“Why the hell are we standing down?"

That was the question that the White House's cybersecurity coordinator was asked after Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, issued a stand down order on Russia.

Testimony at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian interference in the election once again raised the central paradox of the Russia conspiracy theory. If Russian interference in the election represented the crisis that we are told it did, why did Obama fail to take any meaningful action?

The White House’s own cybersecurity people wanted an aggressive response before being told to stand down. Obama issued a bloodless warning to Russia while his people deliberately crippled our offense.

Democrats and the media blamed the Russian hacking on Trump. But it was Susan Rice who had told the cybersecurity team to “knock it off” and Obama’s people who hadn’t wanted him to be “boxed in” and forced to respond to Russian actions. Was this just the usual appeasement or was there more to it?

Why didn’t Obama and his team want to stop Russian hacking? Because they needed the Russians.

The 2016 election is really the story of two deep state intelligence operations that dovetailed neatly with each other. One was an ongoing Russian operation that took advantage of a weak president to sow chaos in America and Europe. The other was a domestic political operation utilizing counterintelligence resources in the United States and Europe to spy on, undermine and try to bring down Trump.

Contrary to claims made by Obama operatives, the Russian operation was not new. Russian hackers and spies had done enormous damage to America’s intelligence community. But they had succeeded so well because the mission of the intelligence community had shifted from deterring foreign adversaries to suppressing domestic political opponents. And this new mission made the Russians attacks irrelevant.

The Russian attacks on the formerly formidable NSA were so easy to accomplish because it was no longer countering the Russians. Instead Obama viewed it as a police state tool for spying on pro-Israel activists, members of Congress and Trump campaign officials. The NSA’s opposite numbers in Russia, posing as rogue hackers, were no longer hammering rivals, but a twisted and crippled organization.

Obama didn’t want to fight the Russians, but the Russian attacks were very useful because they justified the NSA’s powers, which he was abusing not to go after the Russians, but after American political rivals. And the Russian election hacks played perfectly into his hands by justifying the counterintelligence investigations supposedly aimed at the Russians, but really aimed at domestic political opponents.

The Mueller investigation is only the latest of these disguised counterintelligence police state gimmicks.

Without the Russians, Obama’s people would have just been nakedly abusing their powers to spy on Americans. But as long as the Russians were active, his deep state had the excuse that it needed.

The two intelligence operations, the Russian one and the Obama one, were interdependent. Their deep state symbiosis was possible only because neither side threatened the core interests of the other.

The Russians were a national security threat, but Obama’s people didn’t care about national security. And Obama’s counterintelligence operation was aimed at domestic political opponents rather than the Russians. It’s still unknown if the Russians and Obama’s people actively colluded in these operations, but it’s likely that seasoned professionals on both sides had a quiet understanding of their respective roles.

The Russians had not set out to alter the outcome of the election. Nor did they have that capability. Their attacks followed the pattern of the Dulles Plan, a fictional piece of Soviet propaganda which attributed any anti-Soviet activity to an American conspiracy to undermine Communism. The KGB veterans running Russia as an actual deep state sought to undermine the American political system by feeding extremism, creating panic and discrediting elections. And that also fit the Obama agenda.

Obama’s people had spent eight years dismantling political norms and undermining America. The KGB deep state conspirators in Russia and their leftist counterparts in Washington D.C. had emerged from the same ideological school. Their aims and allegiances had diverged, but the ex-Communists in Moscow and Adams Morgan Socialists in Washington D.C. shared a common hatred for America and its values.

There was no reason to interfere with the Russian interference. Obama and his people did not believe that the Russians would significantly affect the election. But if his efforts to eavesdrop on Trump officials came to light, the Russians had provided him with an alibi. Susan Rice, as national security adviser, was at the center of the eavesdropping effort and had every reason to protect the Russian operation.

Protecting the Russians also protected the Obamas.

Nor did the Obama deep state have any particular allegiance to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Obamas and the Clintons loathed each other. Though both factions were leftists, their approaches were as much at variance as Bolsheviks and Trotskyists. Obama had been forced to make a deal with the Clintons to secure his hold on the Democrat operation. But his support for Hillary Clinton was only an endorsement of the lesser evil. Her defeat left him and his political allies in total control of the Democrat operation.

And the chaos and violence of his anti-Trump resistance achieved his goal of radicalizing the Democrats.

The Russians didn’t hack the election. That conspiracy theory remains wishful thinking. But the allegation proved very useful in enabling everything from the pre-election eavesdropping on political opponents to the post-election sabotage of the Trump administration to the move away from electronic voting to paper ballots which enable the old-fashioned kind of Democrat ballot stuffing.

But like an iceberg, the most troubling development of the Russian conspiracy is mostly underwater.

After 9/11, the intelligence community was revived with a new purpose. That purpose was fighting Islamic terrorism. During Obama’s two terms, the intelligence community was compromised, crippled and transformed into a domestic deep state aimed at suppressing the political opposition. Tragically, it came to resemble the KGB, with its domestic surveillance and investigation of political opponents.

This transformation of law enforcement and intelligence agencies did not emerge out of thin air.

The Founders were rightly cautious of the power of a strong central government. And a national law enforcement and intelligence infrastructure was always ripe for the worst big government abuses.

The FBI’s record of political tampering under Hoover was no secret. And it didn’t end there. Everything in Washington D.C. is political. Especially the apolitical. Its engine of careerism runs on networking and connections. The apolitical bureaucracy is a buzzing hive of ambition and backstabbing. Every agency has its own Machiavellian subcultures with courtiers, saboteurs, spies and manipulators. And every agency culture has a leftist ideological component, among its other agendas, some more than others.

The Obama years politicized everything from the food you ate to the clothes you wore. Certainly no arm of government survived those terrible two terms without being substantially transformed.

As the cold winter sun set on another year in Washington D.C., the deep state was reborn.

The Democrats have spent two years accusing Republicans of colluding with Russia. But as usual they were accusing their political opponents of their own crime. Republicans had not undermined national security. The Democrats did. A Republican president hadn’t sat across from Putin’s agent and assured him that he would have more flexibility to make deals after the election. A Republican president hadn’t let the Russians hack our national security secrets to provide a casus belli for targeting his opponents.

That was all Obama.

Barack Obama and Susan Rice sabotaged efforts to stop the Russians because their deep state domestic spying program depended on Russian collusion, both the reality and the allegation. Everything from the original allegation, Clinton campaign opposition research which drew on claims by a Russian intelligence operative, to the Mueller counterintelligence investigation, which has done nothing to actually stop the Russians, but has gone after Republican campaign pros, needed the Russians as its stalking horse.

Russian hacking didn’t change the election. But Obama’s exploitation of Russian hacking nearly did. We still don’t know what materials were gathered by the eavesdropping operation. Or who saw them. Information is the ultimate weapon in national security and election campaigns. Obama used the former to tamper with the latter. And all these years later, we still don’t know what damage was done.

While Mueller prowls around pursuing Hillary Clinton’s conspiracy theories, those crimes remain unexplored. But we do know that the Russians didn’t do anything that Obama didn’t allow them to do.

Any serious effort to investigate Russian election hacks must begin with the man who let them to do it.







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.

“Prohibitionism never works” is a cliché. And like most clichés, it’s true and not true at the same time.

Everyone believes that prohibitionism works and never works. The progressive advocating for drug legalization believes just as fervently in the power of gun control as in the futility of banning pot. He doesn’t see the contradiction, because he knows that the drug laws never stopped him from getting high. But he would never want to buy guns, legally or illegally. So banning them should work.

