernie Sanders snapped. "You're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that."

"What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy,” he continued. "You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?"

That was three years ago.

Bernie’s final surrender came after dodging a question on CNN about abolishing ICE. After the backlash, he went even further, issuing a statement urging that we "abolish the cruel, dysfunctional immigration system we have today”. Open borders had gone from a right-wing position to a Bernie position.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie's rare successful socialist candidate, had already told Al Jazeera that, "We should grant people a safe and documented right of passage".

"Republicans try all these scare tactics. And they go ‘Oh, open borders.’ Because they’re trying to incite fear," she added.

Bernie’s immigration flip flop didn’t actually take three years.

After the backlash from the open borders interview, he adopted contemporary leftist positions. His platform was full of boilerplate language about Republican "anti-immigrant and xenophobic hysteria", mass amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens and ending the "militarization" of the border.

That was the new position of the candidate who once told MSNBC, “I don't think there is any candidate for president -- none -- who thinks that we should open up the borders.” The platform appears on the same Bernie site where an old article dubs open borders a “trendy libertarian idea” and calls for improving the economies of other countries so that their immigrants don’t come to America.

Even people who don’t like Bernie Sanders think that he honestly believes what he says. His views, they imagine, are so extreme that he might be wrong, but he must be authentic. But Bernie’s actual record reveals a pattern of cowardly flip-flopping in response to political pressure from the left.

Bernie 2.0, the formerly poor politician who has earned over $1 million for two years running, is a very different political animal than the crusty old socialist that Obama’s old lefty allies dug up in Vermont.

The left’s favorite Senator owes his seat to the NRA. He voted against the Brady Bill and was listed as the only non-Republican among the 25 top recipients of money from gun-rights groups. Hillary Clinton quickly zeroed in on gun control as Bernie’s weakness. And his response to her was praised by the NRA. And then, as usual, the flip-following followed the leftist backlash in the media and on social media.

After telling the New York Daily News that firearms manufacturers shouldn’t face lawsuits from victims of crimes committed with firearms, he flipped his answer completely around at the debate. It only took a few weeks for Bernie to go from, "No, I don't" to "They have a right to sue, and I support them."

These days Bernie is hanging out with David Hogg and blaming a “three letter word” for gun violence.

“It’s the NRA,” Sanders recently sneered. “And it’s Trump and the Republicans who don’t have the guts to stand up to these people and that’s pretty pathetic."

But it’s Bernie who is too pathetically gutless to stand up to the bullying of his own political radicals.

In 2014, Bernie Sanders got into a shouting match at a town hall over his condemnation of Hamas. Two years later, he falsely claimed that Israel had killed 10,000 innocent people in Gaza. These days his public statements on the subject are often little better than Hamas propaganda.

Bernie 2.0 was shaped by a series of confrontations with key Democrat constituencies that sliced away whatever was authentic about him and left him one step closer to being a generic Democrat.

Black Lives Matter activists harassed Bernie Sanders until he adopted their platform. So did illegal alien activists. He sparred with the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay rights lobby, and Planned Parenthood. Each confrontation followed a familiar pattern, a surly response from the Sanders campaign, followed by a quiet capitulation and a loud affirmation.

After running against an inauthentic politician with a wet finger in the wind, Bernie took on all her traits.

But Bernie is very different than Hillary. While Hillary Clinton was her own woman, Bernie is a puppet. Revolution Messaging plucked him out of obscurity because they couldn’t get Elizabeth Warren. Lefty consultants frozen out by the Clinton campaign and book publishers made millions off Bernie.

Bernie also cashed in. He’s up to three homes and has joined the 1 percent. His wife and stepkids have their own cozy arrangements. Officially he’s the leader of a movement. The reality is he’s a brand.

The inept Vermont socialist isn’t actually leading a movement. He’s just the face of one.

