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Thursday, November 30, 2023

Napoleon Complex

By On November 30, 2023 In
Before 2020, movie theaters were dominated by superheroes. After the pandemic and the race riots, it’s been biopics. 2023 superhero movies like The Flash, Blue Beetle and The Marvels bombed, but biopics are booming. From Elvis to Oppenheimer to Napoleon, audiences have grown tired of special effects superpowers and are longing for real life larger than life figures.

But Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is every bit as unreal as Batman or Captain America. The lavish but hollow spectacle stretched out at its longest to four hours is not about Napoleon, but about the postmodern idea of him and of all the great men of history as both superhuman and flawed.

The seemingly wide range of biopics actually tell the same story over and over again. The protagonists may be rock stars, race car drivers or dictators, but they succeed without really trying and fail because of their troubled personal lives, not their lack of skill. The dramatic arc makes human beings seem superhuman only to cut them down to size for being all too human.

Napoleon the movie perpetuates many of the myths that Napoleon the man wove around himself. Where a French king might have proclaimed, “l’etat, c’est moi” or “I am the state” by virtue of divine right, Napoleon briefly made himself equivalent to France through heroism. The heroism was part real and part fiction. Napoleon was only the latest heroic figure to bestride the stage of the nation after the Revolution replaced monarchy with cults of personality.

The Renaissance had unleashed a wave of celebrities, artistic and criminal (some like

Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor who alternated between stunning works of art and brutal murders which were overlooked because of his talent, managed to do both). Italian cities warred with each to bury great artists the way that they might have once competed to provide a resting place for the bones of saints. Greatness had become holiness and fame was a pagan immortality that could outlast the centuries better than any dream of heaven.

Scott’s Napoleon biopic has a poor understanding of European warfare or French politics, all it knows is fame. It is no coincidence that the dead Corsican stands out among a wave of biopics about rock stars, musicians and other celebrities. In the style of the conclusion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it collects as many apocryphal Napoleon legends as it can, then strings them together with grandiosity and insipid dialogue. Want to see Napoleon take a shot at the Sphinx? It never happened, but like so many made up stories, it’s there in the movie.

Ridley Scott, a director who specializes in making movies that look good with nothing more underneath, and David Scarpa, the writer responsible for the equally hollow Man in the High Castle streaming series, have wasted hours of film and countless millions of dollars to distill a major historical figure to the ahistorical cliches that people who don’t know much, know.

Napoleon the movie isn’t in the business of history, but of celebrity, yet it has no actual insight into its real narrative, not about a long dead historical figure, but about the hunger for fame. To Napoleon, the cult of personality he developed was a political tool that allowed him to wield power, but to those who perpetuate the legend, fame becomes an end in and of itself.

The French turned to Napoleon, as the Italians would later turn to Mussolini and the Germans to to Hitler, because he appeared superhuman. Napoleon accomplished many things, including social and educational reforms, which are usually ignored in favor of war stories, and rallied men under impossible conditions on the battlefield, but he could not save France from itself. Nor could he save himself from his own weaknesses and frailties. No man, no matter how accomplished or lucky, which Napoleon also was, can ever live up to a cult of personality.

The cult of personality clashed with the cult of democracy that France had introduced with the Revolution. And it never resolved the question of whether ordinary men were fit to rule. While America ultimately (and perhaps temporarily) came out for the right of the common man to decide his own affairs and to govern: the cult of personality sidestepped that vital question.

Great men elevated from more ordinary ranks appeared to overlay meritocracy atop democracy, but the lie at the heart of the cult of personality was that extraordinarily gifted people were like gods who bestrode the earth and could accomplish what no amount of ordinary men could. Much as after the Revolution, Napoleon’s cult of personality once again convinced French military men to abandon reason and pursue grandiose wars that made no strategic sense:

That same destructive notion has a sizable footprint in American life. Superhero movies alternate with biopics for unrealistic depictions of great men who seem to accomplish the impossible because of some intangible gift. This narrative satisfies a belief that greatness is inaccessible to ordinary people (and we shouldn’t even try) but when applied to real figures it also dooms those mortals who possess it. It’s a quintessential belief taken from Ancient Greece with its obsession with hubris and the fickle favor and scorn of their all too human gods.

While it helps to have certain natural gifts, accomplishment in real life is the result of hard work, persistence and a certain amount of luck. Even those geniuses who have incredible inborn talent in a particular area have to struggle to apply it in a way that makes a difference in their chosen profession. In real life, genius is overrated. Like child actors, the 11-year-olds you hear about applying to college and then graduating rarely amount to anything in their adult lives.

But that’s a message few want to hear. In a culture where every other urban high school boy wants to be LeBron James and every other urban high school girl wants to be Kim Kardashian, celebrity, with its magical ability to do anything, is a much more compelling vision whether it is represented on the big screen by Superman or Napoleon.

The roster of narcissistic influencers who have never learned how to do anything except be famous makes celebrity seem empowering, but it’s actually disempowering. Accomplishment is democratized and merit isn’t a magical gift you’re born with: it’s one you work hard for. Potential isn’t entirely universal, but it’s much more so than celebrity culture would have you believe.

Cults of personality urge us not to try. They assure us that if we were going to be successful, we would have done it already. Famous people have innate gifts that we do not. And they succeed without having to work hard. That is the opposite of the actual message of Napoleon’s life. And that of the lives of many successful people, including celebrities, who worked hard to succeed.

But in a culture whose leftist politics have convinced much of the public of the general unfairness of life, cults of personality resonate much as they did in post-revolutionary France. Democracy appears to have failed and hard work seems futile in a social setup that leftists have indoctrinated people to believe is rigged against them. Why even bother trying?

A cult of personality offers the possibility of a savior who can do what we are convinced we cannot. And so many Americans wait for someone special to come along and save them.

But no human being can ultimately do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

Biographies of famous historical figures used to offer inspiring and meaningful lessons, but Napoleon the movie is never more its lavish costumes and sets, the strained performances led by Joaquin Phoenix who in every movie is in can’t help playing an actor who’s trying too hard, and the theatrics of what a top-level historical drama should be, but without the content.

Why make a biopic of Napoleon or anyone else? The invariable answer is because they’re enormously famous and controversial enough to be debated, but not canceled. Fame is the only true narrative in Napoleon, not his fame, but the fame of an industry that is addicted to it, which trades in it as the only vital currency and whose obsession with fame has deranged our culture.

Cults of personality are a form of despair masquerading as glory. A people who become obsessed with them have given up. That is in some ways as true of America as it was of Napoleonic France. The real Napoleon complex is not the one he suffered from (he was actually 5’6) but that of nations who stop believing in themselves and embrace cults of personality.

We don’t need strongmen or superheroes to save us, we need to find our own strength.






