Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

When does defeat actually happen? It's not the signing of a document aboard a battleship or in a train car. It's not even even the actual bloody rout. It's when you come to believe that you can't win. Before submission comes defeat and before defeat comes hopelessness. The three words that are the X mark for defeat are, "We can't win." They're little words but every leader of virtually every country fighting against terrorism today has said them, from Bush to Olmert to Brown to Arroyo. They've said it in different ways, whether it's "We can't fight 1.5 billion Muslims" to "We are tired of fighting", but they all project the same message. "We can't win." The most basic psychology of warfare is to make your enemy believe that he can't win. They did it with horns and costumes. We do it with Shock and Awe. And it's done to us with suicide bombings and demographic expansion and economic warfare. The end ...

Everyone knows that Obama can't win on his merits. Bluntly put, he has none. He isn't running on the issues, since he's demonstrated that he'll switch positions at the drop of a hat. What he's running on is a cult of personality, his own charisma and celebrity. Imagine JFK with no platform but a youthful smile and some vaguely optimistic rhetoric and that is the Obama platform in a nutshell. Beyond the cult of personality, his real power comes from being treated as the inevitable winner. As far as the press is concerned, Obama is the incumbent, the election is nothing more than a formality and these next few months are a celebration of his victory. Too many people, even those who hate Obama, see his victory as inevitable. That's not because of the poll numbers, but the perception created by the media with its constant coverage of the Messiah from Chicago and its determination to create the perception that you can't fight the future and that the election is ...

Since the US is, for many reasons, committed to an alliance with Israel, our options in the Middle East are limited. Note I make no comment on the Israel Alliance: it is as much a fact as the daily sunrise, and it is not going to change without tearing the nation apart. But it limits our options as to allies. Given the reality of the US-Israel alliance, our choices of other allies in the Middle East were in effect confined to: The Shah of Iran (but not the mullahs); Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party; and the Kemalist Secularists in Turkey (but not necessarily the people of Turkey). Via an article linked to at LGF It is of course easier to take refuge in blaming Israel than in dealing with reality. But I have to ask Mr. Pournelle, how exactly has Israel limited America's options for alliances in the middle east? Today the United States has extensive ties to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, not to mention Pakistan. Egypt and Jordan receiv...

Gandhi's tactic of non-violence is often foolishly credited with the peaceful liberation of India. This claim would be more impressive if the British Empire hadn't expired but was still around with a large retinue of colonies, instead of having disposed of its colonies, many around the same time as India. And considering the bloodshed of Partition, despite Gandhi's best attempts at appeasing Muslims it was hardly peaceful. Yet despite the hypocrisies that have dotted Gandhi's life, his ideas continue to have a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Few would seriously argue that had Gandhi been facing Imperial Japan (whose brutal conquest of Asia he briefly supported) or Nazi Germany or even the British Empire of the 19th century, that non-violence would have been nothing more than an invitation to a bullet. Yet that is exactly what first world nations are expected to do when confronted with terrorism. Not long after 9/11 slogans were already appearing on posters cha...

A car bomb goes off in Iraq. Another bomb explodes in Afghanistan. In Beirut the terrorists cheer as one of their own is ransomed to them in exchange for dead bodies. In any fight, whether it's one man or a nation's army, there must be a clear and direct focus on the task at hand. To fight, to dodge, to ultimately win. To complete any task requires focusing on the goal. The clearer and simpler your goal is, the easier your path to accomplishing it becomes. The more complex and diffuse your goals are, the more difficult it becomes not to accomplish them, but to go through your day. Clarity is focus. Diffusing that clarity means diffusing your ability to accomplish even the simplest things. Wars fought by democracies are often a tricky business precisely because they suffer from diffuse goals. If your goal is to win a war while avoiding damage to civilians who are virtually indistinguishable from the enemy while keeping peace, protecting infrastructure and making sure that absolu...

Well this has been a very artificially messianic week as Barack Obama, running for messianic savior of the world, made his ignoble tour, going from his hostile reception at the Western Wall where he was jeered with cries of "Jerusalem is not for Sale", despite his secret 3 AM visit intended to avoid protesters, to a speech given at Hitler's old Victory Memorial to a crowd drawn by free beer, sausages and a concert. Forget about Bread and Circuses, Obama offers the German people Sausages and Beer, skipping on a visit to the wounded American troops he claims to care so much about that it motivates him to run away from Iraq. Can the Democratic party afford a beer and sausage for every American? With Obama's massive war chest I'm sure he could, but Obama isn't coming to power to give anything away, except America itself. Via IsraelMatzav , Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post and David Horrovitz's interview with Obama paint one picture while Andrew Klavan pa...

First up are two videos of Obama's disastrous Western Wall visit as Obama's attempt to use the holiest site in Judaism as an election photo op fell through as members of the crowd shouted at him, "Jerusalem is not for Sale." As Obama's security led him away, they attempted to drown out the protesters by chanting, "Obama, Obama." Naturally this has gone virtually unreported in the American media, but has been briefly mentioned in a few British outlets. Seemingly unaware or gloating, Obama grins on a visit to Sderot while holding up a T-shirt that shows the heart of Sderot pierced by a Kassam rocket, referring to the large scale rocket bombardment of the town. A reaction not shared by anyone else in the photo. Obama did the usual Yad Vashem tour and then described the place commemorating the murder of six million Jews as "A place of hope." Maybe for him Jewish genocide is a hopeful phenomenon. It was probably either that or describi...