That movement, whose key figures are people like Keith Ellison and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have little in common with who Bernie was. The old socialist had tapped into traditional lefty strains in New England politics. His movement is top heavy with urban diversocrats like Ben Jealous and Stacey Abrams. It hasn’t tapped into anything except the radicalization and narrow identity politics of the Democrats.

Bernie Inc. helped mainstream the use of socialism. But despite the tingly feeling that saying, “Socialism” gave the left, its pitch isn’t all that more socialist than the Democrats already are. Buying minority votes with freebies has been the elevator pitch of the Democrats since LBJ. Free college isn’t some radical new idea. It’s a failed plan by Jerry Brown’s dad from back when Bernie was a deadbeat.

Despite the socialist moniker, Bernie hasn’t pushed anything too radical for the lefty billionaire Pelosi donors who actually run the party. His movement isn’t trying to replicate Bernie. Instead it made him over in its image and is propping him up, Weekend at Bernie’s style, as the figurehead for a movement built on trendy lefty identity politics causes that its namesake has trouble keeping up to date on.

The same candidate who dismissed identity politics has come to be defined by them. His economic message is funneled through the usual victim groups and the medium has become the message. Bernie, an old white leftist, is the awkward public face of a movement that puts forward minority leftists for political office, even as its base remains as white as Bernie’s hair.

Bernie Inc. bets on the ethnic and racial nationalism of local constituencies with the big wins coming from harnessing the Latino and African-American votes that eluded Bernie during the primaries. That’s why Bernie is now for open borders, drug dealers, Hamas and gun control. Bernie’s old socialism has been streamlined to match the safe identity politics of the Democrat multicultural coalition.

The media’s sudden love affair with Cortez is also a warning that the Bernie Sanders brand is shaky. Even Revolution Messaging, the original wizards behind the curtain, only took him because they couldn’t find anyone better. And Bernie has been careful to remain surrounded by even less charismatic figures.

Bernie Inc. is a typical leftist organization, militantly loud, internally poisonous, virtue signaling its altruism while really being motivated by conventional greed, clumsily mismanaged and yet aspiring to absolute power. Its figurehead is angry and erratic. A fraud who has sold his soul for ego and cash.

Bernie will never have his revolution. He’s flip-flopped so many times that even he can’t keep track of his compromises and betrayals. And the one thing that everyone thinks is true about him is a lie.

He’s not authentic and doesn’t stick to his beliefs. Instead he traded them for a seat in the 1 percent.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

58% of Democrats believe in UFOs, but only 32% are proud to be American. Only 37% of Republicans believe in flying saucers, but a full 80% are proud of their country.

Almost twice as many Democrats are willing to believe in being abducted by space aliens than in their country. Hillary Clinton had promised that if elected, she would find out the truth about the little green men and suggested that the planet had already been visited by aliens.

"Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51," she suggested.

The chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, John Podesta, an obsessive UFO buff, appeared on an episode of Ancient Aliens which claimed that Hillary Clinton was defeated to suppress the truth about space aliens.

Like Podesta, the Democrat (space rather than illegal) alien obsession dates back to Bill’s era. When Bill Clinton appointed Webster Hubbell as his Associate Attorney General, he gave him two priorities.

"If I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me," Hubbell recalled. "One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs.”

Hubbell didn’t find any UFOs, but he had to resign after only serving a year and was sent to jail for fraud.

The Clintons may have picked up their flying saucer obsession from Laurance S. Rockefeller, a environmentalist UFO obsessive and major Clinton donor who got them involved in his UFO Initiative. Hillary may have just been grifting an old man who contributed to their legal defense fund, but there’s no reason to think a woman who responded to the Republican midterm victories of ’94 with a séance that consulted Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t believe what most of her fellow Democrats do.

Laurance S. Rockefeller was a founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which recently underwrote the push for a nuclear Iran while insisting that its nuclear weapons program didn’t exist.

According to the party that “believes” in science, Iranian nukes don’t exist, but flying saucers do.