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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Tuesday, November 28, 2023

After Biden’s Pullout, Al Qaeda Built a Path From Afghanistan to Europe

By On November 28, 2023
After Biden’s withdrawal, the fighting ended in Afghanistan and moved into Europe.

Even before the Taliban takeover, a massive traffic in migrants and drugs flowed over the ‘Balkan Route’ that took Afghans into Iran, Turkey and then Eastern Europe. One of the biggest holes in Europe’s armor was the former Yugoslavia, illegally invaded and partitioned by the Clinton administration, with a large Muslim population in Bosnia and heavy criminal organizations across the former republic that tie together the Russian mob, local gangs, Islamic terrorists, and Turkish, Pakistani and Afghan operations moving weapons and drugs.

All of this comes together at the border between Serbia and Yugoslavia. Parts of Serbia’s border areas have become no-go zones: territories occupied by Muslim gangs. Serbian police raids on “migrants” now look like Israeli military operations with armored vehicles and troops. These raids have rounded up thousands of migrants along with automatic rifles and bombs.

Ever since Hungary began fortifying its border, the Muslim gangs had to work harder to penetrate it in order to continue moving their cargo into the rest of Europe. Faced with a more secure border, the smuggling was taken over by more violent groups. Including Al Qaeda.

Much as drug cartels followed Latin American migrants to America, the Afghan migrants traveling through Iran and Turkey to Eastern Europe were followed by Afghan Jihadis.

In Serbia’s border regions, competition between Afghan smuggling gangs broke out into open warfare with the groups using heavy weaponry against each other. Some of those weapons may have been left behind by the Biden administration when it fled Afghanistan. These gun battles are not just happening in deserted villages or near border fences, but in more populated areas.

The Serbian city of Subotica, with a population of nearly 100,000, has become ground zero for the migrant invasion. In September, Afghan and Moroccan Muslim gangs shot at each other in the parking lot of the multinational Lidl supermarket chain in a suburb of the city. The shooting spree in the crowded parking lot filled with families killed a 16-year-old girl.

The Afghan gangs that prevail in the gun battles that have become common on the route are the ones with the weapons and the training and likely to be linked to the Haqqani Network.

When the Taliban took Kabul, it was actually the Haqqani Network which unlike most of the Taliban had built up professional units that resembled their NATO opposite numbers. The Haqqani Network had carried out some of the most devastating attacks against American forces in Afghanistan. The Haqqanis gained these capabilities through their close ties to Al Qaeda.

The Al Qaeda ties brought Arab Muslim money and training to the Afghan Jihadis. After the fall of Kabul, it was the Haqqanis who took over and decided who was allowed to reach the airport. The Biden administration had turned over passenger lists to the Al Qaeda group. After being put in charge of security in Kabul, Haqqani figures control security for the new Taliban regime.

Unlike the old Taliban leadership, which is reclusive and isolationist, the Haqqanis, true to their Al Qaeda links, have been focused on building up an international network. The Biden administration has decided that the Haqqanis, despite Al Qaeda, are moderates because they are more open to supporting education for girls and are willing to talk to the United States. But that is what makes the Haqqanis more dangerous because they are interested in the world.

The Haqqani interest appears to have taken the Al Qaeda linked Jihadis all the way to Europe.

György Bakondi, Hungary’s national security adviser, has warned that the Haqqanis won the gun battles and are now in charge of the smuggling route into the European Union.

“Smuggling gangs originating from Afghanistan in Serbia have family ties to the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Haqqani network, which is a terrorist organisation,” he said. “The Taliban secret services are now directly controlling the activities of these Afghan-origin smuggling groups.”

The Hungarian authorities have shown video of aggressive efforts by Afghan migrants to invade their country. Migrants no longer just try to get across the border, they “are organised into military-style formations of 20 and armed with marbles, slingshots and sticks to fight back against Hungarian border guards sent to stop them.” The Afghan smugglers carry assault rifles and open fire, into the air or at border patrol officers, to signal that a crossing is underway.

According to Bakondi, the smugglers have “family ties” to the Haqqanis. The Haqqanis are a large family and they also have extended clan connections. Using those family ties to gain control of the smuggling route into Europe would give them a financial lifeline outside of Afghanistan, whose main current source of income is foreign aid run out of Kabul-based NGOs that are taxed by the Haqqanis, and the ability to move Jihadis into Europe for future attacks.

The United States and European NATO members may have hoped to leave Afghanistan behind, but Afghanistan instead followed NATO. As Islamic terrorists always do. When France left North Africa, an army of North African immigrants followed and transformed France into a terror hub. Pakistanis did the same thing to the United Kingdom and Turks and Kurds to Germany.

America imported vast numbers of Afghan refugees and those we didn’t airlift are migrating to Europe. The Haqqani Network decided who would get on Biden’s evacuation planes. Now it’s deciding who gets to enter Europe. While the Haqqanis are cashing in, they’re also almost certainly bringing their own “family” members to Europe to set up local criminal operations.

The Taliban’s alleged ban on opium production was widely reported by the media, less widely reported was that the Taliban have switched from opium to meth. Despite the Taliban ban, opium production actually rose by a third, and the Taliban are cashing in on an artificial shortage that their regime temporarily created, but the real story is that Afghanistan has become the fastest growing source of meth in the world. And the Islamists are using Iran as a model.

The Afghan smuggling route is also the transit point for moving meth from Iran to Europe. By controlling the route, the Haqqanis can potentially control both the heroin and the meth market. And human smuggling allows them to also bring in their people so that they control not only the transit of drugs, but also the sale and distribution of them across Europe. Jihadis have already used access to the European criminal class to convert its members to Islam and recruit them.

While NATO may have left behind its ‘nation building’ operation to win ‘hearts and minds’ in Europe, the Jihadis it was fighting have followed NATO to Europe to build their own nation, their ‘ummah’, in the heart of the infidel enemy. And they’re winning ‘hearts and minds’ left and right.

Afghanistan is not just a place, it’s where the Afghans are. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were not left behind in the dust of Kabul, they are making the long trek into Europe. The Hungarians have tried to build a wall, but much as the Chinese learned during the Mongolian invasions or the Israelis learned on Oct 7, it’s not enough to build a wall, you have to vigilantly defend it. And given enough time, the barbarians will find a way around it, under it, over it or through it.

Walls alone do not stop an invasion. Eventually you will have to fight and defeat the invaders.






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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How Hamas Became an Environmentalist and Gun Control Cause

By On November 28, 2023 In
From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.

The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas.

How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”

The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.

Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.

Intersectionality has sidelined both principles and tactical considerations while making protestations of victimhood into the only consideration that matters. The more violent the rhetoric and the more extreme the cause, the more it takes over the entire Left.

