Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The two streams in American politics are not liberal vs conservative, they can be roughly defined as "Leave Me Alone" vs "Make It Better". Leave Me Alone seeks personal independence, self-reliance and freedom from interference. Make It Better believes in the progressive betterment of society through regulation, intervention and education. Most people associate the "Leave Me Alones" with conservatism and the "Make It Betters" with liberalism. That's partly true, but not entirely. The hijacking of liberalism and the Democratic party by the radical left has them into the standard bearers of a ruthless "Make It Better" agenda. But "Make It Better" is found often on the right as well. The loss of the cultural war to the left has pushed conservatives into a defensive position. And the ascension of the left has moved it into a state of permanent aggression. "Leave Me Alone" is defensive. It creates boundaries and asks t...

Reports say that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez may be seriously ill. In Dictatorspeak, seriously ill means seriously dead. And seriously dead, means there's a revolution coming up shortly. But whether Hugo Chavez is dead, sick or just vacationing in Cuba for his health-- there's no reason for him to feel down. Even if Hugo Chavez is dead, his brother Adan Chavez has vowed to use force to stay in power. And that is the true socialist way. If you can't win an election or keep your strongman seated upright on his throne without stuffing him full of hay, then bring out the army and show the rabble who's really in charge. Nothing proves you're a man of the people like ruling through armed force. And with so many brothers already in power, the Chavez clan can look forward to a long career of wealth redistribution. With his father and brother running one state , another brother running a town, and more scattered around cabinets , banks and other high offices, th...

The absurdity of the postmodern left is that it is a chimera crossbred of contradictions mixing together technocracy and environmentalism. Hunting through the trash for discarded food and triumphantly blogging about it on a 500 dollar device. Big government projects and making your own shoes. Stand up to the man and tell him to appoint more bureaucrats. Read Dawkins and then blog about visiting a Middle Eastern mosque. Reject materialism in the latest carefully branded 200 dollar shoes made from recycled rubber tires.   If the old left at least had something resembling rational project, the postmodern left has its broken vestiges, dressed up in directionless rage, superstition, anti-materialism and primitivism. The end result of this progressive reactionarism isn't just ugly, it's unsustainable. The contradictions between the left's big government ambitions and its destruction of everything that makes it work dooms the whole project to a meltdown. The Soviet Union was ru...

The good news is that victory is all but assured in Libya. Just don't ask for whom, or how or why. Or any other questions for that matter. Ten years ago, liberals howled in outrage when President Bush said, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." They wanted a third option like remaining neutral. Or a fourth option of being with the terrorists, while still having the patriotic credibility of condemning any action against Muslim terrorists as "Un-American". Now Hillary Clinton replied to Republican congressional critics with, "The bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them?" As rousing retorts go, this sounds like it was processed through the sausage factory of bureaucracy and ended up as the conclusion to a thesis. But then it's hard to make, "You're either with th...

What's your mental image of prison. Breaking rocks, risky showers and listening to trains go by where rich folks are eating from a fancy dining car? Forget all that. If you're a Muslim terrorist in Israeli prison, life is smartphones, salaries paid for by American taxpayers and access to your own Facebook fan page. That was the Facebook fan page of Omar Saeed until recent media attention got it taken down. Those are photos he took in prison with his 3G phone and uploaded to his own fanpage, along with poetry about destroying Israel. And there's more in my exclusive Front Page Magazine article, The Hard Life of Muslim Terrorists in Israeli Prison Hamas terrorist Haytham Battat, who was responsible for the murder of four Israelis, uses his Facebook page to share Jihadi videos from YouTube. PFLP terrorist Saeed Omar, who was sentenced to nineteen years in jail, poses with his favorite soccer team’s banner... Using a 3G smartphone, Omar is able to update his own Fac...

Yesterday I walked across half the width of the city. To walk across New York City is to see a study in contrasts. The ambitious skyscrapers of the real estate bubble and the declining working class neighborhoods being eaten away at by Halal markets and mosques. It is also to witness the prolonged death of the progressive vision for the city. New York is not a large city in space. It is walkable if you have the time and the energy. Its largeness is vertical. The buildings push upward around concentrated real estate bubbles. A dozen blocks in a hot zone can be completely torn down and rebuilt into an unrecognizable mini-metropolis in only a few years. While a dozen adjacent blocks remain stagnant and unchanged since the 50's. Much of this has to do with zoning regulations. Some of it with the ridiculous trends of 90's gentrification. But seen from above it is undeniably strange. Walk across one of the bridges between Manhattan and Brooklyn, dodging bike riders with messeng...

The celebration of the Arab Spring is built on faith in the redemptive ability of enhanced communications technologies to create a transparent global culture. To the true believers on the New York Times editorial page, it is axiomatic that cultural revolutions driven by communications technologies will be liberal. That anything which breaks down barriers must be liberal. Technocracy as foreign policy has become the standard reaction to turmoil and instability in the Muslim world. Whether it's Hillary Clinton talking about the need to have relationships with the populations of entire countries or Thomas Friedman sketching out yet another vision of a New Middle East, the misplaced enthusiasm is everywhere. At the heart of it all is the idea that social media is leading to the dawn of a new age. This Twitter-centric narrative assumes that social media is ushering in a new age of progressive people power. But that's hardly the case. The successful revolutions of the Arab Spri...

Imagine a European Union member nation which represses an ethnic minority that makes up a fifth of its population. Now imagine the EU being forced to take sides in a domestic civil war within its own union in which ethnic cleansing is the order of the day. That is the fate awaiting the EU if it admits Turkey as it is. Turkish intolerance of ethnic minorities resulted in the Armenian genocide. And in the ongoing repression of its Kurdish population. Turkish prisons are full of Kurdish political prisoners, some who have done nothing more than use the Kurdish language in the wrong place or sing a Kurdish song. Kurds have fought back against Turkish state repression with a political and militant struggle. And despite what Turkish authorities are telling their European counterparts, that struggle is not over. The same elections that gave the Erdogan regime another term, also racked up political victory for Turkey's Kurds. Meanwhile chaos in Iraq and Syria may be setting the stage ...