The first law of prohibitionism is that banning things other people want seems easy. But banning the things that you want appears impossible. Prohibitionism never works for you, but works for him.

We ban all sorts of things. Many of them, like nuclear bombs or lethal toxins, are things that few would want. So prohibiting possession of them works fairly well. But when there’s significant demand, then no amount of legal and social sanction can stop a black market from continuing to operate in the shadows.

Prohibitionism won’t entirely wipe out that black market. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

Nothing is as reviled in our society as the sexual abuse of children. Hardly anyone in the United States, on the left or the right (Some of Europe’s Green parties have tried to legalize pedophilia, and the New York Times and Gawker, in its glory days, had pieces defending it) will advocate legalization.

Operation Broken Heart recently made 2,300 arrests for everything from child pornography to child trafficking. The investigation, which ran from March to May, received 25,000 tips. Those are horrifying numbers. And they show that, as the cliché goes, prohibitionism doesn’t work. It hasn’t stamped out traffic in the vilest crime that we can possibly imagine. But that also shows the limits of the cliché.

No law will ever entirely wipe out certain crimes. But prohibiting them limits their prevalence. And it reduces the number of innocent victims. 2,300 or 25,000 are both horrifying numbers. But imagine how high they would be without prohibitionism. The laws we take for granted today weren’t always there. 19th century moralists campaigned hard for them by exposing the abuse of children in London and Paris.

Prohibitionism has a strong moral component. That’s why it doesn’t work without social sanction.

Social sanction and law enforcement can banish a behavior to the shadows. But without social sanction, the behavior reemerges into the daylight. And the calls for legalization swiftly follow. The enforcement of laws that aren’t backed by social sanction turns hollow and becomes a curious historical relic.

Like Prohibition era cops raiding speakeasies and smashing barrels of moonshine with sledgehammers.

The left dismantled social sanctions on drug use and gay marriage, but has spent three times as long trying and failing to impose social sanctions on gun ownership. That’s because dismantling social sanctions is easy. All it takes is demonstrating that a significant section of society practices the sanctioned behavior with no consequences. And is perfectly happy to go on doing so indefinitely.

Social sanctions can’t be imposed on a divided country. And that’s just as true for the left’s sanctions.

The left has failed to realize that it is much harder to build values in a divided society than to take them apart. If Kansas can’t change Hollywood, why should Hollywood be able to change Kansas? The cultural elites wanted immunity from the community values of the heartland. But having won all those battles, they hypocritically turned around and tried to impose their own values on the heartland.

Hollywood has replaced the Hays Code that governed what could be shown on the screen with its code that, like the Hays Code, is designed to socially engineer values throughout the entertainment industry. This Hollywood Code, with its codicils about diversity, environmentalism, hostility to the military and endorsement of progressive values, is only faintly codified. But virtually everything you see projects it.

But it is even more difficult to embed values remotely than it is to govern a country from far away. Making policy for the whole country in the Washington D.C. bubble backfires. Making values for the country in the Hollywood, Harvard and Manhattan bubbles is an even more doomed political project.

The left’s moral panics, over gun control or global warming, are amplified through the megaphones of popular culture, academia and the media. They are dressed up in the traditional images of victimized children and total catastrophe. Not to mention the lab coats of science. But each time the panic comes up against the existence of the gun owners and truck drivers of the other half of the country.

Our values reflect how we live. And people in Iowa and Nebraska are not going to live like New York or San Francisco no matter how much they’re scolded and hectored by their bicoastal betters.

Moral panics are directed at populations, not behaviors. Prohibition targeted liquor at a time when that was the substance of choice for those on the lowest rung of the ladder. These days it’s drugs. But it was the social problems caused by that population living on the lowest rung that was the real issue.

When a society is united, then its moral panics are aimed at pockets of misbehavior in the lowest and highest social spheres. But when it’s divided, then the moral panics are aimed broadly at the way the other half lives. And these panics serve only to reinforce the sense of superiority of the panickers. Every failed gun control bid ends with blue state lefties sighing in relief at their infinitely better way of life.

Punitive prohibitionism in a divided society is just tyranny. All it does is deepen the existing social divide.

Social sanctions don’t work when a society can’t agree on a common set of values. Attempting to impose them anyway leads to a social civil war of the kind that made President Trump a reality.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln famously observed. Political divisions can be endured, but sustaining moral divisions in a single country requires an even greater compromise. And the left is not about to accept the same moral libertarianism that it had demanded throughout the twentieth century. It is convinced that it won. And winners don’t compromise. They take everything.

But the left didn’t actually win. It just wrecked the house. It didn’t unite the country under its values. Instead its social catastrophes are destroying the very idea of values around the country and the world.

Our values originated in religion. And that is declining across the country. They originated in communities that are being fractured by nationalization, globalization and the internet. And the left’s ideology will never replace religion and community for more than a tiny fraction of the population. Its experiments in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba and Europe have shown that.

While the 1% of the leftist cult actually run a society, the other 99% retreat into hollow pursuits. Birth rates fall, suicide rates rise, alcohol and drug abuse run rampant as people lose any sense of purpose.

We are beginning to see the same situation in the United States of America.

While the left rants about gun violence, suicides far outnumber homicides. Our suicide rate continues to rise for reasons having nothing to do with the left’s moral panic about gun owners, but everything having to do with a lack of purpose and meaning. The loss of purpose and meaning is killing Americans.

Prohibitionism represents a failure of values. Sometimes these failures are local. Other times national.

Even the most morally divided society can still occasionally agree on things so reviled that they must be prohibited. But our society is losing its values and those we have are increasingly not the ones we have in common. The civil war tearing apart this country has its origins not in violence, but in values.

In 2008, Colorado separated a Jewish boy from his parents.

Marten Kudlis was separated from his parents while waiting for his mother to bring him his ice cream. The 3-year-old boy who had just been playing in the park never got his ice cream.

Instead Francis Hernandez, an illegal alien driving 81 miles an hour, slammed into a pickup truck, killing the two women inside, and smashing it through the glass wall of the Baskin Robbins.

Blood and broken glass covered the floor. Little Marten, who had just learned to ride a bike, died of a slashed jugular vein and was buried with a teddy bear.

Francis Hernandez had been arrested 16 times in 5 years without ever being turned over to immigration authorities. That failure to enforce immigration law separated a little boy from his family forever.

Advocates for illegal migration claim to be outraged by family separation. They want illegal alien invaders like Francis to go on separating American children from their families. What the fake news media falsely calls family separation is just arresting illegal aliens like Francis instead of releasing them. When previous administrations failed to enforce border security, they separated American children like Marten and many others from their parents forever. And the blood of those children is on the hands of the posturing politicians, activists and pundits who want to unite illegal aliens and separate Americans.

In February 2018, the United States government separated Grace Aguilar from her parents.

Grace was a bright and cheerful 6-year-old girl. While she was sitting by her favorite tree in the front yard of her family home, Maximino Delgado Lagunas, a Mexican illegal alien who had already been deported twice, ran her down.

The illegal alien's blood alcohol limit was three times the legal limit. He had been arrested before for a DUI, but was put back on the street by local cops instead of being turned over to immigration authorities.

Sanctuary city policies separated Grace, whose parents had tried to have children for 8 years, from her parents. The illegal alien who killed her had been deported twice, once under Bush and once under Obama. The combination of lax border security by these two administrations and local sanctuary policies permanently separated the little girl and her parents. Unlike the illegal migrants whose plight is playing out on every cable news channel, the Aguilar family will never get their daughter back.

