DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS
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EGYPTLAND
On to current events, I predicted a counterrevolution last year in Egypt and Tunisia. And those seem to have materialized. But predicting revolutions in unstable societies is not that great a leap.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has resorted to Mubarak’s old tactics of using violent attacks against protesters, particularly female protesters. Unlike Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t care what anyone thinks of it, but the escalation of that violence may lead somewhere they don’t expect.
Tahrir Square is once again turning into a protest ground, this time for Anti-Brotherhood activists who were the players in the original revolution. The confrontations between liberal protesters and government thugs is playing out a lot like the way the old revolution did. And while the Muslim Brotherhood reaped the rewards of that revolution, Mubarak was not removed by an election and there’s no reason to think that the same thing cannot also happen to Morsi.
And it did. But it’s not the end of the game.
Morsi’s big mistake was in alienating too many groups at the same time. He alienated the military by making too many sudden moves against it and alienated the liberal opposition by breaking all his promises to them.
He didn’t expect that the military and the liberal opposition would join forces against him. He was wrong. The Egyptian military has bypassed him assembling a coalition of religious and political leaders to sideline the Brotherhood.
And even if the military and the liberal opposition succeeds in their political judo move, they inherit a disastrous economy and a wave of popular anger over it. The Brotherhood can stage another revolution or a counter-revolution or a counter-counter-revolution after a few months of El Baradei running Egypt into the ground. If the military doesn’t remove him first.
The genuinely impressive thing about all this is how smooth it is. The military is using liberal protesters to escape any accusations of a coup and the liberal protesters suddenly find themselves on the same side as the police and the military. The ostracized protesters suddenly find that their protests come with a steel fist. And the military no longer looks like a bunch of thugs. Everyone wins, except the Islamists.
This is the sort of outcome a lot of the Western backers of the Arab Spring expected, concluding with an El Baradei presidency. And that may still be in the cards. After spending some time with Morsi, the military has decided that El Baradei and the liberals are a better alternative after all.
But that alliance, like all the others, will prove fragile. And finally…
Before the Arab Spring, liberal foreign policy experts claimed that the people of the Arab Street hated us for supporting tyrants and that we had to change that by supporting the “popular will”… which turned out to be Islamists.
Fast forward to the Islamist aftermath of the Arab Spring and everyone on the Arab Street still
1. Accuses of supporting tyrants
2. Hates us
THE LAST BEST HOPE
Gennifer Flowers should have buried the prospects of any presidential candidate. Instead she gave an unknown politician a national forum to ply his brand of fake sincerity and self-righteous promises of having finally learned the error of his ways.
Hillary’s great challenge is her blandness. Like the apparatchiks of his own party whom Bill Clinton swatted in the primaries on the way to the White House, no amount of fake trendiness can disguise her standing as a perpetual government employee.
Indeed the revelation of such an affair might be the only thing that could save the Hillary 2016 campaign.
Reinventing herself as Huma’s girlfriend would make for months of headlines and months of sympathy. The entire mess would be ghastly and tawdry, and just like the Jodi Arias trial millions would tune in, watch and take sides. And a Post-Bill Hillary would emerge out of the ashes with a new pantsuit and a new identity.
The Never-Ending Clinton Sex Scandals
TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS
We are privileged to live in a time when we can no longer take freedom for granted. It may seem like an odd sort of privilege to watch and worry as our rights are taken away, but freedoms are won and rights are secured out of such difficult times. And the freedoms won are much more satisfying and enduring when they are snatched out of the teeth of tyranny because it is only in such difficult times that the true meaning of freedom can be understood.
Freedom is an intangible quality. Like health or light, we notice it most clearly in its absence. And so the only way to truly appreciate freedom is to be on the verge of losing it.
Our Fourth of July may be more troubled than it was a century ago, but those troubles have brought us closer to a day some 237 years ago that led to centuries of freedom. Political revolutions can happen once, but revolutions of liberty must take place again and again to secure the precious commodity that is so easily swallowed up by the power of government.
JUST LIKE GEORGE
During his visit to South Africa, Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington.
George Washington, unlike Nelson Mandela, was not a member of the Communist Party. Martha Washington had not been involved in murdering a 14-year-old boy or in urging the colonists to burn men, women and children alive by placing rubber tires around them, pouring gasoline on them and setting them on fire.
The American Revolution did not unleash a state of permanent lawlessness in which the quality of life declined drastically for everyone in the country and people went to sleep every night expecting to be murdered in their beds.