This would make little sense if leftists actually cared about feminism, gay rights or global warming. But then again if they actually cared about those things, wouldn’t the USSR, China and Communist China be utopias where benevolent gay people cleaned up the environment?

The first and foremost thing that Merav Michaeli and most leftists don’t understand about the Left is that causes, whether it’s gun control or men pretending to be women, are just leverage to recruit activists, tear up society and then seize power. And once that happens, the new regime will have as much use for transgenderism or environmentalism as the Soviet Union did.

When you understand that, it becomes quite obvious why the Left supports Hamas, how it can juggle support for Islamic terrorism with the LGBTQ movement, and why it demands that gay rights take a back seat to Jihad. Intersectionality is just a new suit of clothes on the very old leftist idea that all causes are ultimately subordinate to the overriding cause of the revolution.

Under Stalinism, American Jewish leftists were told to support a regime that was massacring Jews and had allied with Nazi Germany. American feminists advocating for reproductive rights were ordered to back Communist China which was forcibly breeding women and aborting their babies. The American Indian movement was expected to support the Sandinista regime which was burning its own Indian population alive. To be a leftist is to be a traitor to your own cause.

These crimes which scarred generations of leftists were whitewashed out of history by leftists and the movement was rebranded as identity politics narcissism. Much as the military tried to appeal to a self-identified generation with the slogan ‘Army of One’, the Left rebranded as a movement centered around the personal identity of each of its members. But just as the army is still a massive hierarchy, not a personal development seminar, the Left is a collectivist movement whose central idea is that it is the group, not the individual, that actually matters.

Intersectionality promised a more individualistic leftist movement, one that was highly attuned to the ‘lived experience’ of its members and the more complex, and less black and white nature of identity politics in a world of many ethnic groups and sexualities, but that was bait and switch. Instead of customizing the movement to its members, intersectionality customized its members to the movement and its overriding objectives of burning down everything and seizing power.

And thus Hamas.

The American Left originally embraced third world liberation movements. When what it thought were secular Arab Socialist movements, including the PLO, turned out to be Islamist, it went along without missing a beat. After 9/11, liberals and Democrats in a fit of schismogenesis countered Bush’s War on Terror with a war for terrorists. Islamists became an oppressed group and a vital part of the leftist coalition not in spite of their destructiveness, but because of it.

If the Left actually cared about the things it claims to care about, it would be natural for it to side with Israel. But if the Left actually cared about those things, it would wave the American flag and condemn the Third World. Instead the Left acts like America is the worst place in the world and that every backward dictatorship is morally superior to us.

The hostility of the Left to the countries it’s in is the best evidence that it doesn’t believe in its causes. The diversity of the causes are a pretext for the true cause of mass destruction.

The inner purpose of any leftist cause is to create division and sow mistrust. The specificity of the cause is only a means of recruiting activists from a particular part of the spectrum. The more causes, the more races, ethnicities, sexualities, classes and belief systems, it can recruit from. Intersectionality is ultimately an academic term for demanding that the outer purpose, the official cause, must be subservient to the inner purpose.

How are abortion rights, gay rights or gun control served by supporting Hamas? The outer purpose of those movements is not served, but the inner purpose is advanced. And the inner purpose is the same as that of Hamas. The gun control advocates, environmentalists and other leftist activists are not here to improve our society, like Hamas they want to destroy 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.

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Monday, November 27, 2023

The Dead Al Qaeda Hippie Who Went Viral on TikTok

By On November 27, 2023 In
Eight years after he was taken out by a drone strike in Waziristan, Adam Gadahn went viral on TikTok. Had the former Al Qaeda terrorist been alive to see TikTok lefties praising his, “Letter to America”, written in Osama bin Laden’s name, he would have been absolutely thrilled.

Raised by California hippies, Adam Gadahn’s message clicked with TikTok teens because he used to be one of them. After experimenting with heavy metal to rebel against his dad’s terrible folk music (“So tell us what the sign will be/Of the end of the age we know/War and famine everywhere/There’s no place left to go” he went for the ultimate in death metal.

We love nothing more than “slitting the throats of the infidels” he bragged in his videos in a fake Arabic accent right out of ‘Team America World Police’. “You and your people will, Allah willing, experience things, which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11.”

Al Qaeda embraced the previously useless hipster because he promised to teach them how to reach Americans. But the ‘Azzam the American’ experiment never took off. Even after he stopped wearing a burka-like disguise over his square wire rimmed glasses, and wound a tablecloth around his head instead, he never stopped looking like a dork in a costume.

Adam never belonged in Pakistan, he belonged in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ or ‘Napoleon Dynamite’: his blank thousand yard stare had been perfected by getting high, not in Koran study.

Americans did not rush to enlist in Al Qaeda because of his words. Adam had aimed his rhetoric at the Michael Moore demographic that had birthed him, but one it was one thing to jeer Bush in between Starbucks lattes and another to move to a cave on the Pakistani border.

The videos mostly tapered off and he was reduced to translating the speeches of Al Qaeda leaders. After Osama bin Laden’s death, Americans stopped paying attention to Al Qaeda, and Adam’s death in a drone strike took second billing to the deaths of two American hostages.

But Adam or Azzam had been ahead of his time. He had peaked before the age of social media, and he never reached the audience he needed. But that’s changing now.

8 years after he was spattered over parts of Pakistan, Adam is an Al Qaeda influencer now.

The living can catch up to the times, but the dead can only wait for the times to catch up to them. When Adam Gadahn converted to Islam in 1996 and then assaulted his local Imam for not being antisemitic enough, there weren’t a lot of American teenagers like him. But we now live in a world where there are plenty of American teens converting to Islam and going Jihad.

Take Trevor Bickford, a 19-year-old from Wells, Maine, a town of less than 10,000 people, who converted to Islam, and headed down to Times Square to kill non-Muslims. Or Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of 15,000, who joined ISIS and planned his own terror attack. Or Jonathan Xie, a 20-year-old from a New Jersey suburb who joined Hamas and threatened to bomb Trump Tower.

When Shannon Maureen Conley, a 19-year-old teenage girl from suburban Colorado converted to Islam and tried to join ISIS in 2014, there were articles and profiles on her. By the 2020s, it’s become common enough that American teens becoming Islamic terrorists has become routine. Hardly anyone bothers with the extended profiles of what is now a social phenomenon.

The handful that actually go all the way, like Adam, Trevor, Xavier, Jonathan or Shannon are the tip of the iceberg. When Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, actually written by Adam, went viral on TikTok, it exposed a much larger contingent of American teens friendly to the Jihad. Most Muslims are not actually terrorists, they’re just sympathetic to their positions. The same is true of parts of the non-Muslim world, including Europe, and it’s true of some American teens.