16-year-old Kayla Cuevas and 15-year-old Nisa Mickens were separated from their parents when they were battered with baseball bats and butchered with a machete in a suburban cul-de-sac by illegal alien MS-13 members.

The brutal illegal alien assault left the bodies of the African-American teenage girls, who had been out celebrating Nisa's birthday, barely recognizable.

“There are days where you feel like you want your world to end, just like your child’s,” Kayla's mother said. “Then you realize you have a new purpose: to fight, so that your child’s death is not in vain.”

10-year-old Alena Clay was separated from her family while walking down a bike lane with her 16-year-old sister and two other girls. Juan Carlos Ortega-Santos, an illegal alien, had no driver's license, no insurance and his blood alcohol level was far over the limit. 16-year-old Tyeisha Lacy, Alena's sister, pushed an 8-year-old girl out of Juan's way. But Juan slammed into the two Lacy girls killing them both.

"He will never know the extent of the damage he did," Lakeenya Lacy, Tyeisha's mother, said in court. "You did not just take their lives. You took other people's lives with them."

4-year-old Ellie Bryant and 22-month-old Grayson Hacking were separated forever from their mother when Margarito Quintero Rosales slammed head on into their car. Ellie, Grayson and Courtney Hacking's husband, Peter, were all killed.

Rosales had been previously deported and had no license. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

15-year-old Genesis Cornejo-Alvarado was separated from her parents when two illegal alien MS-13 gang members killed her in a satanic ritual after previously raping her and a 14-year-old girl.

11-year-old Abigail Robinson and 6-year-old Anna Dieter-Eckerdt were separated from their parents while playing in a pile of leaves. Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, who ran them over, was an illegal alien and one of Obama's DREAMERs. Despite killing the two girls, she was released from jail and allowed to apply for a Social Security number and a work permit. And that is exactly what illegal alien advocates want.

When illegal aliens separate a child from her parents, no power on earth can undo that separation.

The sheriff's department and volunteers searched hundreds of acres for 14-month-old Owen Hidalgo-Calderon. The body of his mother, 18-year-old Selena Hidalgo-Calderon, had already been found.

Evarardo Donoteo-Reyes, a Mexican illegal alien who had already been deported twice, and convicted once of illegal entry, was charged with moving her body.

10-year-old Kayla Gomez-Orozco went missing after church. Her body was later found in a well. The accused murderer was Gustavo Zavala-Garcia, her previously deported illegal alien uncle, who allegedly sexually assaulted her, beat her with a blunt object, choked her and then drowned her in the well.

But sometimes illegal aliens don’t even bother separating parents and children. Marco Tulio Hernandez Ramirez was driving his employer’s van when he slammed into the Cannon family's Toyota Camry.

His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit, he didn’t have a license and was driving on the wrong side of the roadway. But the illegal alien survived to become a 40-year burden on taxpayers. 5-year-old Rose Marie Cannon didn't. Neither did Katherine Cannon and Russell Cannon.

Rose Marie had been given a dollar to spend as the family headed out to do their Christmas shopping.

“And she died with that dollar in her hand," Louise Cannon, Russell's mother, said. "That's the most heartbreaking thing."

"He gave them the death sentence," she said of Ramirez.

But it wasn’t only Ramirez who did that. Ramirez had been deported before, but there he was back again. The failure to enforce immigration laws separated Rose Marie forever from her family.

America is full of angel dad and moms whose children were separated from them by illegal aliens.

Ray Tranchant was separated forever from his 16-year-old daughter Tessa, when Alfredo Ramos, a drunk illegal alien, slammed into the back of their car.

"My idea of heaven", Tessa had written in her journal, "is a nonstop vacation on a tropical island … all the people I love would be there with me."

Ray Tranchant has been fighting to prevent other American families from being separated from their child.

And he’s not alone.

The victims are all around us. These are only a handful of their stories. They are members of every race and religion. Some were born in this country and others came here as legal immigrants.

We have a choice to make.

Either we can detain illegal migrants crossing the border or we can let them all in. We can take the Merkel way out and hope that the family that pays the price for illegal migration isn’t our own.

There are no apologies or excuses necessary for detaining illegal aliens who illegally cross the border. Even if we set aside minor matters like national sovereignty and the rule of law, the stories of these murdered children provide ample justification for arresting every single illegal migrant.

Either we separate illegal migrants from this country. Or they will go on brutally tearing families apart. And if we allow them to use children as human shields, then American children will pay the price.

President Trump has called the media the “enemy of the American people.” It’s not just the enemy. Its manicured hands are covered in the blood of American men, women and children. The media advocates for drug dealers, for Islamic terrorists and for illegal aliens. The more Americans they kill, the more the media cheers them on. The media’s lies aren’t just tearing apart the country, they’re killing children.





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.

President Trump boldly moved the embassy to Jerusalem. And a poll shows a nearly even split among American Jews opposing and supporting it, while 85% of Israeli Jews back the courageous decision.

77% of Israelis back Trump's handling of US-Israel relations while 57% of American Jews disapprove.

How can the vast majority of Israelis be happy with the relationship while the majority of American Jews aren’t? The answer gets at the heart of the split between what American and Israeli Jews want from Israel. And also to the root of a deeper split within the Zionist tree.

Modern Zionism is split between positive aspirational Zionism and negative respectability Zionism.

Positive Zionism was the movement of a cultural, religious and national minority to reclaim an independent identity and unleash the potential of the Jewish people. Negative Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism. And then, when Zionism became safe, it became a trophy of communal respectability.

Now that Zionism is no longer safe or respectable, the trophy is in the communal dumpster.

Positive Zionists are self-directed, but negative Zionists are other-oriented. Their Zionism is only another bid for approval from the same people and political movements whose rejection made them Zionists.

The Israeli left began as a series of movements that embraced Zionism because the Communists (and other Socialists) had made it painfully clear that there was no room for an independent Jewish socialist movement in what would become the USSR. So they launched their Socialist experiments in Israel while slavishly worshiping Stalin. Some were even willing to launch a revolution in Israel for Uncle Joe.

And that’s why the Israeli left has been going electorally extinct for a generation.

Most Israelis don’t care what the Socialist International thinks of them. The most other-directed Israelis are usually the ones who already spend more time in Paris, London and Los Angeles than in Jerusalem. The average Israeli is a positive Zionist who doesn’t even think about it. He just lives a Zionist reality.

Negative Zionists dominate diaspora organizations. But those organizations value respectability more than Israel. They want to be proud of Israel because they’re ashamed of being Jewish. And they are pathetically vulnerable to the anti-Israel lobby’s weaponization of Jewish shame. Air strikes on Gaza, New York Times editorials and protests by anti-Israel hate groups deprive them of their respectability.

Modern Zionism began as the battle cry of an oppressed minority. But then it became respectable. The communal leaders and organizations that once despised it used its bright gleam to add a little luster to their wardrobe. And then toss it overboard the moment that it detracts from their respectability.

That is who tends to speak for American Jews. These are the unelected leaders who deliver ultimatums to the Prime Minister of Israel. They wring their hands over Gaza and assent to the Iran nuke sellout.

When push comes to shove, they will always do the respectable thing. Not the Zionist thing.

The Zionism of respectability is about being able to read the New York Times and feeling good instead of feeling ashamed. Many American Jews are easily shamed. But Israeli Jews are almost impossible to shame. Unlike Jews abroad, they’re not a minority group constantly looking around for approval.

Zionism without chutzpah is unsustainable.

The future of American Zionism is to be found among Jews who don’t care about respectability. They’re either from insular religious communities or have the same tough Queens attitude as Trump.