If both Washington and Mandela are to be considered the fathers of their respective countries, Washington’s children are figuring out how to go into space while Mandela’s children are raping children because they believe it will magically give them immunity to contracting AIDS.
REPORTING FOR DUTY
Being Secretary of State is nice work if you can get it. Here Secretary of State John Kerry is reporting for duty aboard his warship, the USS Isabel. While the Isabel will probably shortly sail on a secret Christmas Day mission to Cambodia while dodging RPGs and members of the Kennedy family, for the moment it is moored in Nantucket while the Middle East burns.
3 AM phone call? Please. That’s for people who work for a living.
Kerry Waits Out Egypt Crisis on Private Yacht
MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD PRESIDENT DOWN
Obama and his minions swore up and down that they couldn’t possibly stop supplying Morsi with weapons. Now suddenly Obama is concerned about (gasp) American Law, a subject that he usually cares less about than the price of tea in China, and the implications of supplying aid to a non-democracy.
Perhaps he should take that question up with the Islamist FSA brigades in Syria whom he’s supplying with weapons. I don’t recall them holding any elections.
Obama Warns Against Arrests of Morsi and Brotherhood Members
AN ALLAH AKBAR, A HAIL SATAN AND A PRESSURE COOKER
Canadian Al Qaeda terrorist wannabe John Nuttall used to record bad music. One of his songs was titled “In The End”, another was “End of the World” and a third was “In League with Satan”.
Then he moved up to the big leagues by converting to Islam and trying to kill people with a pressure cooker bomb. Apparently Islam has become the logical next stage after Satanism. First you wear a black leather jacket with pentagrams and talk about how the world has to end. And then you get serious and convert to Islam to try and make it happen.
New Pressure Cooker Bomber Went from “In League with Satan” to Muslim Convert
SOCIAL MEDIA KILLS
State Department officials spent $630,000 to get more Facebook “likes,” prompting employees to complain to a government watchdog that the bureau was “buying fans” in social media, the agency’s inspector general says.
I wonder how much security that $630,000 would have bought for the Benghazi mission. But Hillary knew where the money really needed to go. Buying Facebook fans.
No Money for Benghazi Security, But State Department Spent $630,000 on Facebook Likes
HIGH HOPES
We have to pass amnesty right now to fill the country with unskilled poor Mexicans who are the Latino demographic least likely under any conceivable set of circumstances to vote Republican.
And even after becoming the champion of amnesty, Marco Rubio would still decisively lose the Latino vote to Joe Biden. What do you call that? De Facto Destructiveness?
Rubio Would Lose Latino Vote to Biden 60 to 28
SHAME OF GITMO
Americans are supposed to have sympathy for the accused terrorist detainees now on hunger strike to protest supposedly cruel conditions at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“I don’t want these individuals to die,” President Obama recently lamented, adding he intends to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to US prisons.
But just a few years ago, detainees got so plump from overeating hummus and other dishes from the camp’s Islamically correct menu that commanders specially ordered treadmills to help them lose weight.
Then they ordered them again — because they weren’t made by Muslims.
Gitmo Terrorists Got Fat, Got Gym Equipment, Got Equipment Replaced Because It Was Made by Non-Muslims
CONTINENTALLY STUPID
All illegal immigrants in Britain should be granted an amnesty to stay in the country, a Tory MP has said.
Nadhim Zahawi, MP for Stratford-Upon-Avon, argued that the move makes sense economically and that a ‘seismic’ shift in policy is needed for the Conservatives to attract votes among minority groups.
Amnesty Fever in UK, Muslim MP Says It’s Only Way to Win Minority Votes
FEEL THE EXCITEMENT
During a deposition, Mustapha claimed the video, showing a child holding a machine gun on stage as Mustapha and others sing, “O Hamas, raise the banner of Jihad … through it or through martyrdom,” was not an endorsement of the terrorist group, but actually meant something quite benign.
When the singers name Hamas, he said, they were “referring to the Palestinian people, that Hamas means ‘excitement’ in Arabic and the use of the word ‘jihad’ in the song related to the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom and equality.”
Imam Caught Supporting Hamas, Claims “Hamas” Just Means “Excitement” in Arabic
INFANTICIDE IN BEFORE IMMORTALITY
“That’s why we have to get started now. Waiting just compounds the problem. World population increases by 220,000 every day, after accounting for the 155,000 who die. It’s truly a hydra-headed problem, because for every person that is cut down by death, more than two are born.”
“Within the next several decades we’ll figure out how to solve the related problems of ageing and dying.”