A poll showing that 51% of Americans 18-24 supported the murders, rapes and kidnappings atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct 7 is not just a statement about Israel. How many of them also think Al Qaeda had a point? There’s no meaningful polling on that: only anecdotal.

Adam’s “Letter to America”, stripped of his terrorist cosplay, the costumes and the droning voice, proved to be effective with teens who are like him, bored, dissatisfied and lacking in meaning. The Al Qaeda influencer rebelled against the Christian and Jewish religions of his parents, adopted Islam and then called for the destruction of America. In a counterculture that prizes teenage rebellion as the ultimate form of cultural change, Adam was the ‘it’ Jihadist.

Converting to Islam is a bit of a side road from the one that his Boomer parents took to get to their place in the counterculture. Adam went from his dad’s ‘Beat of the Earth’ and ‘Love Will Find a Way’ to a scorched earth triumph over the infidels, but isn’t this where the Left always ends up? Converting to Islam and joining Al Qaeda is the Zoomer answer to the Boomer side roads of joining Charlie Manson’s race war or drinking Kool-Aid with Jim Jones.

The Age of Aquarius always ends in Altamont and gulags. Why not also Jihad?

Adam Gadahn adapted Osama bin Laden’s message to a generation of teens who grew up believing that America was racist, “freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only”, destroying the environment, ranting that “you have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gasses… despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement” (Adam had started out as an environmentalist), and oppressing the rest of the world. Starting with the leftist premise that America was evil, Al Qaeda made perfect sense. And to leftists it still does.

The first Al Qaeda influencer is postmortem piggybacking on a culture of radical activism that has made Islamic terrorism into the ultimate counterculture.

The Guardian profiles Americans who reacted to Islamic terrorism by reading the Koran and converting to Islam. The dead-eyed Manson followers and Jim Jones cult members are reading Korans and shouting “ceasefire”, they’re blocking traffic and having hysterics at the Capitol.

The Left has always drawn on fractured souls for its causes. Even more than dynamiting buildings, it set bombs to blow up the culture and its values. The more people it broke, the more recruits it gained. Islamists in America have gone beyond recruiting in prison and are recruiting from this same broken base. Mom and Dad may have protested the war, but Junior is a Jihadist.

Islam, like the Left, promises to destroy a failed world built on oppression and lies, in order to save it. Behind the apocalyptic idealism is the same perversity that led Adam Gadahn to threaten that, “the streets of America shall run red with blood.” Was this rhetoric really all that different from the anarchists, the Black Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army?

The radicals have become one great big apocalyptic gestalt, castrating teenagers, burning down pro-life centers, marching through the streets, tearing down statues and looting stores. The spectacle of it matters more than the details of the ideology. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, some teens robotically repeat verbose dogma they don’t understand, whether it’s Critical Race Theory or Hadiths, because it lets them run around destroying things and terrorizing people.

The destructive impulses that leftist radicals and Islamic terrorists channel are fairly similar. And not so different from the Hitler Youth. Put on a uniform, shock your parents and wreck things. The more you rage and hate, the stronger you feel and the more you bypass the hard work of adulthood. Radical politics is just another way for teenagers to never grow up.

‘Azzam the American’ was a Jihadist Peter Pan who never had to grow up. He’s dead now. And some of those radicals protesting for Hamas will eventually convert and follow in his footsteps.

Adam Gadahn understood instinctively how to take a foreign ideology and make it palatable to those like him, but we’re now in a world and a country full of Adams. Social decay has been supplemented by educational and pop culture indoctrination. TikTok is happy to spread Osama’s message as long as it weakens America. There is a world of strange bedfellows out there all happy to see us fall. And if we are not careful, some of them will be our children.

The return of ‘Azzam the American’ is a reminder that we’re not just in a war, but a culture war. A broken and divided nation is in no shape to defeat a vast enemy that is already inside our borders. The War on Terror is an extension of the old culture war we’ve been losing until now. Islamic terrorism could not succeed unless it could rely on a fifth column inside our countries.

After 9/11, it was clear that we would have to win an internal war to win an external one. Now as the wars come together and the enemy roams our streets, the need is more urgent than ever.

Either we defeat the enemy within or the war is lost.





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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Sunday, November 26, 2023

Thirty Years Ago Israel Deported Hamas. Clinton Made Israel Take It Back

By On November 26, 2023 In
“Deporting The Hope For Peace?” Newsweek asked. The hope for peace was Hamas.

The year was 1992. The Clinton administration was trying to get Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat to sign on the dotted line of the Oslo Accords to create a terror state inside Israel. In the name of peace. Unfortunately Hamas kept killing Israelis.

15-year-old Helena Rapp had been stabbed to death at a bus stop on the way to school. A few days later, Rabbi Shimon Biran, a father of four, was similarly murdered by an Islamic terrorist.

Fed up with the latest killings, Prime Minister Rabin put 417 Islamists terrorists on buses and dumped them in Lebanon. The monsters he deported included top Hamas terror leaders.

On the six buses were current Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who would vow, “by Allah, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine”, Abu Osama, who helped draft the Hamas charter calling for the extermination of the Jews, Hamas co-founders Mohammed Taha, Hammad Al-Hasanat, and Mahmoud Zahar, who threatened “They have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people”, Hamad Al-Bitawi, who proclaimed that “Jihad is a collective duty” along with Abdullah al-Shami, the head of Islamic Jihad, and many other present and future Islamic terror leaders deported to Lebanon.

The New York Times headlined its coverage, “Ousted Arabs Shiver and Wait in Lebanese Limbo”. Newsweek also sympathetically described how the Hamas terrorists were “shivering in the cold.” The Washington Post lingered on their handcuff “welts”. The Associated Press provided detailed coverage of their cases of diarrhea turning the bowel movements of Islamist terrorists into an item worthy of international coverage.

In reality the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists had been equipped by Israel with raincoats, blankets, food and $50 each: more than enough to buy whatever they needed in Lebanon.

“We are thirsty, cold and hungry,” said Dr. Abdul-Aziz Rantisi,” is how the Times began its story. It mentioned that Rantisi was planning a hunger strike, not that he was a terrorist leader.

The Los Angeles Times suggested that the “free speech” of the terrorists had been violated. It asked them to “define Hamas’ membership conditions” and ”many answered, ‘To pray and be good Muslims.’” That is how the media explained the Islamic terror group to Americans.

The Red Cross, which after over a month had failed to pay a visit to the Israeli hostages, including children and old women being held by Hamas, was quickly on the scene with “three truckloads of tents, food, blankets and bedding”. The aid organization set up tents for the Hamas terrorists who were apparently too lazy or incompetent to set up their own tents.