Those are also the Jews most likely to support Trump.

The anti-Israel lobby weaponizes Jewish insecurity. Its activists and reporters exploit Jewish shame. Its politicians openly employ dual loyalty language and dog whistles. And its spinmeisters package appeasement as respectability. Even if that respectability comes at the cost of the destruction of Israel.

The peace process, which has killed and crippled thousands of Israelis, created two terror states inside Israel, and put Jerusalem and Tel Aviv under fire for the first time in a generation, is respectable. The Iran deal was respectable. Suspending it wasn’t. Blockading Hamas is shameful. Opening the border with Gaza is respectable. No matter how many Jews die. Being critical of Israel is respectable. Supporting it is tribal, narrow-minded and disreputable. And they don’t want to be seen as any of those three.

Those American Jews who continue to support Israel will be immune to media shaming. They won’t look for mainstream respectability. Instead they will become more Zionist because it is disreputable.

Trump’s support for Israel is bad for its respectability. Respectable Jews would rather not have the embassy moved at all if Trump had to be the one to do it. They are critical of everything that Trump does because that’s the respectable thing to do. When they worry about being suspected of dual loyalty, they don’t mean to America and Israel, but to the progressive cause and to the Zionist reality.

As long as the left controls the cultural high ground, it gets to define respectability. And so respectability invariably becomes an echo of its views. Only those who defy that echo chamber will remain pro-Israel.

Many pro-Israel groups claim to be working very hard to escape this trap. But there is no escape.

The left’s anti-Zionism is over a century old. Within the left, pro-Israel positions are usually found among moderates. The uncontrolled leftward turn of what used to be liberalism makes its anti-Zionism inevitable. Any correction would require reversing that leftward turn, not attempting to befriend it as the ADL and other groups have been futilely trying to do. And such a correction is not currently realistic.

Negative Zionists will have to experience anti-Semitism personally before they’re likely to turn. And they won’t make that adjustment over Israel. But the day will come when the left takes away their respectability even if they denounce Israel and subscribe to the New York Times. As Corbyn and the UK Labour Party show, anti-Zionism as a movement is just anti-Semitism wearing a funny hat. The two are joined at the hip. Where you’ll find one, you’ll soon find the other dooming Jewish respectability politics.

Israeli Jews have a more uncomplicated view of reality. Anyone who hates them, hates them. It’s American Jewish groups who wonder whether they are hated abstractly, personally, politically, religiously, nationally or culturally. And then they figure out that it’s usually all the above.

Defying bigotry in any age requires courage. That’s how Zionism was born.

Zionism was never a solution for those too timid to defy convention. It is not the pathway to respectability. That brief moment passed decades ago. It probably won’t come back.

In the decades to come, Israel will have to make some hard decisions. And the American Jewish organizations trying to balance the impossible demands of respectability and Zionism won’t like them. But as the moderate Democrat goes extinct, the constituency for negative Zionism will fade away.

Positive Zionism however will remain.

American Jews remain split between respectability politics and aspirational politics. But the future belongs to those American Jews for whom Zionism is not a source of social approval, but defiant pride. In the near future, American Zionism will cease to mean rubber chicken dinners and mindless clichés. Instead, as it already has in France, it will once again become the battle cry of an oppressed minority.

Those American Jews who have the courage to be Zionists will also be bold enough to stop being Democrats, to turn off NPR, unsubscribe from the New York Times and thumb their noses at society.

Negative Zionism thrived when it was safe to be a Zionist. It will soon be as unsafe to be a Zionist anywhere as it already is on college campuses. And then Zionism will mean something again




(Thank you to everyone for their good wishes and prayers. I may not have time to reply, but I do appreciate them. And thank you also to those who have sent in donations. I do intend to thank you personally when the chaos and crisis dies down.... Daniel.)



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

On a pleasant Wednesday in Schiedam, a Dutch city near Rotterdam’s sizable Islamic population, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee stood on a balcony waving an axe and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

The police arrived at the modernistic dark and gray building, limned in steel and glass, where the nameless Syrian was shouting about the supremacy of his religion and its axe to all others in Schiedam.

The Dutch cops tried to calm him down. Instead he attacked a police dog which later died of its injuries. After some failed attempts at negotiating his surrender, the Syrian was shot in the leg. Paramedics loaded him into one of two yellow ambulances dispatched for the occasion and maneuvering past a police Volvo took him off to be an even bigger burden on the taxpayers of the Netherlands.

Even before murdering a police dog, the Syrian refugee had been in contact with various aid agencies. By the time he’s done being treated, evaluated, counseled, tried, defended, prosecuted and judged, he will have cost the Netherlands enough money to feed an entire Syrian city for a day.

"It is certain that he had no religious motives," Mayor Lamers insisted. "The most important thing is that he first receives the right care, that also applies to his father. As soon as he is recovered, there will probably be a long-term admission to a clinic."

Make that two Syrian cities for a week.

But the most important thing isn’t stopping Allahu akbaring axmen. It’s seeing they get the right care.

"Honesty requires saying that there are more disturbed people walking around in Schiedam," the politician added. "That is why it is good that there is discussion at national level."

There’s a discussion. Just not the right one.

In May, Malek, a Syrian refugee, stabbed three people in The Hague while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

The attack happened on Liberation Day when the country commemorates its liberation from murderous thugs who shouted, “Heil Hitler” and celebrates its new occupation by murderous thugs who shout, “Allahu Akbar.”

The Syrian had previously thanked the Dutch people for their hospitality by shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” and throwing pieces of furniture out of the window of his apartment and into the street.

For months, he had terrorized his neighbors with loud Arabic music, “Allahu Akbar” cries and disturbing behavior. The police finally showed up, accompanied by police dogs and riot shields, and he was institutionalized. He was there for six weeks, married another patient, and was back on the street even though while in the hospital, the police had received a tip that he was planning a terrorist attack.

On the loose, Malek cut a man’s throat. He also stabbed two others.

Police shot him in the leg, ruled out terrorism and blamed mental illness. His family is suing the hospital because Dutch taxpayers haven’t paid enough blood money yet.

In December of last year, Saleh Ali, a Syrian refugee wearing a keffiyah and waving a terrorist PLO flag, went up to a Jewish restaurant in Amsterdam, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and began smashing the windows. The police stood by and watched until he was done. And then they arrested him.

Ali admitted to having fought with Jihadists in Syria. So the system decided that he needed a psychiatric evaluation because in the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe, smashing things while shouting, “Allahu Akbar” means that you need to spend some time in a white room talking about your mommy.

All three Syrian Muslim refugees had a habit of shouting, “Allahu Akbar” while doing threatening things in public. All three escalated their habits to violent attacks with weapons. Their violence, anger and threats were treated as signs of mental instability rather than religious fervor. But that may be because the former Calvinist stronghold has become an irreligious society incapable of understanding religion.

Less than a third of the Dutch believe in anything. Only 25% identify as Christian. 5% as Muslim. Only 13% of Catholics believe in the basic elements of Christianity. So the numbers are even smaller.

The vast majority of the younger native population has no concept of religion. So is it any wonder that the “Allahu Akbar” violence of Muslim migrants is met with incomprehension and psychiatry?

The Dutch were once on the front lines of religious wars. They still are today. But the difference is that much of the country no longer recognizes or understands religion.

Recent research claims that 40% of the Syrian refugees in the Netherlands are suffering from mental problems.

Among Dutch people, it tops out at 14%.

