Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

In times past the Forward newspaper celebrated the fast of Yom Kippur with a feast and in keeping with that tradition it celebrated Israel's Independence Day by rewriting its anthem to remove the word "Jew" from it. The linguistic purge from the notoriously anti-Israel paper was meant as a way to help Muslims feel better about singing the Israeli national anthem. The yearning of the Jewish soul becomes the yearning of the Israeli soul and the eyes turned east no longer long for Zion, but the generic "our country". The proposal made by a self-proclaimed linguist seems rather devoid of understanding when it comes to the origin and meaning of words. Purging Jewish souls from the anthem and replacing them with Israeli souls doesn't actually solve anything. Jews are Judeans, dating back to the Kingdom of Judah, contrasted with the breakaway Kingdom of Israel and its tribes. The Jews are also Israelites, being sons of the patriarch Israel, a category that st...

Controlling a large number of people isn't easy. The United States alone consists of 312 million people spread out across nearly 4 million square miles. Add on nearly 500 million for the population of the European Union and another nearly 4 million square miles of territory. Then pile on Canada with 34 million people and another 4 million square miles, Australia with 22 million and 3 million square miles and a few other stragglers here and there, and the postmodern rulers of the progressive empire have to cope with nearly a billion people spread out across 15 million square miles. Large territories and large numbers of people are very difficult to govern. Structures tend to break down and people further away from the centers of power don't listen to the boys at the top. The only way to make a going proposition of it is to consolidate as much power as possible at the center and the very act of centralizing power leads to tyranny. The most direct chokehold possible is physica...

Every now and then a hobbyist inspired by splashy magazine covers featuring art deco cities and soaring vehicles full of the cheerful people of the future puts together a flying car. The result is noted chiefly for its novelty and then everyone moves along because we aren't a flying car culture. From the bottom up we might long to soar above the highways, but from the top down we are a light rail culture, a biodegradable house culture and a guard rail culture. For the people at the top the flying car should be able to fit in a closet, have a minimal carbon footprint, run on the tears of Third World children and not fly. It should be the sort of thing that you can leave outside a vegan tofu restaurant in Portland in order to shame working class truck drivers. That is if you have to have a car at all, rather than a bike and a light rail pass. The flying car belonged to an America at a crossroads. A nation tiptoeing between the adventure of innovation and the progressive order o...

TRUTH, JUSTICE AND JOURNALISM It seems almost redundant to link to the Reuters piece on George Zimmerman that nearly everyone has seen by now, but what's interest about it is just how routine it is. It's a standard background piece and thousands like it run after prominent crimes. Any sizable news organization can put one out within a week and smaller community papers and magazines regularly run them when there's a major case. When the case is big enough, some of them get turned into movies, mostly they help set a tone. All they really involve in meeting with some of the locals, arranging for interviews, taking some notes and writing up the results. And what's really interesting about "Prelude to a Shooting" is how long it took until a media organization chose to run it. I strongly suspect that there's a dozen pieces like it sitting in file folders and desks in other media organizations that have not decided what to do with them. I suspect the ...

Israel's Jewish population is approaching six million. If current birth rates hold steady that significant milestone will be reached in time for next year's Independence Day. If there is to be one. In the sixty-four years that the revived country has existed, there has been a dramatic population shift. Western and Eastern Europe and Russia, where the majority of Western Jews once lived, now hold a  fraction of the Jewish population. The Muslim world, former location of the majority of Eastern Jews, is barely worth mentioning. Globally the Jewish population is divided between Israel and the United States. Israel is the home of the majority of the world's Jews, but the combined Jewish Anglosphere is still larger, not so much because of the United Kingdom, but because of North America, which holds the largest number of Jews. In a development that would have been all but incomprehensible a century ago, the majority of Jews in the world speak English or Hebrew. Smaller numbe...

Last year I completed a pamphlet on 10 Reasons to Abolish the UN for the Freedom Center, which you can find at its online bookstore that explores the reasons why the United Nations is a threat to the United States and to freedom around the world. You can learn more about the pamphlet from this video and this excerpt below that discusses the failures of the UN not only at preventing genocide, but at trying those responsible. How effective is the United Nations at tackling genocide? When it happens or is about to happen, its peacekeeping forces usually find a good reason to be somewhere else. And the Security Council and General Assembly find some pressing Israeli matter to concentrate on. But what about after the fact? The United Nations boasts of leading the charge against genocide through its tribunals. Warlords and generals who commit mass murder are supposed to fear the wrath of the international community. But how much wrath...

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has ruled that ten year old girls can be married off, because in his words, "Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age." The Mufti, who also recently called for destroying churches in the Arabian Peninsula, is descended from Mohammed Wahhab who gave birth to Wahhabism and his descendants have controlled the Saudi religious establishment, which has given them control of Islam around the world. For all his power and influence, the Mufti is blind and hasn't seen a thing in the last 52 years, an apt metaphor for his entire religion. The Grand Mufti Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, still tries and executes witches. What sort of religion can come out of a place that marries off ten year old girls and murders old women on charges of witchcraft? Exactly the sort of religion you would expect to fly planes into skyscrapers, murder teenage girls for using Facebook and base their entire society on a ladde...

Everyone deals with trauma in different ways. Getting violently attacked on a street late at night. Watching a loved one murdered in front of your eyes. Feeling the fire on your skin as your home burns. It's not just the pain of the experience, it's realizing afterward how your world has changed and that your life will never be the same. There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself. I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world. The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora. There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews w...