The head of UNRWA trekked out from Vienna to visit the expelled Hamas terrorists.

Bernard Pfefferle, the local chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, wept, “They won’t survive the winter out there like this.” In fact, they survived just fine.

UN Under Secretary General James O. C. Jonah, Bernard Kouchner, France’s Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, and many other foreign dignitaries tried to visit the Hamas terrorists.

French Ambassador Daniel Husson asked to meet with the Hamas terrorists to “express France’s sympathy with their cause.”

Amnesty International organized a letter writing campaign whining that the Hamas deportees were “living in tents in freezing conditions” and demanding the “safe return of the deportees to Israel.” B’Tselem, a pro-terror ‘human rights’ group operating inside Israel, denounced the deportations as a “a flagrant violation of human rights”. During the Oct 7 attacks, Vivian Silver, a B’Tselem board member, was killed by the terrorists she had spent her life advocating for.

B’Tselem had been one of the pro-terrorist groups that had originally challenged the deportations in Israel’s leftist Supreme Court in a bid to keep Hamas inside Israel.

The media relentlessly covered the Hamas deportees the way it had failed to cover their victims. By the end, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi had held a record of 1,500 press conferences. Every time the Islamic terrorists sneezed there was a correspondent there to write about it, a photographer there to take a picture of it and a human rights activist there to condemn Israel for it.

Even if it was all a lie.

“EXPELLED PALESTINIANS RUN OUT OF WATER,” a Washington Post headline blared. In that same story the paper mentioned that they were getting their water from a stream. Other stories complained that they were running out of water while surrounded by snow.

One Associated Press story described a deportee eating a breakfast of jam, cheese and bread or beans and chickpeas with lemon sauce, and then a lunch of tuna fish or sardines, and then complaining, “I’m so sick of this food. I eat only to stay alive.”

In reality the Hamas and Islamic terrorists had plenty of food and water. At one point even a New York Times article admitted that “on Thursday, the Palestinians said that they had fasted during the day to preserve food stocks that had dwindled to some vermicelli and potatoes, with drinking water completely gone. Yet today, an Associated Press reporter said that the deported men were cooking rice, chickpeas and canned meat, and that some had eggs.”

A week after they were deported the New York Times claimed that the Hamas terrorists would start “dying from pneumonia” in a few days. None of them died even after seven months.

In reality, they were holding lavish religious feasts with Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC terrorists. The tent city would become an enclave of television sets, fax machines, copy machines, cell phones, a fridge filled with soda and a satellite dish beaming Iranian television shows to them. 

Israel had dumped the Hamas terrorists in Lebanon, but the Hezbollah allied government refused to take them and blocked the road with tanks to keep them from leaving. The Lebanese government wouldn’t allow aid to pass through to the Hamas terrorists, but did allow reporters and camera crews through to document the “shivering” of the Hamas leaders.

In a foreshadowing of Egypt’s policy of blockading Gaza, Lebanon kept the Hamas terrorists from entering Lebanon. And the international community and the media placed the blame on Israel, rather than Lebanon, which was preventing them from entering its territory.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 799 condemning the deportations of Hamas terrorists and demanding that Israel “ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied territories of all those deported”.

The first Bush administration voted for the resolution even though it had shrugged when a year earlier, the Kuwaitis had expelled 200,000 ‘Palestinians’ using tanks and troops.

“I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature,” President George H. W. Bush had observed.

Israelis however were supposed to take kindly to the Hamas terrorists massacring them. The Bush administration “strongly condemned” the deportations. Bill Clinton was no better.

“I share the anger and the frustration and the outrage of the Israeli people. And I understand how they feel. They have to deal very firmly with this group Hamas, which is apparently bent on terrorist activities of all kinds,” Clinton, who would soon be taking office, said. “On the other hand, I am concerned that this deportation may go too far and imperil the peace talks.”

“We are not sure that President-elect Clinton and his team fully comprehend the danger from Islamic fundamentalism,” Rabin had observed before his meeting with Bill Clinton.

The Clinton administration mostly certainly did not. But neither did Rabin.

Prime Minister Rabin had only temporarily deported the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists for two years to improve his domestic image and buy some quiet time for peace negotiations. His coalition of leftist and far leftist parties was soon divided between him and future Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s far leftist cabinet coalition. “No one is enjoying the suffering of these people,” Peres said. “Israel deported them, but it did not mean to hurt them.”

The leftist coalition Meretz party called deporting Hamas “a gross violation of human rights.”

Under pressure from the Clinton administration, which warned that it would not protect Israel from UN sanctions, and members of his own leftist coalition Rabin offered to allow the Hamas terrorists back if they promised to “desist from terror and violence for the duration of the peace negotiations”. The terrorists refused to promise that. And so he agreed to take in over a hundred of them now and the rest in a year. Hamas began returning to Israel in 1993. 

The Hamas terrorists only agreed to return due to insufficient TV coverage of their antics.

"High among the reasons given by the Palestinian deportees for accepting Israel's effort to let about half of them back into the West Bank and Gaza next month was the deportees lack not of food or shelter, but of coverage by the news media -- meaning television," the New York Times reported.

30 years ago Israel had expelled the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and then took them back in.

Two weeks after Rabin agreed to take back the Hamas terrorists, the World Trade Center was bombed by the Islamic Group which, like Hamas, had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Our struggle against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world which is lying in slumber. We call on all nations and all people to devote their attention to the real and serious danger which threatens the peace of the world in the forthcoming years. The danger of death is at our doorstep,” Rabin had warned. But the world went on slumbering .And so did Israel.

In 2023, Israel and the world have the opportunity to undo or repeat the mistakes of 1993.






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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Friday, November 24, 2023

There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza

By On November 24, 2023 In
Ever since Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, along with ordinary Arab Muslims from Gaza, invaded Israel, murdered, raped and kidnapped women and children, the debate has been about how innocent they are. And how easy Israel should be willing to go on them.

In the weeks since, Israel has been lectured about a “disproportionate” response and the urgent need to avoid civilian casualties. That’s a little tricky when fighting an Islamic terrorist group whose only real defensive strategy is hiding behind civilians. Fighting Islamic terrorists without killing civilians is like trying to invade Russia while avoiding cold weather. It’s impossible.

But ever since the Bush administration decided that the real problem in Afghanistan and Iraq was not a cult and a culture of death, but a lack of democracy, our elites have been busy pretending that over a thousand years of terror was due to a lack of free and fair elections.

The Bush administration got its elections in the West Bank and Gaza. And Hamas won. Then Obama got his elections in Egypt and across North Africa, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas and Al Qaeda, won. We’re still dealing with the fallout from that.

‘Democracy’ handed over Iraq and Gaza to Iran. And as a result ISIS emerged.