Are 40% of Syrian refugees really disturbed or verward, the Dutch term that loosely translates as confused? Or are Europeans unable to process behavior and values different from their own?

In Europe, brandishing an axe while shouting at the entire street would be a sign of mental illness. So would smashing restaurant windows or tossing furniture out of the window into the street.

But Syria isn’t the Netherlands. And the Middle East isn’t Europe.

Public displays of anger and violence are much less aberrant in the Middle East. The values of the burghers of Rotterdam are not those of a Syrian man in his twenties. Nor is their scrupulous lack of conviction in anything more than civility and good behavior a match for his religious convictions.

His cry of, “Allahu Akbar” is not mad, but a threat. He may be a penniless refugee here, but his religion is greater than theirs. And will subsume the tidy precincts of Schiedam, The Hague and Amsterdam.

Integration is not an option. But disintegration is.

78% of Syrians are unemployed and don’t intend to leave. The Dutch government solution is to improve mental health services at refugee centers. That raises the question of just who’s really crazy here?

Meanwhile in another experiment, Syrian refugees are being housed in empty prisons. At least until they commit enough crimes to be sent to an actual prison. Instead of more psychiatric evaluations.

Dutch voters have made it very clear that they don’t want more migrants. And relatively few asylum petitions are being approved. But that just means that Dutch cities are filling up with failed asylum seekers who can’t be deported, who will no longer be subsidized and are ticking time bombs.

If they want to stay, all they have to do is commit a crime and land in one of the famously cushy prisons.

The Netherlands boasts what its defenders call an innovative mental health system. And in its prisons, the inmates are getting keys to their own cells.

Again, who’s crazy here?

Given a choice between having to get a job or shouting, “Allahu Akbar” before taking an axe to a police officer, who is under orders to aim at the feet in the extreme scenario that he has to use his weapon, it’s an easy choice. And more of those Syrian refugees, who won’t be integrating, are making it.

Is it terrorism? Is it gaming the system? Why can’t it be both?

Islamic terrorists have shown a real talent for gaming the system. And gaming the system, like terrorism, is just finding chinks in the armor to exploit. Welfare fraud and suicide bombing are different sides of the same coin. And in Europe, Jihadists have been known to finance their plots with dole money.

Just don’t call it crazy. When 40% of a population group is deemed loopy, that’s not crazy, it’s the new normal.




(Thank you to everyone for their good wishes and prayers. I may not have time to reply, but I do appreciate them. And thank you also to those who have sent in donations. I do intend to thank you personally when the chaos and crisis dies down.... Daniel.)



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.

On May 22, Susanna Maria Feldman went missing. It was the day after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which celebrates G-d’s revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses and a nation of freed slaves.

The fifth commandment is, “Honor thy father and mother.” The sixth is, “Thou shalt not murder.”

And in the German city of Mainz, whose Jewish community dates back to Roman times, a worried mother waited for the worst. Susanna had gone off with her friends. They came home. And she didn’t.

Her mother received a WhatsApp message from her daughter's phone on the afternoon of the 22nd. "Mom, I'm not coming home. I went to Paris with my friend. Don't look for me. I'll come back after 2 or 3 weeks. Bye."

According to Diana, Susanna’s mother, the message sounded nothing like her daughter. 4 hours later, the teenage girl’s phone was switched off. There was nothing more.

"I hope and pray that nothing bad has happened to her," she posted on Facebook. "Please help me find my daughter safe again."

The police reassured the frantic mother that her daughter had just gone off with some friends and would come back on her, but she feared the worst while the authorities stonewalled.

On June 1, she published an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she wrote, "I feel abandoned by the German state."

Two weeks passed. The police searched. Dogs sniffed around but found nothing. And then someone noticed a flash of white among all that brown and green. It was the white of a clothing label.

They found her body between the railroad tracks and Autobahn 66. The killer had stashed the girl under a bush and covered her over with twigs to keep the body out of sight and to buy him some time.

Susanna’s body had been dumped a few hundred meters from the refugee shelter where her alleged killer had been living. The traffic noise of the highway would have covered any sounds the young Jewish girl might have made as a Muslim refugee brutally raped and then strangled her to death.

At only 14, a year younger than Anne Frank when she died, Susanna had been murdered in Germany. The teenage girl had been strangled to death after being raped. Her killer then boasted of the crime.

While the German police were searching for Susanna’s body, the Bashar family, all eight of them, were on their way back to Iraq. The Bashar clan had been living in a refugee shelter even though they were apparently able to afford to book eight tickets to Turkey. The tickets were bought under different names than the ones they had used to apply for asylum in Germany. By June 2, they were back in Iraq.

That same day, Susanna’s mother posted a Facebook message announcing that it was the 11th day. "Every passing day is a nightmare and hell for us!!! Also her little sister misses her."

At the airport Ali had showed his residence papers, under the name Ali Bashar, and his ticket under a different name, and a Laissez-passer emergency passport in Arabic issued by the Iraqi embassy.

German airports had apparently become so used to migrants traveling under various names that they didn't blink an eye.

The residents of the refugee asylum had watched the Bashar clan packing up as if they were leaving for good. They told one resident that they were facing deportation. Another resident heard that they were going on vacation. When Ali’s mother was asked where the Bashar clan was going, she answered Berlin.

Like so much else, that was a lie.

Around midnight, they left by the back door, got into two cars and then they were gone.

Ali Bashar, one of the six sons, had come to Germany through Turkey and Greece. He had arrived in Germany in the fall of 2015 at the height of Merkel’s migration crisis. Since then, he had been accused of raping an 11-year-old girl in a refugee shelter, attacking a policewoman and robbing a man at knifepoint

His asylum application had been rejected at the end of 2016. Bashar claimed to have been threatened by the PKK, a Kurdish group fighting against ISIS and Turkey.

But he appealed, and was allowed to stay on in Germany until he finally killed.

In April of last year, Ali Bashar was suspected of being in a brawl. In February of this year, he was linked to an assault. In March, he bumped into a policewoman and spat on her. Next month, he was accused of robbing a man with a knife. And he was caught with an illegal knife.

Despite that, he was still allowed to stay on even as the policewoman case moved through the system.

But next month, Ali Bashar allegedly did more than hurt his victims. He finally committed a murder.

Ali Bashar had spent most of his time hanging out in the Wiesbaden city center, going back to the refugee shelter only to sleep, and Susanna had gone to the Wiesbaden city center with her friends.

When the authorities moved the Bashars from Giessen to Wiesbaden, they signed a girl’s death warrant. The brand new Weisbaden refugee shelter built in 2016 has become the gateway to a cemetery.

And the same is true of every refugee shelter.

The 20-year-old Muslim refugee boasted of his crime to a 13-year-old in the refugee shelter. Ali’s younger brother had known Susanna and that may have made the rapist and killer’s work easier.

With that information, the police began searching around the refugee shelter and found Susanna. Ali Bashar fled to Kurdistan. And there he made a mistake. The Kurds arrested him and sent him back.

Ali Bashar is not the first refugee to have committed an atrocity in Germany. And he won’t be the last.

The authorities know how to handle this sort of thing. There are police officers patrolling outside the refugee shelter. Are they there to protect those on the outside from those on the inside?

Or are they there to provide security to the denizens of the shelter?

Despite the recent rash of anti-Semitic incidents, the authorities insisted that there had been no anti-Semitic motive in a Muslim attack on a Jewish teenage girl. But how can a motive be credibly ruled out when the alleged killer hasn’t been interviewed by the police and isn’t even in their custody?

The Green Party's Annalena Baerbock declared that nobody should, "presume to abuse the death of this girl to sow hatred."