All this helps explain why the Democrats were so quick to retreat into conspiracy theories after losing the 2016 election. Just as they did after the JFK assassination and the 2000 election. It’s natural for them to believe the worst of a country they already distrust. The left’s core beliefs are a series of conspiracy theories about class, race and gender. These conspiracy theories explain everything from crime rates to poverty to social problems. Most leftist programs are geared toward fighting a conspiracy by white people, by men, by the wealthy and the middle class that doesn’t exist except in the minds of the left.

America has been shattered by generations of social policies that completely bypass the problems they’re trying to solve from the inner city to the campus because they’re too busy getting revenge against the evil white male conspirators by making it harder for them to get into college or get a job.

That’s what happens when you turn over the country to Marxists watching the sky for lights and watching social statistics for any discrepancy that they can blame on the white male conspiracy. The inability to understand the difference between correlation and causation that trips up so many conspiracy theorists is also the disparate impact claim underlying the left’s allegations of discrimination.

And disparate impact simply means that all correlation must imply racist causation.

If a job requires a high school diploma, if there are laws against littering or if a standardized test is demanding, and more black people are disadvantaged by that, that is disparate impact. And disparate impact proves a racist conspiracy that requires state intervention. No matter how dubiously legal.

Adding new conspiracy theories to the central leftist conspiracy theory is easy. UFOs, Russians rigging elections and CIA Cubans killing JFK are small potatoes compared to the conviction, expressed in so many leftist texts from Marx’s Das Kapital to Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, that all the beliefs you grew up with are a lie and everything around you is the end result of a vast conspiracy.

Democrats are the party least likely to know that the earth revolves around the sun once a year. Only between 48% to 27% of the enlightened supporters of the Party of Science actually knew this.

45% of liberals believe in astrology. Only 23% are proud of America.

Three-quarters of Democrats believe that thoughts can influence the physical world. Over half believe in ghosts.

Almost a third of Democrats, twice as many as Republicans, believe in “spiritual energy”. 35% of liberals compared to 18% of conservatives are believers.

A fifth of Democrats fear the “evil eye”.

If you can name a superstition, knocking on wood, walking under ladders or stepping on a crack, polls show that Democrats are more likely to believe in it.

Democrats are 60% more likely to fear black cats than Republicans (so much for the anti-racist party) and 33% more likely to fear the number 13.

The rational and enlightened elite who want to make all our decisions are also 54% more likely to think that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck.

A fifth of Democrats believe it’s unlucky to walk under a ladder. Nearly a fifth believe in fortune telling.

The left liked to think that dispensing with the old truths of G-d and country would make them smarter and more rational. Instead it reverted them to the paranoid superstitions of paganism.

Instead of moving forward to the fabled “right side of history”, they’re retreating into pre-history.

They haven’t replaced G-d with reason, but with flying saucers, storefront psychics, black cats, bad luck ladders and umbrellas, the wrath of Mother Earth, safe spaces, and the magical powers of dolphins.

They haven’t replaced nationalism with the enlightened embrace of the entire human race, but with a paranoid racial and political tribalism which is eager to believe the very worst of outsiders. Instead of transcending the nation for the world, they’ve become hostile toward most of the country. They haven’t become broadminded. Instead they’ve lost even the broadmindedness that Americans used to have.

Their policies not only haven’t made the world better, but they haven’t made them better people.

50 years after HUAC vanished into the mists of time, they’re finding Russians under every tree. 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, they’re frantically defending racial preferences in education. Their vaunted journalism has been reduced to an outrage machine feeding them insane conspiracy theories. One week, Trump is a Russian spy. The other, his family is in league with China. One week, he’s about to destroy us by going to war with North Korea. The next week, he’s selling us out to North Korea.

The Democrats have learned to love xenophobic nationalism in the service of tribal ideologism. The Party of Peace fears the rest of the world as much as the Party of Science believes in spooks and UFOs.