As Hamas uses ICU patients and babies in NICUs as human shields for its bases, what do the “ordinary Palestinians”, the ones liberals are convinced are innocent parties in all this, think?

A recent poll of Arab Muslim residents of the West Bank and Gaza, known as ‘Palestinians’ circa 1967, conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) asked them.

74% supported the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7. Of these 59% “extremely” support them and another 15% only “somewhat”. Only 7% were “extremely against” and 5% somewhat against.

That’s 74% in favor of murdering, raping and kidnapping Jews and only 12% against.

Only 7% were ‘extremely’ against murdering and abducting children.

Is this a moral or a tactical objection? Let’s look at the breakdown by region.

83% of those in the West Bank, ruled by the Palestinian Authority, said that they supported the Hamas atrocities. Only 7% were opposed. In Gaza, there was notably less enthusiasm at 63%. But after weeks of bombings and raids, only 20% seem to have decided it was a bad idea.

Why were only 7% of those in the West Bank, but 20% of those in Gaza opposed?

Do those extra 13% of Gazans reflect a people (slightly) more likely to value human life or terrorist supporters who, like their comrades in the West Bank, like it better when someone else is doing the fighting? If the attack had come from the West Bank, would 83% (instead of just 63%) of those in Gaza be enthusiastic about the massacre and beheading of Israelis?

The survey asked a few more questions that got to the heart of it.

A majority believed that the Hamas atrocities were an Islamic response to the “defilement of Al Aqsa” by allowing Jews to set foot on the former site of the Holy Temple.

98% in Gaza and the West Bank said that they felt ‘pride’ as ‘Palestinians’ over the war.

74% expect the fighting to end with the defeat of Israeli forces in Gaza.

Only 17% support a two-state solution while 77.7% want to destroy Israel and replace it with a ‘Palestinian’ state.

Are there innocent civilians in Gaza? Probably a lot fewer than in Berlin or Tokyo in 1944.

The Germans supported Hitler and the Japanese backed the Imperial war machine. Those dissidents and opponents who disagreed not just on tactical grounds, but on moral ones, were a small minority. They’re a far tinier minority among the so-called Palestinians.

The ‘Palestinian’ majority wants a war to destroy Israel fought by Islamic terrorists.

They’re not complaining and crying for a ceasefire because they don’t want a war, but because they’re losing the war that they wanted. They still want the war, they just want to be winning it.

When you spend all of your time dreaming of invading and destroying another country, you may be a civilian, but you’re no more innocent than your average Nazi Party member.

Currently Hamas is a good deal more popular in the West Bank (88% approval rating) than it is in Gaza (59% approval rating), but the Al Aqsa Brigade, the military part of Hamas, scores big in the West Bank (86% approval) and at (69%) in Gaza. Those are numbers Biden would kill for.

And don’t mistake even the nearly 9 out of 10 in the West Bank and 7 out of 10 in Gaza as a lack of enthusiasm for Islamic terrorism.

The Al Qassam Brigades, the direct terrorist arm of Hamas, is at 95% approval in the West Bank and 78% in Gaza.

Islamic Jihad scores 93% in the West Bank and 72% in Gaza.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is at 88% in the West Bank and at 70% in Gaza.

But let’s go back to democracy. Whom do they want running the place?

75% of those in the West Bank and 68% of those in Gaza want a national unity government of the various Islamic terrorist groups that would naturally include Hamas.

Isn’t democracy a beautiful thing? The ‘Palestinian’ people want to be ruled by terrorists. They want a war. And then they cry to the cameras when the war they demanded actually happens.

That’s what ‘Palestinians’ want and whom they like. Whom don’t they like? Everyone.

98% of the Arab Muslim settlers in the West Bank hate America as do 96.8% of those in Gaza. That’s still better than the UK which is hated by 100% of Arab Muslim colonists in the West Bank and Gaza. They actually hate America and the UK more than Israel which is only at 97.3%.

But don’t feel too bad, Americans, Israelis and Brits, because they hate everyone.

Not a single country, and that includes Iran, gets even a 5% ‘very positive’ rating. 63% don’t like Iran, 27% like it, and only 4% really like it even though it bled itself dry financing their terrorism.

64% don’t like Turkey even though Erdogan, its Islamic dictator, pulled out all the stops for them.

85% don’t like Egypt, 86% don’t like Jordan, 95% don’t like Saudi Arabia, and 95% don’t like the UAE even though these are the fellow Arab Muslim countries that provide aid to them.

Proving that ingratitude is the one consistent ‘Palestinian’ characteristic: 92% don’t like the EU, 88% don’t like the UN, and 69% manage to be against the Red Cross.

Russia, which created the entire ‘Palestinian’ cause and continues to back them, gets some of the best numbers. Only 57% don’t like Russia and 60% don’t like China.

Even more ungratefully, 85% don’t like Western media.

The ‘Palestinians’ have their own dedicated UN agency (UNRWA) and have billions of dollars lavished on them. Their needs are taken care of by the people they hate, America, Israel, Egypt and the UAE, not to mention the UN and the Red Cross, whom they repay by hating them.

If you give them free food, they will really hate you, and if you give them free rockets, they will hate you a little less. The only things they want to do are kill people and then kill some more.

This isn’t a culture or a country: it’s a xenophobic death cult that hates the entire world.

You don’t want them as neighbors or as refugees. Israel is stuck with them. The rest of the world doesn’t have to be. Stop giving them money, stop listening to their propaganda and stop caring.

Our faith in democracy convinced us to waste blood trying to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And then we handed Afghanistan to the Taliban on the understanding that they’d run for public office. The State Department is still asking the Taliban to open up elections.

What’s behind this insanity? We refuse to come to terms with the fact that some people are bad. No matter what horrors they commit, we’re certain that it’s only a “tiny minority of extremists” who have “misunderstood Islam” and are surely not representative of the vast majority of peace loving people who want the same things we want and just haven’t been given the opportunity.

The troubling question they don’t like to think about is what if none of that is actually true?

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham pleads with G-d to spare Sodom. The Lord agrees if some righteous people can be found in the infamous city. The patriarch bargains with G-d for increasingly smaller numbers of righteous people until it turns out there is only one. And he has to run for his life before Sodom is destroyed. Modern people are uncomfortable with the story.

We don’t really believe in evil. Even when we come face to face with it we make excuses for it. And evil is then able to manipulate us, to play on our sympathies when it has none for us.

You see there is one piece of good news from that poll.

90% of ‘Palestinians’ would like a ceasefire from the war that 77.7% of them would like to see conclude with the destruction of Israel.

How stupid would anyone have to be to give it to them?






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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Thursday, November 23, 2023

Who's Afraid of Thanksgiving?