That right is exclusively reserved for the migrant population that the Green Party welcomed in.

A German poll of refugees last year found that more than half hold anti-Semitic views. Even before the migrant flood, German police had noted the rising number of Muslims arrested for anti-Semitic acts. In polls, Jews in Germany listed Muslims as the group most likely to harass or attack them.

In one Berlin school, Muslim students openly boasted, "If a Jew enters our school, he'll get beaten up - I'd beat him up too."

In German cities, Muslim mobs have chanted, “Hamas Hamas Jews to the gas!” German courts ruled that firebombing a synagogue previously torched by the Nazis was anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic.

When an Israeli Arab wore a Jewish kippa to test the level of anti-Semitism, he was assaulted by a thug shouting, “Jew” at him. The attacker was a Syrian refugee.

After the attack, Merkel had vowed to act "with full force and resolve". Where is that resolve now?

As the search for Susanna wrapped up, a Jewish teenager in Germany was attacked by Muslim thugs who heard the music he was listening to. “Berlin is ours now,” they shouted, “and you won’t listen to crappy Jewish music here.”

Ali Bashar made a spot near his refugee shelter into his own. The girl who was left there will no longer listen to music. And there is no shelter anywhere, in Germany or America, from the “refugees.”




(Thank you for your good wishes. I'm still dealing with an ongoing medical crisis. Hopefully there will be some improvement in the situation in a week or two.)



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.

We ask that the verses of the Qur'an calling for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and unbelievers be rendered obsolete," the manifesto states.

It cites the murders of Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll, two elderly Jewish women murdered by anti-Semitic Muslim thugs, the fact that "French Jews are 25 times more likely to be attacked than their fellow Muslims", and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Jews from the encroaching no-go zones.

"10% of the Jewish citizens of Île-de-France - that is to say about 50,000 people - were recently forced to move because they were no longer safe in some cities and because their children could not attend the schools of the Republic,” it courageously warns.

“This is a quiet ethnic cleansing being carried out in in the country of Emile Zola and Clemenceau."

The manifesto was written by former Charlie Hebdo editor Philippe Val, who had republished the original Mohammed cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten despite the threats, both terroristic and legal, and its signatories include former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, famed singer Charles Aznavour, actor Gérard Depardieu, and many other significant figures.

The moral power and the importance of the manifesto should not be underestimated.

After 9/11, it was American Jews who brought attention to the plight of French Jews while their community leaders often preferred to remain silent. Now it is French Jews who speak out, who march and whose LDJ even confronts Islamic thugs in the street while American Jews keep quiet or collaborate.

The despicable alliance between AJC and ISNA, and the ADL’s attack on Canary Mission, carry with them the stench of Vichy on the spring wind. When an Islamic terrorist attacked a Kosher supermarket before the Sabbath, asking his victims if they were Jewish before he shot them, Obama dismissed it as a random attack on a “bunch of folks in a deli.” It’s become virtually impossible in the United States to have a discussion about Islamic anti-Semitism without being denounced as an Islamophobe.

Why did France and America trade places? France has faced worse terrorist attacks in recent years than we have. But, more significantly, it lacks the politically correct viewpoint consolidation of America. Despite certain views being criminalized, there are all sorts of non-traditional views in public life there that are actively debated, instead of being airbushed or silenced the way they are in the United States.

Neither the manifesto nor Charlie Hebdo could exist in the United States. The media in this country censored the Mohammed cartoons more vigorously than the Europeans did. Without any legal threat.

And yet, despite its moral courage and its vital message, the manifesto misses the true nature of Islamic anti-Semitism.

It’s a lot more than a few verses.

The verses are part of a larger Islamic narrative. They’re not random outbursts, but a story. And that story is the primal conflict between Mohammed and the Jews. It begins with the massacre of the Jews at Khaybar and concludes with an end of days that can only come when Muslims exterminate the Jews.

It’s not a few intemperate verses. Anti-Semitism is fundamental to the story of Islam. And that story with its visions of a conquest sweeping across the world has not ended. That’s why the violence goes on.

Jews and Christians have a paradoxical role in Islam. They are on the one hand, People of the Book, the unacknowledged originators of the ideas and texts that Mohammed looted to found Islam. But their precedence is removed by accusing them of having betrayed Allah and perverted the scriptures.

Unlike the polytheistic pagans wiped out by Islam, Jews and Christians are in theory monotheists, with a higher status, but they’re also accused of being mushrikeen, polytheists, who take “partners” with Allah. Jews and Christians had “taken Rabbis and monks to be their lords besides Allah”. (Koran 9:31)

The ambiguity of Jews and Christians gave them a special status and a special peril. Ritual humiliations of Jews and Christians were enacted to demonstrate their inferiority and the supremacy of the Muslim. In an honor-shame culture, Islamic superiority had to be demonstrated by humiliating other religions.

When Jews and Christians gained independence or won battles, it called the truth of Islam into question.

That, rather than a few verses, is what we are dealing with. The verses remain relevant to those Muslims who believe that they are in a zero-sum struggle with every other religion on a battlefield whose scope is as large as the planet and as small as a neighborhood or a building. And that’s the vast majority.

You can try to make an idea obsolete when it’s no longer relevant. But the anti-Semitic hatred in almost every country where Jews and Muslims both live shows that anti-Semitism remains quite relevant.

Hating Jews, attacking them and even killing them, remains a meaningful part of Islamic identity.

The Jews were a primal Islamic enemy. That enmity is written into Islamic scriptures, traditions and prayers. All of that can’t be made obsolete because the Islamic conquest is an ongoing project.

It’s not a few verses. It’s the context of the conquest. That’s the mission at the heart of Islam.

The Lebensraum and Drang Nach Osten of Islam might pause for periods, but it never actually stops. Iraqis, Pakistanis and Somali migrants pour into Europe seeking Lebensraum. They move into poorer areas associated with immigrants bringing them into contact with earlier Jewish communities.

When the second generation, usually more prone to supremacist violence and expansionism than its immigrant forebears, comes of age, the Jewish communities are violently driven out of their homes.

The verses that justify it won’t become obsolete until the modes of behavior behind them lapse.

Calls for the persecution of Jews and Christians won’t be outmoded relics of another time until Muslims make them so, not by changing words, but by changing deeds. The trouble is that the verses remain entirely relevant because Muslim populations around the world continue to fight religious wars.

Muslim hatred of Jews has unique elements. As anti-Semitism usually does. But it’s still a subset of an Islamic supremacism and xenophobia that is endemic and whose consequences can be seen in clashes between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims and Buddhists (and Hindus) in Myanmar, Muslims and Yazidis in Iraq, Muslims and Zoroastrians in Iran, Muslims and Atheists in Bangladesh, and those are just a few of the many examples around the world.

Islam is not on good terms with any other religion. Including its own spinoffs, like the Bahai, or its own subdivisions, like the Sunnis and the Shiites.

It’s not about the Jews. It’s about Islam.

The truth of Islam is validated by violence. Its theological disputes are settled by force.

The verses about Jews and Christians are not the problem. They’re a symptom of the problem. As are the terrorist attacks, stabbings, shootings, bombings, no-go zones, sharia police and sex grooming gangs.

The response from Muslim clerics in France to the manifesto has been to claim that the verses are meant to be seen in the context of their time and that Islamic wars are only defensive. Historically, that’s nonsense. But everyone would be perfectly happy if they believed that and really lived it.

Instead Islamic violence is always deemed to be defensive. Peace can only come from victory, not co-existence. War with non-Muslims who don’t submit to Sharia law is seen as inevitable and necessary.