Democrats inhabit a demon-haunted world of superstitions and conspiracies. Instead of being enlightened, they were robbed of the confidence in the Creator and America that resounds from every patriotic Fourth of July anthem and song. They sold their birthright for the pottage of fear and hate.

They cower in safe spaces, fear the other and live their lives in the shadow of irrational terrors.

Unable to function as citizens of a society, they retreat into conspiracy theories and plot to bring down their country while replacing it with a utopia based on magical thinking and its sordid orgy of blood.

Having lost faith in G-d and country, it is easier for them to believe in flying saucers than in America.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine here at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs. Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.

And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.

The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe. They also betrayed the duties of the two men and two women.

The affairs were not private matters. The two illicit sexual relationships were also illicit political arrangements. As the Inspector General’s report noted, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Clinton ally who has since been fired, used Page as his liaison with Strzok to circumvent the chain of command on the investigation. McCabe used Page as his conduit and Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.

BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.

But here some of the biggest names in the media were caught using the same tactics as the Russians.

How significant was the Ali Watkins and James Wolfe affair? Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, in her furious defense of Watkins, noted, "most crucially, the value of her journalism (her Carter Page scoop in BuzzFeed actually helped lead to appt of Mueller)." Strzok was forced to leave the Mueller investigation due to the exposure of his texts with Lisa Page. Watkins’ affair with Wolfe has been credited by a key media figure with helping create the monster that is the Mueller investigation.

At the rotten heart of the campaign against Trump lay the betrayal of private and public fidelities.

But the Strzok-Page and Watkins-Wolfe affairs were also crucial in bypassing formal lines of communication. Illicit affairs are popular espionage tradecraft not just because they provide blackmail material against influential officials, but because their very informality makes it easy to create covert networks within organizations as personal intimacy is used to maintain political intimacy.

McCabe allegedly used Page to create such a connection between him and Strzok. The media appeared to have used Watkins to create a link into the Senate Intelligence Committee. It’s unknown if anyone on Wolfe’s end was aware of the affair and using it to feed information to the media. But it would not be too surprising if the open secret of the affair was just as open on his end as it was on the media’s end.

It’s easier to piggyback one illicit secret on another. There were two layers of secret affairs here, one layer of intimacy between two couples, and another layer of illicit intimacy between organizations. The organizational affairs cover three key players in the campaign against President Trump: elements in the FBI, the media and the Senate Intelligence Committee who had adulterated their responsibilities.

When we talk about the deep state, what we really mean are these illicit networks within the government that have their own rogue agenda. These networks exist in every part of the government. Some are just corrupt, trading favors, cash and access. Others are political. Like enemy spy cells, their members coordinate privately to suborn organizations the way that these men and women did.

The arrest of the occasional spy ring gives us an insight into how they operate. The exposure of Strzok, Page and McCabe, of Watkins, Wolfe and the media, gives us an insight into how the deep state runs.

Corruption requires complicity. As every good spy knows, the best sources are those who have proven that they are willing to compromise their ethics in other areas, whether it’s gambling, adultery or theft.

The network that went after Trump was, at least in part, built out of such people. In their varied cases, mistresses and spouses served as crucial conduits to a public official such as the DOJ's Bruce Ohr whose wife Nellie worked to dig up dirt on Trump for Fusion GPS or McCabe whose wife Jill had received $675,000 for her political campaign through a close Clinton ally, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Spouses could be used to route financial benefits while mistresses carried information, as Watkins did from Wolfe and Page did from Strzok. Formal political affiliations, such as James Comey’s supposed Republican status, matter less than the private ones of his wife and daughters who are rabid Clinton supporters and Trump opponents. In Washington D.C., formal party affiliation is downstream from social politics. The career networks that matter are built in restaurants and cocktail parties, not polling places.