By On November 23, 2023 In
There are two annual traditions that make up Thanksgiving. One is the ancient and venerable tradition of thanking the Creator for our bounty while the other is the more recent leftist tradition of turning the day into a festival of grievances, a 'festivus' during which they pick political arguments with family members and launch into screeds about how Thanksgiving is the product of imperialism and colonialism.

The Nation magazine recently proposed replacing it with a 'Truthsgiving' during which we will all confess our crimes and ponder how much better life would be if the Pilgrims had never come to America, and the Nazis and Communists had won WWII and gone on to exterminate 70% of the population of the planet.

Wrecking Thanksgiving, like the family, womens' sports and Star Wars is just one of those things lefties do. The perpetual teenage tantrums that began with Karl Marx and ended with Cousin Jan screaming at the Thanksgiving table about how nobody understands Hamas and how inspiring she found Osama bin Laden's letter are the essence of the movement.

The idea of Thanksgiving is scary to a movement obsessed with power and grievance. The essence of the holiday is gratitude and that requires taking a step back and acknowledging the limitations of our power. From the environment of the planet to every detail of our lives, the Left is obsessed with control, but Thanksgiving, like most religious festivals, is about surrendering that control to a higher power. G-d.



True people of faith are humble. Thanksgiving requires humility and the recognition that we are not ultimately in charge. While we can and should strive, we cannot do everything, and our successes are owed to a force that utterly transcends us and our efforts. But to believe that is to reject most of the objectives of the Left.

The utopian conviction that the purpose of life is to study politics and take power is a poisonous secular religion, more akin to Islam, than to Christianity and Judaism, whose fixation on power stems from the desire, as George Soros and other leftist billionaires have admitted, to play god. And to play god, is to deny that there is an actual Deity, only a chaotic world that has to be ordered by god-like humans.

There's no room for gratitude for the aspiring man-gods, the cults of personality, the mean and cheap little substitutes for religion that speak of love, but preach only hate.

The Left rejects gratitude. As Stalin said, "Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs." Resentment is what gives the Left purpose. The more leftists receive, the more they resent. Their resentment is in inverse proportion to their bounty. That is why Western leftists are the most resentful of them all.

Rather than fleeing blessed by prosperity and comfort, they grow arrogant and certain of themselves. The blessings around feed their egos and inflate their narcissism and stir up neuroses so that they alternate between ecstasies of power and catastrophes of doom. They imagine a new world and break the old one.

Gratitude is an antidote to arrogance, it is one of the best defenses against leftism. Teach your children gratitude and you give them a knowledge of G-d, a sense of security and their place in the universe.

Teach them leftism and you teach them to scream at you across the Thanksgiving table.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Equity, Equality and Hamas

By On November 21, 2023 In
How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.

America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.

The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.

“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”

What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.

Siding with Israel or Hamas has become a litmus test for the left of center. It evenly divides liberals from leftists. The dividing line is between human decency and ideology. It’s a familiar moral struggle that played out time and again throughout the twentieth century.

Morality can only exist in a society that believes in equality. Equity is obsessed with outcomes which is another way of saying that it believes that the ends can always justify the means.

“To put it brutally,” Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, busy covering up Communist atrocities in the Soviet Union, famously wrote, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Equity is all about the omelets. It reduces all morality to a political program. Right and wrong is determined by where everyone starts out and where they want to end up. Violence is just another means. Sometimes eggs have to be broken and millions of people have to be killed.

Brutality, rather than something to be deplored, becomes a sign of revolutionary commitment. Only those who truly believe in a new age and are determined to overthrow the existing order will be utterly ruthless, vicious and destructive in the campaign against the system. The worst barbarism is justified as a ‘reaction’ to oppression and a determination to rush out an end to it.

The Left never lets go of bad ideas. It just rebrands them. Equity is just the same old program of promising to make everyone equal through a temporary totalitarian ‘evening out’ period. Under this umbrella, there is no room for individuality or freedom, and the only morality is political.

Radicals claim that equality perpetuates the system while equity disrupts it. The reality is that equality is genuinely dangerous because it disrupts all systems of power while equity is just another means of eliminating individual rights, and replacing it with a system of power.

Expecting people dedicated to this proposition to side with Israel over Hamas is foolish. And those indoctrinated to view the world through concepts like anti-racism, intersectionality and orientalism have been groomed throughout their miseducation to support Hamas. All the tools and the information they have been given have trained them to understand Islamic terrorists as the oppressed, not just in Israel, but in America, Europe, India and all around the world.

This may seem like madness to conservatives and liberals, but if you understand the world as a conflict between the old order and an emerging new order, as leftists and some far righters do, siding with Hamas is wholly reasonable. Not to mention China, Russia and Al Qaeda.

Equity is all about forcibly ‘evening out’ humanity while intersectionality connects all causes.

When abortion rights ralliers carry signs reading, “Palestinian resistance is reproductive justice”, it seems like madness, but it’s a very particular species of ideological madness. The same one that led Communists to defend Nazi Germany during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Or led the Trotskyists who still form the backbone of the anti-war movement to sabotage the defense industry in the United States and the United Kingdom once WWII was in full swing.

If the only real measure of morality is the oppressor/oppressed or ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’, then why be selective about who the oppressed ‘punching up’ are? Nazis and Hamas both look pretty good when they’re inflicting defeats on the people you want to overthrow.

Some radicals may be well aware that Hamas Jihadis would be shooting or raping them if they were in the wrong place, but it didn’t especially bother them when their friends ended up on the guillotine or in gulags, or when they were beaten during race riots or killed in Latin America.

Equity requires sacrifices. We can’t all be even until some of us are broken or killed.

Where equality sees us as individuals, equity reduces us to members of a group operating within a political context. Our lives are sacred only to the extent that our death serves a political purpose. Do black lives matter? Only when they’re taken by a police officer, not by the stray bullets of a gang member over a long weekend in Chicago.

College students who cheer Hamas or tear down posters of kidnapped hostages ask themselves what is the political context in which these crimes were carried out. It is the context that matters, not the people. In the right political context, anything can be justified.

The further away we get from equality, the more we find ourselves in this abyss of equity where the only morals are political, the only crimes are political and the only people that matter are political. The cruel god of the leftist is politics. Men, women and children are sacrificed to him, but he yields nothing except a permanent sinecure for the bloody priests wielding the knife.

Equity gazes at the past and the future, but has little interest in the present except as a meeting point of the two. It destroys the present to avenge a poorly understood past and ensure its impossible plans for the future. It dehumanizes people on the promise of humanizing them. It convinces them to support discrimination to end it, to spew hate for the sake of love, and to support mass murder so that all mankind may live in peace.






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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Monday, November 20, 2023

The ‘Two-State Solution’ is Terrorism

By On November 20, 2023 In
“We must keep pursuing peace. We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace. For me, that means a two-state solution,” Biden lectured Israelis during his visit.