The verses libeling Christians and Jews, and justifying violence against them, are just rationalizing this fundamental Islamic worldview and applying it to specific targets. Islamic anti-Semitism is born of Islamic supremacism and imperialism. Muslims aren’t persecuting Jews just because of anti-Semitic verses in the Koran. They’re persecuting Jews because the Koran is supremacist and imperialistic.

That’s why Muslim violence against Jews is not just a problem for Jews. It’s a problem for everyone.

Like the Yazidis, Jews are a tiny minority and more vulnerable. That’s what makes them the canaries in the coal mine of Islamic migration. Muslim attacks on Jews in Europe date back over a generation. Long before Paris, Brussels and London were being regularly terrorized; European Jews had already retreated into fortified synagogues, stopped wearing Jewish clothing in public and maximized their security.

That was the canary in the coal mine. If Europe had woken up then, it wouldn’t be choking now.

American synagogues and Jewish institutions are starting to resemble their European counterparts. A decade ago, armed guards were a rarity outside synagogues. I walk past them all the time now.

The French manifesto is an imperfect effort to call attention to a burning problem. It’s an attempt to start an urgent and necessary conversation in France that can’t even be had in the United States.

And it’s a conversation that we must have before civilization chokes in the coal mine.



(Due to an ongoing family medical crisis, I may have trouble answering emails, but I appreciate all the positive wishes and hopes for a full recovery.)



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.

"I have a horrible story to bring you about a woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole," Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King began.

Dixon-Cole claimed that she had been sexually assaulted during a traffic stop by a Texas police officer. The story, like so many black victimhood myths about police officers, turned out to be a lie. Body camera footage conclusively disproved it. But by then the damage was done.

The Root had posted a photo of the officer as part of a post alleging a racist culture of police rape. “Black women have always… found themselves at the intersection of state and sexual violence, because this country teaches men… that black women are disposable,” it insisted.

Behind the pseudo-academic jargon of social justice were the same racial prejudices and tribal fears of victimized women that led to Emmet Till’s death. Only this time the races were reversed.

And the vigilantes organized a cyber-lynching party by sending hate and abuse to a completely different Texas cop who shared the same last name.

And to his mother.

In Timmonsville, South Carolina, Rev. Jerrod Moultrie, who also heads the local NAACP, claimed that a police officer had "racially profiled" him and harassed him "cause I was driving a Mercedes Benz".

Once again, body cam video proved that it never happened. But the NAACP announced that it was conducting its own investigation and claimed that there might have been another racist cop.

“Racial profiling, in this context, concerns the reasons for stopping a particular vehicle at a particular time, not whether the officer conducting the stop (or any other officer on the scene) is impolite,” it stated. Since it’s impossible to prove that a traffic stop wasn’t racially motivated (the impossibility of proving a negative fuels paranoid fantasies about ubiquitous racism), that’s guilty until proven innocent.

Why were Shaun King, the NAACP and assorted black nationalists willing to believe the worst of white police officers? Black victimhood is based on the fragility of black people and the evil of white people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in, Between The World and Me that the police officers and firefighters who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Fragility feeds dehumanization. Coates’ exaggerated sense of his own victimhood had him dehumanize the FDNY firefighters who climbed 78 floors with heavy equipment on their backs to rescue people, regardless of race or color, as inhuman menaces. Not people, but violent forces. The poetry of Coates’ victimhood is marinated in the self-pity of the racist for the prejudices that made him a bigot.

And if police officers aren’t really people, it’s easy to believe the worst of them.

Sherita was so readily believed, despite the lack of evidence, because her claims clicked with the prejudices of black nationalists. The NAACP went on defending Moultrie because it was easier to believe in a white racist conspiracy than to believe their own lying eyes. That’s what prejudice does to you.

Prejudice is at the heart of both the Texas and South Carolina cases. And it’s there churning underneath the recent blizzard of anecdotal claims of white racism. Like all prejudice, it has real victims.

The victims are accused of thinking the worst of black people, when it’s actually black nationalists who think the worst of white people. And they justify their prejudices with accusations of racism. The accusations dehumanize white people as innately evil and burdened from birth with white privilege.

These accusations are not just false. They’re racist and dehumanizing.

Some of these accusations, like those in Texas and South Carolina, like the racist hoaxes at the Air Force Academy, USC, St. Olaf College, Kansas State University, Eastern Michigan University, Capital College, and the University of Maryland, to name just a few in the last two years, are invented.

These hoaxes succeed initially because they pander to prejudice.

It’s almost a misnomer to call them hate crime hoaxes. They are hate crimes. But the real targets of these hate crimes were white people. These “hoaxes” advanced stereotypes about white evil. They brought their prejudices about white people to life by inventing and faking them.

And, if the real culprits hadn’t been exposed, a white male, the likely profile of the perpetrator, could have easily been wrongly accused, convicted of the crime or expelled from a university. Even 24 years later, we still hear a lot about Susan Smith. But there were multiple black Susan Smiths on campuses across the country just last year. The media’s latest racial paranoia trend has been blowing up stories of white people wrongly calling the police on black people. But the reverse keeps happening on campuses.

Black nationalists use racial paranoia to manufacture solidarity, sanctifying the martyrdom of the “black body” at the hands of the “white devils”. But while the black body may be a useful metaphor, the white devil are real people subjected to the racist dehumanization that is a necessary part of racial paranoia. And racial paranoia is how you get racism. Hating and fearing another race leads to prejudice, discrimination and violence. Fantasies of black victimhood have led to real white victims.

Earlier this year, Kori Ali Muhammad targeted, shot and killed 4 white people in Fresno, California. The Nation of Islam follower shouted "Allahu Akbar" and “Free black people” when he was taken into custody after his killing spree. The black nationalist blamed his crimes on a resentment of white racism.

Prejudice doesn’t necessarily lead to racist murders like those committed by Muhammad and Micah X. Johnson in Dallas, but racist murders are carried out by racists who dehumanize other people.

And when even saying, “white people” is fashionably derogatory, dehumanization is everywhere.

The left insists that racism is about power. It’s not.

You don’t need to have power to hate. Everyone has that power. Nor do you need power to carry out a racist attack. Most healthy, able adults have that power no matter what their skin color might be.

Racism is about the opposite of power. It’s insecurity masquerading as superiority.

The left focuses on institutional racism. Or racism as policy. That’s convenient because it can then talk about power instead of hate. And anyone who is white and has power is by definition guilty. Much like the police officer who stopped an NAACP president in his Mercedes and was smeared for it. The officer probably doesn’t have his own luxury vehicle, nor does he head an organization, but he is white.

So were the Founding Fathers. Close enough.

But anti-black racism as policy is as exotic as Bigfoot. If it weren’t, we would be taken on tours of segregated water fountains instead of microaggressions and implicit bias training. Disparate impact looks for statistical anomalies and, out of prejudice, attributes them to white racism.

Fanatical racism, that of the Klan, the Nazis or the Nation of Islam, is fed by insecurity. Its glorification of its own superiority always gives way to the lurking menace of the Untermensch or the white devil. The master race claims are unconvincing. They’re put forward by history’s losers angry at the past.

Insecurity is central to the racial paranoia of Black Lives Matter and countless other black nationalists and their organizations. Black nationalists, like Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood and every other hate group, are convinced that they can only regain their destiny by destroying those who stole it from them.

The only way to become truly superior is to kill those whom they secretly believe are superior.

