Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Dear Dar Al Islam, I am privileged to be speaking to you today from Cairo's Al Azhar University, the world renowned center of Islamic scholarship. Once upon a time, Islamic science was the envy of the world over. Islamic scholars brought knowledge and faith to Europe and Asia. Informed by their centuries old faith, the greatest minds of Islam helped transform the world with their wisdom, their belief and their intellectual curiosity. All was well until my predecessor, responding to a random act of man caused disaster on September 11, began a relentless bombing campaign that devastated the peaceful peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. We will never know how much ancient wisdom lies buried in Usama Bin Laden's Tora Bora fortress of meditation and learning. Or how much knowledge was lost when US warplanes rained terror and death on the Baghdad offices of Saddam Hussein's Mukhbarat intelligence service. Worse than even this senseless destruction, were the lost possibilities t...

"He who sets the terms of the war sets the terms of the peace." While our focus is on the visible war against terrorists and guerrillas in which our armies are engaged in, this war is only the visible war, the tip of a great dark iceberg which reaches far beneath the surface. The visible war we are fighting is the war that the most radical Islamists are carrying forward, it is the war that occupies the bulk of our attention, it is the only war that our leaders officially recognize -- but it is also the war that sets the terms for the invisible war happening daily on our streets, in our schools, in government, university, civil service and throughout our lives. The visible war, the terrorist threat, the car bombings, the shootings, the riots, the stabbings are the threat under which free nations surrender themselves one piece at a time. The goal of the visible war is to make present and clear the threat. But it is the invisible war which extracts the concessions. The i...

Word that the Obama Administration may have used its power over Chrysler's restructuring process to shut down dealerships whose owners donated to Republican candidates, while leaving open dealerships that donated to Obama is spreading across conservative blogs. But while this kind of abuse of government power is shocking, it really shouldn't be. Government is an engine of wealth redistribution, and when it gains control of businesses, it redistributes wealth in a way that benefits its supporters. That is what government always does, no matter how it disguises it. That is why despite all the leftist wishful thinking in the world, centrally planned economies are corrupt, inept and inefficient. The free market operates based on profit motive. A store owner's goal is to sell products in order to earn a profit. If he provides discounts, he has to do it based on an economic incentive, for example selling at a lower cost per unit to a purchaser who buys large quantities. A...

If you believe the current regime of diplomats and pundits, peace is something that can be obtained for the right price. Where peace once meant the mutual cessation of war, peace has now become something that can now be bought and sold. Put the right amount on the table and peace can be yours, the pimps of peace cry on every corner. Behind them stand their gruesome wares, the terrorists and mass murderers who will have peace with you, perhaps for a night or two, if the right price is paid. The tricks may think that peace is a long term marriage, but they know it is only a one night stand. Hudna. Ceasefire. Time enough for them to rearm and kill again. We live now in the era of the prostitution of peace. Love doesn't enter into it. Brotherhood doesn't enter into it. We no longer have peace because we are both tired of war and wish an end to it. No, peace has become something that the brute, the thug and the monster offers to the civilized world in exchange for weapons, power a...

There are 5.3 million votes for Obama out there, the only problem is that they happen to belong to murderers, rapists, armed robbers and other convicts and ex-convicts. That golden box of 5+ million votes is being unlocked by Democrats in one of two ways. The first relies on changing state laws that prevent felon voting at the state level. Their greatest success has arguably been Florida, a crucial swing state with over a million ex-felons. When Governor Charlie Crist promised to let criminals vote during the election and then implemented it once in office, the impact on the 2008 Presidential election was quite sizable. With anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 new votes available, the Obama campaign ran a "You can Vote Too!" registration drive for ex-felons. And since Obama won Florida by barely 200,000 votes, the newly enfranchised murderers, rapists and pedophiles no doubt did their share to help put him in the White House. Iowa restored felon voting in 2005, and between 2004...

Last year the Riverdale Jewish Center made headlines by accommodating a female Muslim exchange student's need for a prayer space during school hours. As Rabbi Rosenblatt described it, “We’re just helping to welcome somebody’s child from overseas,” an announcement that was greeted by loud applause in his congregation. King Solomon said in Kohelet, "Cast your bread upon the waters and it will return to you after many days." It took only a few months for the "bread" to return with a Muslim plot to bomb the Riverdale Jewish Center. Since no good deed done for Muslims goes unpunished, while the Rabbi and congregants of the Riverdale Jewish Center were congratulating themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness, their eagerness to throw open the doors of their house of prayer to an enemy, their friendly neighborhood Muslims were plotting to kill and destroy. The murderous plot came out of a congregation, but a Muslim congregation radically different in its outl...

When early in the 20th century Germany faced a variety of complex economic, military and political problems, the Nazi propaganda organ, "Der Sturmer" boiled them down to a simple message, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck". In a flash, Germany's defeat in WW1, the worldwide economic depression and its political turmoil could all be blamed on the Jews. And of course if the Jews were gone, everything would be alright in Germany again. That same message has dominated the diplomatic and political rhetoric on the Middle East, with American and European diplomats, pundits and politicians claiming that the problems in the Middle East would be healed if only it wasn't for Israel. This latest echo of, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck" in regard to the Middle East blames the existence of Israel for the general instability, violence and terrorism in the Middle East. An accompanying illustration naturally features a Der Sturmer caricature of a Jewish "lobbyist...

