Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Each century brings forth its own patriots. Once upon a time we had Patrick Henry, today we have Senator Patrick Leahy, who declared in the Senate that his opposition to an amendment that would  distinguish how much of the UNRWA's funding goes to actual refugees versus fake refugees was a patriotic act. "Refugee Camp" "I always look at what is in the United States’ interest first and foremost, and this would hurt the United States’ interests,” Senator Leahy stated firmly. It is of course difficult to find as compelling a national interest as the UNRWA, a refugee agency created exclusively for the benefit of five million Arabs, approximately 30,000 of whom are actual refugees, but all of whom hate the United States. Senator Leahy, who could not discover a national interest in the Balanced Budget Amendment, drilling for oil in ANWR or detaining Muslim terrorists, all of which he voted against; finally discovered a binding national interest 5,500 miles away in

The respected black commentator and philosopher Thomas Sowell has described the growing toll of black-on-white violence as a race war. I would take issue with that only because "war" implies a level of organization that supersedes that of the flash mobs. Most of the riot organizers have moved on to cozier job titles, like Al Sharpton, who has gone from organizing riots and boycotts to holding down a desk at MSNBC and serving as the unofficial White House liaison to the black community. The old riots were usually a combination of organized protest and opportunistic violence. The organized riot is on the decline, but the opportunistic violence is still very much with us. There are no shortage of what, the media occasionally describes as, "racially-motivated-attacks". Every society has its outside groups targeted for opportunistic violence. The people you beat up and rob when you're bored and there's nothing good on television. These are people whose li

A Scientific Romance of the Year 2024 In the sixteenth year of Obama, Marc and Julie obtained a carbon pass and set off on a light rail journey in a comfortable semi-transparent carriage traveling at a top speed of 30 kilometers per hour whose motive power came entirely from sunshine. As it was a cloudy day, the train moved slowly, often stopping for hours at a time, before sluggishly stirring into motion again, but the young couple did not mind. Obtaining a carbon pass was difficult enough that the very experience of traveling was new to them, as it was to most citizens of the USNAE or the United States of North America and Europe as the grand unified republic was known. Marc and Julie had been in their mid-thirties at the dawn of the USNAE, thought by many to be the greatest achievement known to mankind, but even so its parade of accomplishments often left them awed and proud to be living in such an astounding time and age. "Just think," Marc said. "Twenty year

Wouldn't it be terrible if we lived in some kind of dictatorship where a tiny group of powerful men controlled the broadcast media and used it to justify abuses of power by the government? Isn't it great that we live in a country where we don't have to worry about that kind of thing? Yeah me too. (Please note: Due to the Shavuot holiday, this blog will be on hiatus until Monday night) THE NARRATIVE It all starts with the narrative. Coverage of the lawsuits can be minimized as much as possible, but sooner or later it has to be reported on. The media is as lazy, as it is corrupt and stupid, so they usually garner their talking points from liberal talking point distributors like Think Progress and Media Matters. The narrative on the Catholic lawsuits is problematic because it's a clear case of religious freedom being infringed on. That means this problematic fact has to be countered by... Talking Point #1: The lawsuit isn't religious, it's po

The magazine business isn't what it used to be. In the last ten years, Newsweek lost 2.5 million readers, and its newsstand sales are hardly worth mentioning. A full-page ad in it costs less than the price of a luxury car. Sold for a buck to the husband of an influential Congresswoman, merged with an internet site, it survives only by building issues around provocative essays and covers. If you want to understand why Newsweek put a badly photoshopped picture of Obama with a gay halo on its cover or features Romney doing a number from The Book of Mormon , you need only look at those numbers. Fifteen years ago desperate tactics like that were for alt weeklies like The Village Voice , but Time and Newsweek are the new Village Voice . Or the new Salon . There is no news business anymore, just media trolls looking for a traffic handout, feeding off manufactured controversies that they create and then report on. Magazines and sites struggling to stay alive while preaching to

The question isn't, "What is Facebook worth?", the real question is what are we worth? The secret of Facebook is that there is no Facebook, just reams of user data, information voluntarily submitted by hundreds of millions of people in exchange for a free ride, which is monetized by a company that makes nothing except increasingly broken code, by selling ads to companies hoping to convince consumers to buy the products manufactured by their Chinese partners. There is a tremendous generation gap between the old giants which made things and traded them to people for money, and a new generation of companies, which offer connectivity services for free, build a monopoly over some element of the internet, and then squeeze companies looking to connect with consumers. Everyone is out to provide value, collect user information and begin running ads. Behind all the flash and buzzwords is the promise of smarter and better advertising. The only thing keeping companies like Goog

The debate over the Iraq War that was held in the United Nations, and in academic and foreign policy circles, could be broken down as the question whether it was Iraq or the United States that was the rogue nation. On the one hand, Iraq had defied multiple UN resolutions, but so had the United States. Iraq had gone rogue, but, by talking about a unilateral invasion, so had the United States, and, in the moral calculus of the international community, all that mattered was being a team player. The Iran debate is a resumption of the same old argument. Is Israel or Iran the rogue state? Both have defied the United Nations, which apart from any of the moral issues, makes them rogue states. If the only value that matters is cooperation within the international community, then Iran and Israel are on the same level. Every now and then we wonder why we can't win wars anymore. The answer is that we don't fight wars, we fight endless police actions in the name of stability. Nearly e