Up close the swamp is making friends who can help you move from the public sector to the private sector. It’s peddling influence, getting to know people and building transactional relationships. It’s players who know everybody hiring out to other players who need to know everybody. It’s also knowing how to bypass ethics rules, oversight and chains of command to be able to get the things you need to do done. That might be a contract, a subsidy, a sale or the overthrow of the United States government.

It’s just another day in the swamp.

The Mueller investigation rose out of that swamp and the Clinton-Steele dossier dived deep into it. The investigation of the investigations has only begun mapping the swamp. Underneath the turgid waters of the Potomac, the swamp dwellers have their own mores. The stately government buildings, cozy restaurants and dignified manors conceal twisted relationships between people and organizations.

In every society, the governors live by a different set of rules than the governed. In Washington D.C., infidelity to spouses, oaths, governments, voters and ethics is not an aberration. It’s the rule. Adultery to whatever you claim to hold true is the price of admission. It’s how you can be trusted to join the club.

The political side of the imperial city is a small town. And everyone knows all the dirty secrets. Call it the deep state, the swamp or just what happens when government becomes its own culture.

Government runs on rules, on knowing them, enforcing them and breaking them. At the lowest level of power, you know the rules. At the next level you enforce them. At the final level, you break them.

That final level of power is the deep state. It lives where the rules are meant to be broken.

The campaign against Trump ran on the parallel laws of Washington D.C. Its networks were covert alliances that ran on the social relationships of the swamp. That these networks included infidelity and political prostitution as a feature would only be natural. In a transactional town that traffics in relationships, running a coup piggybacked on an affair and prostituting a reporter are virtues not sins.

The legitimate body of government tests for ethics. The parallel deep state tests for corruption. The men and women who went after President Trump didn’t just cheat on each other, they cheated on America.

These parallel networks, in government, in public life and in private life, are the conduits of corruption. To defeat the deep state, these parallel networks in government must be exposed to the light of day.

As long as the deep state remains deep underwater, the corruption will continue.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Harvard lashed out at the Department of Education and the Justice Department’s withdrawal of Obama era letters backing extreme racist preferences in education by vowing to "continue to vigorously defend its right, and that of all colleges and universities, to consider race.”

To paraphrase the inaugural address of a noted Democrat: “Affirmative action now, affirmative action tomorrow, affirmative action forever.”

The right that Harvard is fighting for is the right to be racist. The same right that George Wallace, the KKK and nearly every single college in the country have been obsessed with protecting and preserving.

Harvard already stands accused of considering race in its admissions to such a degree that an Asian student's chance of getting in would go from 25% to 95% if she switched races and pretended to be black. Low-income Asian applicants were less likely to get in than wealthier black applicants.

"Make no mistake, this is the law of the land. Today’s announcement does not change that," Ted Mitchell declared, channeling segregationist rhetoric which also leaned heavily on the ‘law of the land.’

Holistic admissions are as much of a racist farce and a ‘law of the land’ as separate but equal.

Mitchell was Obama's point man in his war against colleges operating outside the traditional higher education model. These days he heads the American Council on Education, the lobby group of the higher education industry, the universities and colleges trading a fortune in debt for an increasingly worthless degree. Mitchell’s transition from educational hit man to educational lobbyist is a typical example of the self-serving agendas of the Obama administration and its lefty Educrat allies.

ACE is a defender of racial preferences which it benefits from not only politically, but economically. And the Educrats have a better plan to preserve their segregationist system than the segregationists did.

After Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court may be ready to strike down racial discrimination at colleges and universities. Without Kennedy’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision, which will go down in history with Plessy v. Ferguson, that would have already happened. Three of the letters being withdrawn by Kenneth L. Marcus, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, involve Obama guidance to schools on Fisher.

And if affirmative action joins separate but equal in the racist dustbin of history, Ted Mitchell’s spurious appeal to the ‘law of the land’ will be as worthless as those of past defenders of legalized racism.

