Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate. The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia's elections, Turkey's Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya's future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces. Time Magazine declared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester, they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to

IOWA ROLL Santorum is finally getting a look from Republican voters, if only a partial one, and it took long considering that he's far more consistently conservative in his positions. Is he electable, that's another issue. Romney still has a fairly open path to the nomination only because the Anti-Romney vote has not solidified around a single candidate. And it hasn't solidified around a single candidate because none of the candidates really generates that much of an enthusiasm factor or makes voters comfortable. The Pro-Romneyites know what they want. A stable candidate who will toe the Chamber of Commerce line and do a decent job of keeping the same mess going without being an "extremist" or alienating any sizable group. That means, contrary to what Coulter says, immigration reform and some form of national health care. It means compassionate conservatism. And it means a somewhat stable hand at the wheel. Most Republicans don't like Romney or his

All it takes to understand why the Arab Spring was doomed to turn into an Islamic Winter is that Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa were being asked to choose between a Socialist left and an Islamic right. The left has consistently lost open elections in Europe and America, it lost the battle of ideas in Russia and China, and unsurprisingly it also lost the Arab Spring. The left wields power in the West only because it has managed to seize control of political and cultural institutions. Those institutions are used to maintain a death grip on the national dialogue, to criminalize dissent and to feed money to its supporters who are often literally paid to continue supporting it, whether in government contracts, welfare checks or organizational benefits. If the left did not have its media, its unions and its flow of supportive immigrants then it would be just another bunch of cranks. The Western left expected that overthrowing the dictators would pave the way for their favo

If you have been seeing coverage of gender segregation issues in Israel then you may not be aware that you are actually seeing another Soros project in motion. The name of the game, as usual, is divide and conquer. Soros funded NGO's embed themselves into a society and leverage its weakness to create confrontations that empower its activists and agendas. While Israel does have neighborhoods in Jerusalem where a few Anti-Zionist cults practice their own form of intimidation and thuggery (if you have seen men in black protesting outside Israeli events, then you have seen some of these people at work) this particular crisis is the work of Soros funded NGO's who have their own agenda, and it isn't gender equality or women's rights. Soros' money helps fund the New Israel Fund, a radical anti-Israel group operating inside the country which serves as the mothership of smaller left-wing Israeli organizations targeting demographic groups and organizing them under the umb

The masses weeping over the death of Kim Jong Il and the frantic online defenders of Ron Paul have something in common, it isn't the man they care about. It's what he represents. The course of events that took a cranky Texas congressman and turned him into the made man of a motley crew of online gambling entrepreneurs, racists, conspiracy theorists and the whole big circus tent filled with offshore accounts, UFO landing sites and copies of the Turner Diaries is an odd one, but not a completely unusual one. Cults of personality are not about the man, but about the need that he fills in his followers. There is a point at which every dictator, rock star and celebrity realizes that it is the people who adore him that are in charge and all he can do is ride the wave of adulation. The men don't matter, the reasons why people seize on them do matter. Why Ron Paul? Because like so many at the center of a cult of personality, he is everything to everyone. The big tent he pre

Forget Athens and Jerusalem, the new dialectic is between Mecca and Jerusalem. On one side is support for the spread of a repressive theocratic ideology across the region and around the world through violence and intimidation, on the other side is the rise of indigenous states from the pre-Islamic era employing technology and ingenuity to transform the region. Every time a politician pays tribute to Saudi Arabia, a journalist endorses the Arab Spring and a diplomat goes on about how Israel must make concessions to Islamic terrorists or it will destabilize the region, you see a man used to raising his arse and bowing his pate to Mecca. It has become mainstream to speak of the Saudi royals as reformers and allies, while denouncing Israel as a reactionary backward state that's always causing trouble. The Saudis and their Gulf pals can pony up the Riyals to slam planes into the White House and the Pentagon, slowly behead women for witchcraft and promote an ideology so vicious tha

For the eight days of Chanukah, it is common to see a candelabra with eight lights and one light above it, shining here and there, in the windows of stores and hallways, in people’s homes and even on intersections. Some are filled with oil, while others are topped with candles. Some tower high overhead and some are child sized. But all have eight lights and one above it, and all commemorate the same occasion. Many nations have religious holidays and days of national liberation and independence, however rarely do the two come together quite in the way that Chanukah does. That is because Chanukah is a commemoration of national liberation from the rule of the Syrian-Greek empire ruled by Antiochus IV and a commemoration of the hand of divine influence in  inspiring and accomplishing that liberation. The Jews throughout history have had a way of getting in the way of great empires. The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians,  Babylonians and Persians had all tried to enslave and d

BOMBTHROWERS Gingrich vs Romney has some familiar echoes. The obvious precedent for Gingrich is another bombthrower, Barry Goldwater, who would propose explosive things that were actually common sense, lacked patience for dealing with the media and his voting record was more liberal than his positions. The Republican establishment is frantically warning us that we need to choose Romney as our Nelson Rockefeller, the stable reliable middle of the road guy. The man that no one can call an extremist. Maybe they're right. Maybe in a national election Gingrich will get the Goldwater treatment, just like he did while Speaker of the House. And maybe they're wrong. Gingrich has plenty of enemies in the party like Goldwater did, including a former president or two, He has the establishment after him, which is terrified that the base will come into its own and shake their cozy chardonnay politics.  Gingrich has some assets that Goldwater didn't. He pays more attention to