Black victimhood both condemns and sacralizes its own state. Pride is defined by its antithesis. Without the white devil, there is no black nationalism. Black nationalism demands the white devil and summons him forth with hate crime hoaxes, with smears, with word games that distort what racism is and isn’t.

Victimhood doesn’t ennoble you. It degrades you even as it teaches you to degrade others. No amount of hate can ever make you proud of your shame. And pretending that hate is love won’t unite you.

I have a horrible story to tell you. It’s about where racism really comes from in America. And it’s about who the victims of victimhood are.



(Due to an ongoing family medical crisis, I won't be able to reply to most emails. Apologies.)



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.

"Paranoia predisposed him to believe in nefarious, hidden forces driving events," the New York Times writes of Trump. "Political opportunism informed his promotion of conspiracy theories."

But that could just as easily apply to the New York Times.

The Times is unaware of the sublime hypocrisy of accusing the President of the United States of "sowing widespread suspicions about the government" even as it is doing just that.

The paper of broken record specializes in spreading conspiracy theories claiming that President Trump didn’t actually win the 2016 election but that “nefarious, hidden forces” made it happen. Its promotion of conspiracy theories about the 2016 election is obviously informed by its “political opportunism.”

But so are most conspiracy theories.

A conspiracy theory is usually the conspiracy. Democrats spread claims that the JFK assassination was a right-wing conspiracy. That conveniently redirected blame from the Socialist who pulled the trigger and from the Democrats who benefited from it. 9/11 conspiracy theories likewise shift blame away from Muslim terrorists and the Democrats who champion open migration from terror states like theirs.

Before the Democrats used conspiracy theories to delegitimize Trump’s electoral victory, they used them to delegitimize Bush’s victory. You don’t need to be a deep thinker to spot the opportunism.

Or the classic nature of the conspiracy theory: an infinitely expanding plot whose gnostic pleasures come from studying the endless roster of conspirators, the promise of a final takedown never to be delivered, and the seductive appeal of overturning an unwelcome reality with an appealing lie.

Why don’t conspiracy theories ever prosper? Because if they appear in the New York Times, they aren’t conspiracies. What is the Timesian definition of a conspiracy theory? Anything favorable to Trump.

Really.

“The Conspiracy Theory That Says Trump Is a Genius,” is the actual title of a Times op-ed.

Suggesting that the nation’s first billionaire president is a genius is an opinion. Not a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, proposing that the New York Times is biased against Trump is an indisputable fact.

Conspiracy theories, fake news, lies, scandals, corruption and abuses of power are not defined objectively, but along party lines. Timesians are convinced that conspiracies are something that lower class and wrong party people irrationally believe in. Instead truly rational people believe that the 2016 election must be overturned and the winner locked up because of some inchoate string of sentences that begin with Moscow, end with Facebook and take scenic detours through more exotic international locations and random businesses than Anthony Bourdain and a year’s worth of Forbes issues combined.

Successive New York Times stories have spun a web of Trump conspiracies from the Ukraine to Russia, from the United Arab Emirates to Israel. Either Trump is the world’s greatest genius or the New York Times is using crazy conspiracy theories to help sell skin care products to wealthy Manhattanites.

The Times bemoans “baseless stories of secret plots” right before it scoops them up and sells them. The day before that accusation, it ran a story headlined, “Ivanka Trump Wins China Trademarks, Then Her Father Vows to Save ZTE.” The evidence for that secret plot is a string of conjectures and innuendo.

Or baseless.

But it’s not just the Russians, it’s also the Chinese. And the Germans. "Big German Bank, Key to Trump's Finances, Faces New Scrutiny," is another Times hit piece. As is, “Trump's Business Ties in the Gulf Raise Questions" which brings in the Saudis. More Timesian conspiracism includes India, Israel and Uruguay.

The New York Times accuses President Trump of eroding trust in our institutions with conspiracy theories. But that’s exactly what the conspiracy theories it’s spreading are meant to do to elections. Spreading paranoia? That’s another conspiracy media special. The Russians are in your Facebook. Your friends are all fake. If your news isn’t certified by our fact checkers, you shouldn’t trust it.

After an election, the old battles are set aside and everyone agrees to work together. Instead we have an endless election because the media spread conspiracy theories to erode trust in those results.

And those conspiracy theories were based on opposition research from the losing campaign.

President Trump didn’t erode trust in institutions, institutions eroded trust in themselves by enlisting in a partisan campaign. The partisan agenda has always been plainly obvious because these investigations inevitably lead back to the Clinton campaign and its political allies. Unlike the media’s conspiracy theories about Trump conspiring with the Russians to win the election by posting ads on Facebook, the collusion between government agencies and the Democrats is an open book. Many of the media’s conspiracy theories about Trump, such as the Clinton-Steele dossier, the conspiracy’s founding text, originated from that collusion between political operatives and government officials.

Conspiracy theorists in the media left are accusing Trump of being a conspiracy theorist for questioning their conspiracy theory. But is a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory really a conspiracy theory?

Is accusing your opponents of spreading conspiracy theories about you really a conspiracy theory? Especially when they’re doing it on the front pages of every major newspaper in America? The media spreads conspiracy theories. Then it accuses anyone who questions its actions of conspiracy theorizing.

The dubious part of a conspiracy theory is not the ‘conspiracy’ part, but the ‘theory’ segment.

An actual conspiracy can be proven. A conspiracy theory however is just that. A theory. It never gains factual proofs. Instead it diverts attention from its failure to prove its central claim by expanding its sphere and scope, by personalizing, speculating and persecuting anyone it decides is a useful target.

And then, before you know it, you’ve spent a year blowing through millions of dollars, harassing people, breaking into their homes and accusing them of unrelated matters without ever proving collusion.

But don’t worry. The Mueller investigation is on track. That’s why it has to be classified. Like most conspiracy theories, the juiciest parts have to be kept secret because, well, don’t ask questions.

All will be revealed in time.

While Republican congressional investigations sought to declassify information, Mueller, the DOJ and the FBI have built a wall of secrecy. Every detail of the investigation, especially its origins, have had to be pried out from behind that wall. And those details, especially those involving the Steele dossier and how it made its rounds through the government, are damning, proven and germane to the conspiracy.

Unlike the media’s endless world tour of allegations, international conspiracies and vague insinuations, Spygate remains both specific and focused. And, unlike Russiagate, which has yet to even explain its central conspiracy theory of how the Russians actually rigged the election, the accusation is quite clear.

A conspiracy theory evolves into a conspiracy not through elite influencers, sheer volume of allegations or the creativity of their inventors… but through plausible means, motive and supporting facts.

Russiagate was always a toxic cocktail of pre-election dirty tricks and post-election sour grapes. Its central theory has never been adequately explained or justified because even its proponents are unable to explain just how the election was rigged or why Trump would turn to the Russians, instead of his own wildly successful messaging team, to run Facebook ads. If there’s one thing that everyone ought to be able to agree on, it’s that Trump has never lacked for marketing savvy. Meanwhile the most popular brand of Russian vodka is owned by the Brits and made in Illinois.

But the conspiracy to spread the conspiracy theory is real. And its roots have been tracked back through the media, the government and back to the Clinton campaign. While the Clinton-Steele dossier is a series of bizarre unfounded allegations, alternately described as non-credible or as so secret that the Russians would kill for it by its proponents, the conspiracy to seed it into an investigation and the media is not a theory. We know how it happened. We know how it was done. We know who paid for it, who the central players were and why they did it.

That’s not a theory. It’s a conspiracy.




(My apologies, but due to an ongoing family medical crisis, I can't answer most emails.)



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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