Statistics and merit are the smoking guns of racial discrimination lawsuits like the one that Asian students have filed against Harvard. But if you eliminate scores, then you eliminate the entire academic merit argument. And that leaves the system free to use the non-academic and non-merit based measures that Harvard allegedly used to occlude the straight academic merits of Asian applicants. Discrimination grows more difficult to prove as the selection criteria become more subjective.

Would the Educrats really burn down tests to protect the cantons of their academic apartheid state?

The University of Chicago is jettisoning SAT and ACT scores for applicants as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative. In addition to going “test-optional”, it will also allow students to submit a two minute video introduction “in lieu of the traditional college interview”. How “holistic” of it.

Going test-optional isn’t a new idea. But it’s been gathering steam. Chicago joins UTA, GWU, DePaul, George Mason and Old Dominion as a test-optional school. Others, like NYU and Drexel have gone “test flexible”. Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are dropping the writing portions of the SAT.

And the movement isn’t stopping there.

The American Bar Association's Standards Review Committee called for making standardized tests optional for law schools. In response, UC Irvine School of Law’s African-American Assistant Dean warned that such a move would be disastrous for, among others, minority students.

“Students who are admitted on GPA alone or perhaps in conjunction with qualitative factors absent from a standardized test may borrow six figures for just their first year,” he pointed out.

The MCAT, the granddaddy of admission tests which will turn 90, is also on the target list. But the current system limits the impact of academic merit badly enough. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education warned that relying on MCAT tests without affirmative action would cause the percentage of African-American med students at the most selective schools to fall by 90%. And, it goes without saying, the percentage of Asians and other students who had been discriminated against would rise accordingly.

As the Trump administration moves against affirmative action, going test-optional or even test-free will be the modern equivalent of George Wallace’s stand in front of the doors of the University of Alabama.

Jettison any system of national or state standardized tests and the only metrics that will matter will be the dubious GPAs of the local high school and the racial biases of the university. GPAs will provide a fig leaf of merit while the rest will be made up for with key metrics like courage, likability and diversity.

Asians, who often lack either victimhood status or legacy links will be the biggest losers in this arrangement. Eliminate standardized testing and much of the evidence of disparate impact goes with them. And disparate impact on a general population won’t help an academically overrepresented population group. And it’s why Asian students are fighting racist destandarization measures the hardest.

But when merit makes way for political merits, we all lose.

Do you really want to be treated by a doctor who didn’t do well enough on his MCAT, but was scored really well on his perceived personal qualities by a panel of guilty white lefties scoring diversity points?

Opponents of standardized testing argue that there’s more to any profession than answering test questions. That’s true. But the dedication and ability to learn the material is far closer to an objective measure of merit than the subjective biases and political agendas of administrators and staffers.

A meritocracy is not immune to privilege. But it is also the least influenced by it of all the alternatives. And the most likely to produce results. Like democracy, it is the worst system, except for all the others.

And academic meritocracy is dying.

The standardized tests being denounced by education lobbies have already been watered down to an absurd degree. SAT scores rose after the test was dumbed down giving students more time, fewer choices, an optional essay and no penalty for wrong answers. New York’s Algebra 1 Regents offers a passing score for students who only get 30%. But even this grade inflation isn’t enough.

Grades, any grades, create a paper trail. Standardized tests in and across states are the first foe. But any measure of merit undermines the control of educrats by rewarding individual initiative. That is the very thing that the left has been fighting against under the guise of combating classism, racism and a thousand other ‘isms’ for over a century. To kill individual initiative, wipe out merit. And then the only metrics for a good education, a good job or a good anything will be the castes of identity politics.

Undermining standardized testing at the college level is a typical Cloward-Piven strategy creating a vocal and scholastically weak constituency opposed to tests on campus. Students who don’t come in on merit can’t be expected to stay in on merit. As standardized tests stop being a gateway to college, they will become irrelevant at the high school level. Under a system where the best student at a worst school is deemed as good as the best student at the best school, parents who once sought the best schools for their children will instead seek the worst schools where their son can perch at the top of his class.