This past week was dominated by Obama's attempt to take it easy on Islamic terrorists, clashing with the desire of Congressional Democrats to avoid being implicated as soft on terrorism. Obama has to know that he can't win over most Americans with a debate over Gitmo. Going soft on terrorism appeals to only a limited demographic, even within the Democratic party. Closing Gitmo is a major gamble. The way Obama sees it, he can hope that no terrorist attacks successfully take place in the United States between now and 2010-2012. Considering how much damage has been dealt to Al Queda, and Al Queda's interest in keeping Obama and his weak on terror policies in office, this might be a gamble he can pull off, and use amateurs like the Muslim Con Bronx Bombers to argue that the conventional criminal justice system approach works fine when it comes to terrorism. What that kind of argument really does is revert America to a 9/10 mentality, when the FBI managed to bust some terror...

This week has been dominated by Obama's attempt to take it easy on Islamic terrorists, clashing with the desire of Congressional Democrats to avoid being implicated as soft on terrorism. The Gitmo defeat was all the more shocking, because as far as the press was concerned Obama was never supposed to lose. Nor was anyone supposed to point out that he had no real plan and that his proposals were completely unfocused and lacking in elementary details. Naturally Obama's response was to deliver a high profile speech, long on the sort of vague rhetoric Hollywood has been featuring for a while now in movies and TV shows about terrorism, that amounts to a call for letting the same old criminal justice system handle it. Of course Obama has only two crisis modes A.) Give a speech that's full of high minded rhetoric and has no practical proposals to offer. B.) Go on an international trip. It's particularly embarrassing when former Vice President Cheney's numbers ar...

The patterns of a failed state are all too familiar from the Soviet Union, and every "Democratic People's Republic" from Cuba to North Korea . The government controls everything and the people control nothing. The largest employer is the government and its vast bureaucracy, while free enterprise is criminalized. The government constantly announces new initiatives, plans and policies, which do nothing but breed more poverty and misery. An ever watchful government is constantly obsessed with domestic unrest, certain that if they can suppress opposition views, no one will notice how badly everyone but the government officials and the criminals live. And now it's all coming to America. Want to buy a pickup truck? Pretty soon you might not be able to. You will however be able to buy lightweight cars jointly owned by the government and the worker's union that will peel open if you sneeze on them. (If nothing else, Obama will be remembered for turning the American ...

Israel knows it needs to coordinate its strategy on Iran with other nations and that attacking Teheran's nuclear facilities would mean "big trouble," CIA director Leon Panetta said on Wednesday. "Yes," he said, "the Israelis are obviously concerned about Iran and focused on it. But [Netanyahu] understands that if Israel goes it alone, it will mean big trouble. He knows that for the sake of Israeli security, they have to work together with others." Jerusalem Post Yes, Big trouble indeed. Bigger trouble than a nuclear device exploding over Israel at the cost of millions of lives. But much the same message has been delivered by both Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates. When Netanyahu came to Washington to talk Iran, he got repeated demands that Netanyahu instead implement the ethnic cleansing of Jewish towns, in what the U.N. considers occupied territory. With Hillary Clinton explicitly forbidding "Natural Growth", which refers to children g...

The press and the Democratic Party may be busy singing the funeral march for the GOP, but it's their own fate that should be concerning them instead. With only 1 in 3 Nevada voters prepared to support Democratic Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid for reelection in 2010, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught lying and feuding with the CIA, the Democratic party doesn't look to be in very good shape. And that isn't surprising because the Democratic party has invested everything in Obama, and now stands or falls with Obama. But despite the constant media barrage of pro-Obama propaganda, the general public finds Obama likable, but not very competent. The good news is it thought the same thing about Bush. The bad thing is that Obama has earned that rep in only a few months. While Obama isn't up for reelection in 2010, his omnipresent media image has blanked out the rest of the party. And that is going to be painful for them in 2010. To hold on to his credibility, the Dem...

Everyone, and by "everyone" I mean the denizens of Washington D.C.'s and Brussel's government buildings, agrees that we need a Palestinian state. Chiming in with their "Yes" votes are the dictators of a dozen Arab states who agree that the only thing that will fix the region is adding another Arab dictatorship to the place, and subtracting the region's one democracy. But who actually needs a Palestinian state? Or rather a second Palestinian state. The first Palestinian state, commonly called Jordan, was carved out of the Palestine Mandate and equipped with a refugee Saudi royal family. Today Jordan exists mainly under the protection of the US and Israel, and its population of Palestinian Arabs is a seething mass of Muslim extremists currently enjoying a 30 percent unemployment rate, where the majority of the population supports Osama Bin Laden, at a higher percentage rate than even Pakistan. But Jordan is practically heaven on earth compared to the Secon...