Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Humans are at their very basic nature, capitalists. We buy and we sell, and when we do that we try to sell at the highest price and buy at the lowest price. Underlying every economic system, from laissez faire capitalism to communism is the reality that the underlying human nature of the people within that system will not change,they will only adapt those same tactics to function within that system. Economic systems may come and go, but people do not change. When socialism is applied, it does not transform human nature, it is overlaid over human nature. When a socialist system attempts to artificially control the price of a commodity or access to a resource, a black market in that commodity or resource is created. With medical care it can take the form of Canada's illegal health care clinics at one end of the spectrum or the "bribe economy" that is common throughout Communist countries in which people are expected to bribe doctors, nurses and just about everyone within th

In the conventional political narrative the root causes of Islamic terrorism usually run the class warfare gamut from the generic oppression to outrage at Western foreign policy or more esoteric issues of globalism. And naturally like most people who look into a mirror to find the cause of someone else's anger, their reflection only repeats back to their own agenda. Surprisingly enough the root cause of Islamic terrorism has very little to do with any of these things, though they are moderately handy talking points when it comes to recruiting future terrorists or touching base with idiot leftist reporters. To understand the root cause, requires understanding the function which terrorism serves in the Arab-Muslim world. While Western liberals insist on viewing terrorism as a form of political or social activism, within the Muslim world terrorism is a two-sided tool, a way to create friction with an enemy without going to war while promoting the political standing of its leaders

Tolerance is the talk of the West today. You can hardly go a minute without hearing a government congratulate itself on its "tradition of tolerance" or without hearing an agency lecturing others on the importance of tolerance. In the late 20th century and early 21st centuries, tolerance has eclipsed every other moral and social virtue. A child of the first world is far more likely to be taught tolerance, than the value of manners, decency, charity or chastity. And to grow up with very little moral values, except the firm belief that intolerance is a terrible thing. Yet what is tolerance all about and what's wrong with tolerance? For one thing, tolerance is not equality. It is condescension. George Washington understood that over 200 years when he wrote in his "Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport" that, " All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indul

I usually don't do Friday morning posts, today was one of those exceptions occasioned by the death of Ted Kennedy. As a result this roundup will be shorter than usual. But I'm not the only one remembering Mary Jo Kopechne today. The Atlantic has a short piece titled, The View From Chappaquiddick ; Next to the bridge, the flag was at half-staff outside the shack run by the Trustees of Reservations: I mentioned the oddness of the half-staff flag to one of the wizened volunteers at the bridge, and he said, "It's for Mary Jo, I guess." That seemed about right. What also seems about right is Marc Ambinder's analysis of Kennedy's path to redemption, which he calls a specifically Jewish kind of redemption, redemption through deeds. This is not to say that Kennedy was right about everything, not by a long shot, but that he spent the 40 years after the incident on Chappaquiddick trying to save his soul, and did so quite effectively. The two paragraphs are

When Senator Ted Kennedy was first diagnosed with a brain tumor, I wrote a piece titled, " No Tears for Ted ", now with the media awash in salty tears for the departed Ted Kennedy, I can only reaffirm what I wrote then, "Still, No Tears for Ted." Ted Kennedy was no great statesman. Like his brothers, he was the product of privilege and born to power. Unlike his brothers, he could not even be bothered to maintain the charade of the statesman. If JFK and RFK could pose for Dorian Gray portraits, flashing sunny smiles, delivering impressive sounding speeches and maintaining the appearances that covered up the underlying Kennedy corruption, Ted Kennedy didn't bother much.  Or need to. The Kennedy family were the closest thing America had to royalty, and like many of the younger brothers of kings, Ted Kennedy felt free to wallow in his disgusting appetites, to do his worst, confident that the memory of his martyred brothers would serve as a shield for his worst e

Throughout history there have been two fundamental human institutions. The first is "the family" in the form of the basic family unit as well as the extended family and the tribe. The second is "the state" in the form of any overarching institution that claims total authority and control over every aspect of the lives of those who live under it. The family and the state represent two incompatible structures. It is why the goal of such a state is almost always to disrupt and pervert the family unit. The Soviet Union taught children the virtues of informing on their parents, mandating that their loyalty must be to the state above their parents. Nazi Germany planned to replace the family with eugenics under the control of the great father figure of the Fuhrer. The modern left gained a great deal of its power from teaching children to sneer at and rebel against the values and beliefs of their parents. The clash between the family and the state is not that of a battl

There are two interconnected lies that reside at the heart of any American discussion about Israel. The first lie is that the road to peace in the Middle East lies through Israel. The second lie is that Israel controls American policy toward itself. Those lies are not the product of ignorance or misunderstanding, they are the product of an effective propaganda campaign by the unofficial suit and tie spokesmen of the Saudi lobby who dominate American policy in the Middle East. The goal of that campaign has been to make Israel seem like the axis on which the Middle East and America turn, in order to put Israel on the firing line. And it is a campaign that has been wickedly successful up until now.  Let's take a moment to examine those lies now. Within the Middle East, Israel is physically insignificant. At 8500 square miles, Israel could not just fit comfortably into Pennsylvania, it is 1/5th the size of Jordan, 1/8th the size of Syria and 1/12th the size of Egypt. Simply put, Is

Most people who have gone to the movies think they know General Patton's famous speech to the Third Army. They think they know it but they don't, because the speech was too harsh and obscene for the eponymous film and was censored so that it could receive a PG rating. But war, real war, is not rated PG. It has no rating at all. "When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea... My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksucke