Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Some 8,000 people die in the UK every year due to what is being called "Fuel Poverty", or more simply when it costs too much to heat your home. Naturally the left is already on the case, staging "Die-Ins" outside energy companies and demanding that carbon credits be used to make homes "super-energy efficient". Left out of the equation is that rising fuel prices can in no small part be attributed to the environmental mania which is at the heart of the movement. It isn't oil and gas companies that are killing the elderly with high fuel prices, it's carbon mania and environmentalism. Energy companies are not run by saints, but they don't have an interest in making oil and gas prices out of reach of ordinary people. It's hard to sell home heat to the dead or the destitute. On the other hand environmentalists do indeed have that agenda. When Obama's energy secretary communicates that he has no interest in lowering the price of gasoline...

After September 11 the reasonable thing to do would have been to take steps to save ourselves from Islamic terror, instead we went on a crusade to save Muslims from themselves. The latest stop on that crusade is Syria, where the foreign policy experts responsible for decades of horrifying misjudgements tell us that we are duty bound to save the Syrian people from their dictator. Rarely do we ask why it is that Muslims so often need saving from their dictators. Or why a party that campaigned on improving America's reputation by promising not to bomb Muslims anymore, is now improving America's reputation by bombing so many Muslims and so often that it makes George W. Bush look like a tie dyed hippie. The Obama Administration has had a role in regime change in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all in one year. Along with the other "Friends of Syria" it would like to bomb its way to regime change in Syria. The point of all this regime change is to replace totalitarian Musl...

Once again the movie industry is throwing itself a lavish party, one in a series of them, even though there is surprisingly little to celebrate. Movie attendance in 2011 hit a fifteen year low and while the industry isn't doing as badly as its counterparts in the music industry, beneath the greasepaint and glamor, it is panicking every bit as badly. There's still plenty of money to be made, but the industry has the clear sense that it has lost its audience. And it has. The movie industry began, as so much else, with the mass production of theatrical entertainment from classical drama to low vaudeville spectacle. Public entertainment no longer had to be an in-person show repeated anew each time and in each place, now everyone across the nation and across the world could hear the same soliloquy, see the same pratfall and thrill to adventures that could not be performed on stage. For all the technology, the movie took American culture and used film to reproduce it in palat...

The first law of human affairs is force. Before all other laws, the ballot box and appeals to reason is that primal law that enforces submission through violence. Islam is a religion built on that first law, forcing everyone to choose whether they will be the oppressors or the oppressed, whether they will be a Muslim or a Dhimmi. The organizing force of Islam can be seen in urban gangs which react in much the same way to being 'disrespected'. When your religion is little more than an entitlement to be a thug, to elevate your way of life over that of everyone else, violent outrage over even the most minute sign of disrespect is to be expected. And when your beliefs are little more than an excuse to hate, rioting over a slight is the  sacrament of your faith. Islam did not expand through the persuasiveness of its illiterate child abusing founder, at least not beyond the initial persuasion that allowed him to gather bandit troops to raid, murder and enslave the multicultural...

The civil rights movement is a success story, so much so that any and every movement has found that it can borrow the narrative and tactics of it to ram through whatever measures it likes. And so we come to the year 2012 where civil rights means men in dresses having the right to use the ladies room and the right of terrorist groups to be free from police scrutiny-- among many other equally insane "rights". Much as the Civil Rights movement went from trying to reverse legal inequality embedded in law to trying to enforce an equality of outcome in every sphere from the commercial to the educational to the social by depriving others of their rights, succeeding movements have borrowed the narrative of inequality and the tactics of achieving equal outcomes, even when such outcomes are physically impossible. We are for example obligated to believe that surgical intervention can transform women into men and that the only differences between the two can be eliminated with a fe...

height="285" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qIzw7kdiCKw/T0gOO1NlQKI/AAAAAAAAF5Q/VxJWa6Ygn-Q/s400/106640_600.jpg" width="400" /> SPEAKEASY I did an interview yesterday on the Speakeasy with Guy Green and if you want to listen then you can go to their site or try the embedded version here. THE LIFE OF A KORAN What is worth more in the eyes of Obama, an American soldier or a Koran? We all got the answer to that when after an Afghan soldier murdered two American soldiers, Obama apologized to the Afghan government because their already defaced Korans were not properly respected, venerated, kissed and tucked into bed. DRILL BARRY, DRILL So four years after a serenade of Drill Baby Drill, the cost of gas is climbing through the roof. It's almost like it's impossible to drill for oil in this country. And no amount of Chevy Volts being bought by GM employees is going to save the day. The tactical policy of the left has been to driv...

The first and foremost purpose of government is to create government jobs. Going back to the early days of American history a time honored tradition of newly elected politicians was to obtain positions for their friends, their nephews and assorted cousins. In those more innocent times appointing someone an inspector of something was a cordial way of repaying a favor. But the problem with inspectors is that they inspect things. There are only so many idiot cousins you can hire to stamp papers and frown at things until you have to create an entire new department and then a division and then an agency to give them something to do. And that leads to budget drains and an expansion of government authority that interferes with the lives of people who work for a living. A few centuries later we live in a country where every place that has more than three people living within three miles of each other is overseen by a multitude of agencies with overlapping levels of authority beginning fr...

The birth control battle is another reminder that entitlements and freedoms do not coexist well, even if we set aside the economic issues, because entitlements end up intruding into the spaces of freedoms. As the United States undergoes the process that replaces the negative right to be left alone with the positive right to be taken care of in every way possible, these conflicts will only worsen. Americans are getting a taste of life in Europe where social benefits trump individual freedoms, where artificial rights to various government administered benefits and subsidies, along with the protection of national values and social harmony, serve to eliminate most of what Americans have traditionally considered freedom. While negative rights create safe spaces from outside intervention, positive rights offer a privilege that is overseen by the government. Positive rights are inevitably concerned with social welfare and harmony. They offer universal benefits at the cost of individual ...