In the ongoing pathetic charade that is the pretense that there's Israeli support for Obama, we have the "Israel for Obama" group, whose "official head" Jan Samson Altman-Schevitz was quoted as saying that Obama would offer "tough love" for Israel instead of a free hand. This quote was widely reproduced by the press and then radically censored , as I've documented. (Altman-Schevitz is incidentally German born and raised, before moving to Israel.) Though often quoted as the head of "Israel for Obama", on the Obama site Israel for Obama is a rather dubious Messianic Black Hebrew group whose leader Yeshaya Amariel is busy passing himself off as an American Jew who supports Obama, while waiting for the apocalypse and one of whose members may have been involved in violent attacks on Jews in Arad. "Israelis for Obama", which is the group getting the press, is really headed by Tony Jassen. Tony Jassen may have created "Israelis f...

This is the quote that appeared in numerous articles sourced from the original AP story about Obama's trip to Israel by the head of an organization calling itself "Israel for Obama". ``In general, I think tough love is better than a free hand,'' said Samson Altman-Schevitz, head of the Israel for Obama campaign. He moved to Israel two years ago from Chicago, where Obama's wife, Michelle, was his adviser at the University of Chicago. This quote originally appeared in the AP story at outlets such as USA Today and the Miami Herald, as can be seen via a Google search . However it now only appears at the Guardian and various blogs. Instead the outlets have run a greatly foreshortened version of the piece that censors all such negative references to Obama pressuring Israel. Other outlets have more neatly sliced out only the "Tough Love" section from the story as can be seen at the Gulf Live. Here is the original AP story that Gulf Live originally ran as ...

Hello, my name is David Shipley. As Op-Ed page editor of the New York Times I would like to take this opportunity to talk to you, the American reading public. As journalists we take very seriously our obligation to present a diverse group of voices on our op-ed page from Hamas terrorists to Anti-war activists to 9/11 Truthers to Holocaust deniers to Osama Bin Laden. While we may occasionally face criticism for the editorials we choose to present in our forum, we continue to believe that the best hope for understanding one another lies in communication. In the spirit of that openness, we would like to explain why we refused to run an editorial written by Senator John McCain. While we did endorse Senator McCain during the Republican primary because of his faith in global warming and illegal immigration, his continuing support for the War in Iraq makes it unconscionable for us to provide a forum for his hateful views. As the voice of the American people, if they would just shut up and...

In Jerusalem another Arab terrorist went on a bulldozer rampage wounding 25 people and crushing cars and overturning a bus. The terrorist is part of the Abu Tir clan and related to a top Hamas figure. The man who took him down before he managed to kill anyone was once again a settler. Yaki Asael, 58, farmer, resident of Susia, father of 8, Tank Reserve, former company commander, Veteran of several wars, owns a vineyard, teaches Torah at Yeshiva Kiryat Arba. The media and the authorities will once again try to ignore who really took down the terrorist and attempt to give credit to the border policeman, just as they did each time. But as in the previous bulldozer attack where an off-duty soldier who had been arrested for protesting Disengagement took down the terrorist, it was a "politically incorrect" and a wholly Zionist figure who in his life embodies the Jewish and Israel ideal, right down to the vineyard. Asael represents the embodiment of everything that the far lef...

After the Obama campaign issued a dress code for female reporters ordering them not to wear jewelery, nail polish, open toed shoes and a warning to have a scarf on hand to cover their heads with in a makeshift Hijab, Nancy Pelosi style on his MessiahTour 2008 of the Middle East, you can't help but wonder why Americans are once again called on to "respect" Muslim sensibilities with a dress code in their country, while no such equivalent "respect" is reciprocated in our country. If Americans are to be expected to dress like Muslims in Muslim countries, then the reverse should be true, Muslims should be expected to dress like Americans in the United States. But of course the reverse isn't true which really means that we accept Muslim standards as superior both at home and abroad. It's no surprise that Barack Hussein Obama would have female reporters trot out the makeshift Hijab. I'm sure we'll get to the point when Obama Girl is wearing one too. Bu...

Can you name the country where the government controlled media repeatedly spreads antisemitic invective and cites The Protocols of the Elder of Zion? A country where a third of the Jewish population has emigrated and the exodus continues? A country whose governments carries out raids against Synagogues for "subversive activity" and whose advisers accuse Jews of plotting to take over the country? Finally a country whose government or rather dictatorship is widely supported by liberals in the United States and Europe. No it's not located in the Middle East, but in South America. The country of course is Venezuela and like the antisemitic agenda of their fellow Marxist Sandinistas, Hugo Chavez's " Jewish Problem" demonstrates that leftist antisemitism has very little to do with the existence of Israel or any so-called oppression of the Palestinian Arabs. The Marxist and leftist hatred for Jews long predates the modern State of Israel. In fact it goes back to M...

That is a serious question being raised today by the Clash of Civilizations between a secularized West and a fanatically religious Middle East. While the Western nations are far from atheistic, they have secularized and liberalized their beliefs. Moreover they have replaced those beliefs with a worship of tolerance and diversity for its own sake. Religion is far from any certain immunity in war. Indeed in technological armed conflict, the sort of destructive fanaticism displayed by Muslims tends to be self-destructive. But while America, Europe and Israel can easily defeat the enemy on the battlefield, in the clash of civilizations themselves they continue to recede backward while the Islamic enemy advances. They key missing element is righteousness. Not merely morality for morality can exist apart from religion. But a sense of righteousness is what enables a nation to maintain itself in the face of enemies who fervently believe in their own rightness. The problem is not that the West ...