Dem Candidate for Governor Envisions Wonderful World of Immortal Beings and Birth Credits
THE ROUNDUP
Victor Davis Hanson has been saying a lot of blunt things about illegal immigration that aren’t supposed to be said in conservative circles. More conservations like these might even make the GOP relevant in some area other than Federal bankruptcy pie charts.
UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.
The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates.
And then he extends that to illegal immigration…
The state, not the employer, picks up the cost of subsidies to ensure that impoverished illegal-immigrant workers from Oaxaca have some semblance of parity with American citizens in health care, education, legal representation, and housing. The employers’ own privilege exempts them from worrying whether they would ever need to enroll their kids in the Arvin school system, or whether an illegal-alien driver will hit their daughter’s car on a rural road and leave the scene of the accident. In other words, no one in Atherton is in a trailer house cooking meth; the plastic harnesses of missing copper wire from streetlights are not strewn over the sidewalks in Palo Alto; and the Menlo schools do not have a Bulldog-gang problem.
Meanwhile, ethnic elites privately understand that the melting pot ensures eventual parity with the majority and thereby destroys the benefits of hyphenation. So it becomes essential that there remain always hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated, and less-privileged immigrants entering the U.S. from Latin America. Only that way is the third-generation Latino professor, journalist, or politician seen as a leader of group rather than as an individual. Take away illegal immigration, and the Latino caucus and Chicano graduation ceremony disappear, and the beneficiaries become just ordinary politicians and academics, distinguished or ignored on the basis of their own individual performance.
That’s almost as powerful as his previous article…
The divide over immigration reform is not primarily a Left/Right or Democratic/Republican divide; instead, it cuts, and sharply so, across class lines…
The elites favor de facto amnesty for a variety of self-interested reasons. For the corporate echelon, creating a guest-worker program and granting amnesty — without worrying about securing the border first — ensures continued access to millions of cheap laborers from Latin America. The United States may be suffering the most persistent unemployment since the Great Depression. There may be an unemployment rate of over 15 percent in many small towns in the American Southwest. American businesses may be flush with record amounts of cash, and farm prices may be at record levels. But we are still lectured that without cheap labor from south of the border, businesses simply cannot profit…
Many employers appreciate the myriad advantages of hiring illegal immigrants. Although supporters of amnesty are bold in leveling charges of illiberality against their critics, the unspoken truth is that insistence on access to cheap labor is about as reactionary and unethical as one can imagine. Off the record, employers will admit they are reluctant to hire jobless African-American youths, although the black community is suffering historic levels of unemployment. They are not even eager to hire second-generation Hispanics, who, according to the employers’ creed, have lost the firsthand memory of crushing Mexican poverty and thus their parents’ desperate work ethic…
Arms and backs that were near superhuman at 25 are often shot at 50. When the 45-year-old illegal alien can no longer pick, or cook, or rake as he once did, the employer loses interest, and the state steps in to provide him with rough parity through subsidies for housing, health care, food, and legal assistance, and meanwhile it has been educating his children. Because second-generation immigrants are deemed less industrious than their worn-out fathers and mothers — and Hispanic males in California graduate from high school at little more than a 60 percent rate — the need arises for another round of young hardy workers from Latin America.
Is this an American Dream or an American Nightmare?
NICE PEOPLE DO
The things we needed to do to be “nice people” were all, we were assured, such small things. They were all such minor adjustments. To your speech. To your thought. To your soul. We would, in trade, have a lot of freedom for sex and a lot of good feelings about always doing the “right thing.” We would also be fed, and housed, and healed until it was the right thing to do to starve us and kill us “for the greater good.” And with a final free hit of morphine off we’d go, smiling, with the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” playing through our earbuds. After all, all “nice people” do, so why wouldn’t you?
from American Digest, which is now 10 years old.
NICE PEOPLE NEED SAVIORS
Nelson Mandela is a life-long Communist. He even cobbled together a little book called “How To Be A Good Communist”. He co-founded and directed a terrorist organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). He never stopped admiring tyrannies and red dictatorships.
The Mahatma Gandhi was a rather cruel man. He deliberately kept the fifty or so poor Indian workers who labored on his South African farm – which he called “Tolstoy Farm” – on starvation rations, in pursuit of a theory that the body could learn to survive on virtually no food. He also paid them no wages, so it would not be wrong to call them slaves. He abandoned the wife and child he acquired during his years in South Africa, left them with no means of subsistence when he returned to India. In 1946 he commented on the Holocaust, “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife.”
from Jillian Becker’s essay at The Atheist Conservative
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