A two state solution dividing up Israel into a state for the Jews and a state for the Muslim terrorists has been on the minds of Biden, administration officials, EU leaders and the media.

Before his visit to Israel, Biden called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and scheduled a meeting with him. Secretary of State Blinken had met with Abbas the day before.

According to an official of Abbas’ Fatah party which runs the Palestinian Authority, “Blinken even demanded before he met with him that there be a condemnation” of the Hamas attacks. But no such condemnation was forthcoming. Nevertheless the media falsely reported that Abbas had disavowed Hamas. In reality, a statement was planted in a readout of a call with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro without Abbas’ knowledge. When Abbas found out, he had it removed.

Abbas’s actual reaction to the Hamas murder of women and children was to assert the right of the “Palestinian people to defend themselves against the terrorism of settlers and the occupation forces”.

While Biden and Blinken were preparing to meet with the terrorist leader, a terror unit that is part of Abbas’ Fatah party was claiming credit for collaborating with Hamas on the attacks.

A spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades boasted that the “together with the rest of the Palestinian resistance factions” it “carried out several operations behind enemy lines as part of ‘the Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle”, which is the Hamas name for the attacks, and claimed that “we killed and took captive occupation soldiers” as part of a “joint operations room”.

Biden’s alternative to Hamas was actually killing Israelis in coordination with Hamas.

While the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades appears on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, making it a crime for Americans to fund it, its parent organization, the Palestinian Authority, benefits from massive infusions of cash and political support from Washington D.C.

Last year, Biden met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and bragged that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”

The meeting between Abbas and Biden didn’t happen on this trip, not because the leader of the free world refused to meet with a terrorist leader, but because the terrorist leader refused to meet with Biden in order to protest Israel’s bombing of Hamas terrorists. Half a billion dollars didn’t even buy Biden a photo op with the terrorist he would like to see running a country.

None of that has stopped Biden and D.C. officials from continuing to talk about the “Two-State Solution” and to warn that if Israel defeats Hamas in Gaza, it must replace it with the Palestinian Authority and its terrorists to begin the cycle of violence and terror all over again.

But Biden didn’t bother to ask the “Palestinians”: 72% of whom don’t support a two-state solution in “which an independent Palestinian state existed alongside an independent state of Israel”. Among the young, there’s only 16% support for coexistence with Israel. 81% of them don’t believe that a permanent peace will ever be achieved. Two-thirds believe that life was better before the Oslo Accords began the two-state solution process and support abandoning it.

If an election were held, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would defeat Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas by 58% to 37% which explains why Abbas has not held a presidential election since 2005. After Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, all elections were canceled.

Despite the clear evidence otherwise, Secretary of State Blinken put in a call to Abbas to tell him, “that Hamas terrorists do not represent Palestinians”. He didn’t mention that the only reason they don’t is because the Palestinian Authority won’t hold elections to allow them to.

As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque “minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of places in the West Bank… in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”

The Palestinian Authority’s television rejoiced that “Gaza landed a blow that this occupation will yet remember… We are talking about dozens of detainees and captives, both dead bodies and captive soldiers and settlers… Today they are imprisoned in the Gaza Strip.”

The idea that the values of Hamas are fundamentally different from those of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and that those differ from the values of the Arab Muslims living in the territories under their control has no basis in actual fact. Politicians keep repeating these evidence-free claims because the alternative is to admit the grimness of the situation.

The two-state solution is based on a myth and a lie. It defies history, geography, and reality. Decades of efforts to implement it have foundered on the simple fact that the issue is coexistence, not territory, and no matter what impossible maps are drawn, the violence never ends because it does not originate in the wars of ‘48, ‘67’ or ‘73, in Israel’s decision to close the Gaza border once Hamas seized power or in anything that happened in the last two centuries.

The myth that the Palestinian Authority, born out of the PLO, was a moderate alternative to Hamas has long since been exposed as a lie, but no matter how often Arafat and then Abbas showed their true colors, how many innocent people were murdered, the big lie was too big to fail. And now in the face of the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, it’s still too big to fail.

The only way that Biden and the rest of Washington D.C. can countenance removing Hamas is by replacing it with another bunch of terrorists to maintain the “Two-State Solution”.

But the issue is not just one terrorist group. Hamas and Fatah are reflections of their people.

Twenty years ago, a Hamas terrorist disguised as a woman walked into a Passover seder filled with elderly people, including Holocaust survivors, and set off a bomb, killing over two dozen and wounding over a hundred. Next year, the Palestinian Authority sponsored a soccer tournament in the terrorist’s honor to the approval of 71%. (That same poll found that 74% of ‘Palestinians’ supported Saddam Hussein, 82% viewed Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’ and 79% believed that bombing Israeli restaurants and buses were not acts of ‘terrorism’)

“There is no limit to Palestinian barbarism,” the Israeli government spokesman had bitterly observed. The spectacle of “bleeding and dazed survivors” who were “dragging moaning victims across a marble floor streaked with blood and littered with body parts and crushed matzo” set a new standard for evil. One woman saw “a little girl lying dead on the ground with her eyes wide open”. The latest Hamas horrors were more of the same, only executed on a grander scale.

There is indeed no limit to ‘Palestinian’ barbarism and no limit to the lies that the rest of the world will believe to avoid confronting it. The ‘Two-State Solution’ is the worst of those lies. As the Jewish families massacred by Hamas found out, no one can live next door to monsters who lust for the opportunity to torture, mutilate, rape and kill them. That’s the ‘Two-State Solution’.

Biden’s push for a ‘Two-State Solution’ would hand over Gaza from one Islamic terrorist group to another. The Palestinian Authority provides payments to Hamas terrorists and their families as part of its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program. It celebrates their atrocities and collaborates with them.

The Hamas butchery finally convinced the Biden administration that the terror group needed to go, but the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has admitted that Fatah took part in the Hamas attacks. Where did the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade come from? It was founded by a member of Tanzim, another Fatah terrorist group responsible for multiple suicide bombings that was created by Arafat and led by Marwan Barghouti.

While Barghouti is serving several life sentences in Israeli prison, if he were to run for president of the Palestinian Authority, polls show he would defeat the Hamas leader, 60% to 37%.

That’s the future of ‘Two-State Solution’.

The ‘Two-State Solution’ is not an end to violence, it’s perpetual violence. If we want an actual solution, it begins with ending our political and financial support for Islamic terror groups in Israel. The experiment of giving the terrorists an independent state has been tried and failed. The death toll from the terrorists of the ‘Two-State Solution’ continues to grow every year.

The solution to terrorism is not more terrorism, it’s ending terrorism.





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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