Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The days when national leaders responded to a crisis with courage, fortitude and action are long behind us. Today when a crisis occurs leaders look to do two things 1. Shift the Responsibility - Shift the responsibility and the blame 2. Let's Make a Deal - Play let's make a deal with whoever they think can make the crisis go away To wit behold French President Sarkozy in Israel's Knesset playing an upscale version of Shift the Responsibility and Let's Make a Deal. If Israel forcibly ethnically cleanses Jews from X amount of land and divides its capital with the terrorists, surely there will be peace, Sarkozy proclaims. As part of his "I'll give you nukes if you join my imaginary Mediterranean alliance" to the Middle East tour, Sarkozy has managed to repackage the same old politics of 'Let's Make a Deal' combined with 'Shift the Responsibility' so someone else pays the price (in this case Israel and French taxpayers) with some dusted off...

Jihad. We write it in capital letters. We argue over its definition. We place it on the same grandiose level as its perpetrators do. But Jihad is a very simple thing. It is the religious sanctification of the most cowardly and brutal crimes imaginable, from robbery to rape to murder to mutilation to massacre. Without Jihad a murderer is a murderer. With Jihad every murderer becomes a hero. As much as it rests on the occasional fanatic, Jihad rests on the criminal. It might be the fanatics who blow themselves up, but it is the criminals who create the drug, smuggling and car theft networks that finance the Jihad. It is the criminals who kidnap and behead hostages ranging from aid workers to the children of tribal leaders they want to blackmail. It is the criminals who create Jihad states to bleed dry. It is in Iraq that the Jihad has shown its truest face, as Al Queda recruiting primarily from criminal classes unleashed a wave of brutality and death that alienated even its former Sunni ...

One of the few good things about the Bush Administration's Supreme Court appointments was that they were supposed to herald an end to the activist judiciary. The activist judiciary is a fundamentally unconstitutional and undemocratic institution, as lifetime appointed officials creating their own laws is something out of medieval Europe and has no place in a Democratic America. Nevertheless that's exactly what we have and if for a while Justice Roberts seemed to have a moderating influence on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy seems to have gone power mad lately and we now seem set for a bunch of increasingly activist decisions. Case in point the latest SCOTUS ruling striking down a Louisiana law that allows the execution of people convicted of a raping a child. Now that law might arguably go too far, that is something for the voters, the legislature and the courts of Louisiana to decide. Striking it down as cruel and unusual punishment is extremely dubious to say the least. Th...

A nation can't exist for long cannot exist without both a national identity and a national structure. The latter has to come from the political and practical institutions of the state. The former has to come from a shared value and belief system. A state without a shared positive value system is on the way to extinction, as first world nations can amply demonstrate for us. A value system without a state leaves only victims and exiles. The collapse of the first world nations is occurring precisely because those value systems are being ruthlessly torn down, leaving hollowed out states that have the structure of a nation but no defense again attack or ability to rally morale. Like mannequins they have the appearance of states, but not the content. This is occurring across America, Europe and Israel. Without that larger value system birth rates fall, patriotism is deserted by idealists and really does become the last refuge of the thug and the scoundrel, extremist camps are everywhere ...

(Due to another unavoidable absence by Sultan Knish, in place of a post we present another issue of Ask Imam Abdul Moderate , the column by Imam Abdul Moderate that serves as a guide for moderate Muslims all around the world. All 4 of them.) Asalaam Aleikum Brothers and Sisters of the Ummah and Assorted Unclean Infidels While the Zionist media and their whores at CNN, the motherless sons of impotent donkeys at MSNBC and the castrated infidel demons of the BBC continue to misrepresent Muslims as bigoted fanatical madmen filled with hate for everyone-- we Muslims must strive to set an example of moderation to the sons of pigs and monkeys who torment us with the vileness of their unclothed women and ham sandwiches even as they plot genocide against the Ummah. I will now reply to your questions. Dear Imam Abdul Moderate, As a resident of the godless abomination of the United States of Infidels, I was planning to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, but I am torn between my desire to vote for Oba...

Justice for the oppressed, is at the heart of liberal, progressive and socialist morality. And while it is a noble enough cause, it has become the solo cause of liberalism, the one fundamental pillar to which all others must bow. In the process the definitions of both "justice" and "the oppressed" have undergone various changes bringing us to this point. The oppressed were first defined as those deprived of their rights, initially defined as the underclass. This gave the upper middle class intellectuals and lower ranked European nobility a noble seeming goal, to uplift the impoverished, while also giving them muscle in the form of lower class mobs that could do their dirty work. The bloody results of this combination were all too clear during the French Revolution as the liberal upper class wrangled and debated and signed execution orders, while the mobs could be counted on to cry for more heads. Quieter versions of those same battles were being waged in the United ...

Can you hear the echo ? Iran has nothing to gain by war... No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran. Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted. That echo is the sound of appeasement at the heart of Buchanan's rhetoric, 1939-2008. Pat Buchanan has spent a lot of his career dancing around the Nazi question, from throwing in his lot with Holocaust deniers , defending Nazi War Criminals and badgering Reagan to lay a wreath at an SS memorial . Lately though Pat Buchanan has stopped dancing and begun to seriously lay down a revisionist history that seeks to blame Nazi crimes on England and America as an anti-war argument against the United States taking military action against the Hitlers of today and tomorrow. Buchanan opened the hellga...

When the Allies finally beat down Germany's defenses after a long bloody war and marched through a realm of death, the confrontation was rather anticlimactic as it turned out that only "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" had been responsible for the whole thing. And somehow that "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" had unleashed a global war on the world, in which none of the German participants besides a small handful of high ranking Nazi party members were accountable. The same farce repeated itself in Japan as once again "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" was responsible for the whole thing. On both sides of the world, war criminal after war criminal was freed and not held accountable. The populations which had supported and conducted the conquest and mass extermination of entire populations in the name of their master race ideologies were treated as equally the victims. That same farce today plays itself out with Islam which too has supposedly been hijacked by...

Do you know how powerful AIPAC is? It's so powerful that the Bush Administration is currently telling Jews in Israel that they can't live in parts of Jerusalem and Samaria, because they really belong to the Marxist Fatah terrorist group that the US has lavished billions on and whose leader, President Bush has praised effusively, despite Fatah's role in the murder of both Israelis and Americans. No other country in the world gets this treatment from America. Condoleezza Rice hasn't traveled to Turkey 22 times to tell it to get out of Cyprus. In 2003 Turkey received a 1 billion dollar economic assistance package. In response Turkey blocked the US entry into Iraq crippling the war effort and is doing its part to destabilize Iraq with occasional invasions and bombings. That's because Turkey was holding out for 32 billion . Washington had been prepared to go only as high as 26 billion. In 1992-93, the US turned over over 1500 tanks and over 50 fighter planes to ...