The destruction of any objective measure of merit is meant to protect racial privileges. The Educrats of academia would rather destroy education than abandon their shameful racial discrimination.

The era of legal affirmative action, like legal segregation, may be coming to an end. But its academic perpetrators intend that it go on through stealth discrimination, holistic admissions and covert quotas.

Standardized tests will be eliminated to protect the academic suppression of Asian and white students.

Catherine Lhamon, Obama's former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, complained that ending support for super-racial preferences “will discourage the lawful use of race to achieve diversity” and “our college and university campuses will become whiter and less diverse.”

‘Whiter’ is to the new segregation of safe spaces what ‘blacker’ was to separate water fountains. The “lawful use of race”, a term also redolent of segregationist sentiments, is the only thing protecting campuses from becoming “whiter”. And, it once again goes without saying, more Asian.

Don’t call it diversity. Call it racism.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

When the Oslo deal that would create two Islamic terror states inside Israel came up for a vote in the Knesset, the legislator whose vote helped it pass is the same man now accused of spying for Iran.

The strange story of Gonen Segev, doctor, Minister of Energy, drug smuggler, Nigerian exile and now accused Iranian spy, is also that of the dirty politics behind the peace process. It wasn’t idealism that made the deal with the PLO. It was dirty backroom deals with dangerously unprincipled politicians.

Segev's cousin had testified in court that he was "a pathological liar who makes excuses and evades responsibilities for his actions." But the same is true of the Israeli left which brought Segev on board.

The alleged Iranian spy began his political career on the right. But 3 years after he became one of the youngest members of Israel’s legislature, he aligned with the left and helped pass an agreement with the PLO that is the second biggest threat to Israel’s existence after Iran’s nuclear weapons.

It’s only fitting that Gonen Segev, whose political life hit its terrible peak with the PLO deal, should climax his post-political criminal career by standing accused of spying for Israel’s worst enemy.

And the former politician and defrocked doctor has the same excuse for the latter crime as for the former one. He wanted to be a hero. But Gonen Segev doesn’t have a history of being a hero.

What he does have is a history of being willing to do anything for money.

No matter what the Iranians offered him, the biggest bribe that Israelis will remember Segev for was the time that he became the Minister of Energy in a left-wing government. Segev had no qualifications for the job. Except one. He had a crucial seat in the Israeli Knesset as the deal with the PLO was up for a vote. The idea of giving Arafat and his band of murderous killers a state was so politically toxic that even some members of the ruling Labor Party couldn’t bring themselves to vote for it. But he could and did.

Gonen Segev was a nobody. He was a doctor in a country full of them. But he happened to be living in the community of Tel Adashim. Aside from its history, Tel Adashim or Lentil Hill, wasn’t very interesting. But it was the home of Rafael Eitan, an irascible former general and fierce critic of appeasing terrorists. Eitan was right about fighting terrorists, but his ability to run a political movement was minimal.

As the Israeli casualties of Islamic terrorism mounted, the former general’s political movement grew popular. But it was peopled with opportunists. When Tzomet, his political party, stormed the Knesset, it was filled with legislators who, like Gonen Segev, had been the former general’s own neighbors.

Israeli voters had sent Gonen Segev and other Tzomet members to the Knesset to fight terrorism. Instead some defected to the other side. When the crucial vote on the deal with the PLO came up, it was the candidates elected by anti-terror voters who, perversely, were the ones to vote for terror.

The political faction that split off from Tzomet was known as Yiud or Mission. Its mission was obvious.

Of the three Knesset members who joined the left and took their votes along, Gonen Segev became Minister of Energy and Alex Goldfarb was appointed the Deputy Minister of Housing. Goldfarb, a Romanian immigrant, had been an electrician and a union activist.

The terror sellout passed 61-59.

Yiud fractured. Segev became its only remaining member. There was no long term career for the only member of an imaginary political party that had betrayed its original voters. As the PLO deal continued to take Israeli lives, the left lost power. And Netanyahu’s victory all but ended the rule of the left.

But Gonen Segev didn’t give up easily. He was accused and seemingly cleared of corruption. He allegedly developed contacts in China. Most Israelis forgot about him, but then he was suddenly back in the news.

The man who helped give Arafat a state had been caught in Amsterdam with thousands of ecstasy tablets in boxes of M&Ms. The former Minister of Energy tried to claim diplomatic immunity by showing airport security a diplomatic passport from 2000 which he had clumsily tried to change from a ‘0’ to a ‘6’. Then he insisted that he really thought they were candy and was just doing a favor for a friend.

The bizarre case finally ended with Segev pleading guilty to trying to smuggle 32,000 ecstasy tablets into Israel. That came after he was convicted of credit card fraud for having his ex-wife claim that his credit card had been stolen in Hong Kong even as he withdrew over 20,000 shekels.

Segev’s downfall attracted the attention of the Israeli right which saw it as a clear case of poetic justice. But it also put the former politician on Iran’s radar. The Islamic terror state claims to be a shining example of morals, but funds its international terror network through drug trafficking. Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese terror group that is its greatest stalking horse, grows rich drug crops of Lebanese Gold in the Bekaa Valley, moves heroin to Australia and smuggles cigarettes around the United States.

It’s also deeply involved in the West African drug trade. And that was Segev’s next stop.

The former doctor had lost his medical license in Israel. So he set up shop in Nigeria. And Nigeria has long been a home for Hezbollah drug and terror operations. Just as in the United States, Lebanese businessmen serve as Hezbollah’s agents, moving money, weapons and drugs around the country.

Few Israelis have been corrupted into spying for Islamic terrorists. But those who have were usually reached through the drug trade. People corrupt enough to turn to drug dealing and smuggling are the type willing to do anything for money. And that certainly described Gonen Segev’s debauched career.

As the worst sort of exile, Gonen Segev was working as a doctor in Nigeria. In 2016, he asked Israel to reinstate his medical license. “I’ve decided I’m not coming back to Israel unless I can return with my head held high as ‘Dr. Gonen Segev’,” he insisted.

By that point he was already allegedly working for Islamic Republic of Iran.

The lurid tale now unfolding has Segev traveling to Iran, secretly receiving orders from Iranian officials and passing along Israeli contacts to Iran’s intelligence network. And his excuse is the same.

The thrice disgraced politico wanted to be a hero.

And Gonen Segev is a hero. He was a hero to the left, to the PLO and a hero to the Iranians. But never to Israelis. Former members of the conservative political party he betrayed want to see him rot in jail.

Former Tzomet MK Pini Badash described him as a "paranoid megalomaniac who went from being the party’s most right-wing MK to selling out Israel for the bribe of a seat in Rabin’s cabinet.”

“It’s amazing that Oslo passed because of bribing him. This shows how illegitimate Oslo was."

But the Oslo deal that created two Islamic terror states inside Israel was the work of men like Segev, opportunistic megalomaniacs driven by ego and unwilling to consider the consequences. Uncaring of the catastrophes they unleashed, they stumbled from one treason to another leaving the dead and wounded, shattered homes, blown out buses and growing cemeteries in their wake.

There is no counting the lives that Segev’s actions cost. Countless children lost their fathers and mothers. And parents lost their sons and daughters. Even long before the former doctor had allegedly gone to work for the Iranians, entire hospitals could have been filled with the casualties of his vote.

Many speeches have been given about the price of peace. In Israel, there were two prices of peace. One was paid by the thousands of wounded and the dead. The other was paid out to Gonen Segev.

The price of peace is terror and treason.










Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.