Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Ever since the Civil Rights movement became a "Grand Myth", the 20th Century equivalent of wagon trains headed West and the Minutemen at Concord, an activity so redolent of national values that it becomes a metaphor for what being American is, every generation has been given its marching orders to fight for a new equality. Fighting against inequality requires inequality in the same way that Manifest Destiny needed land area to work. It becomes harder to spread out once you've hit the Pacific Ocean. Fighting for civil rights becomes a struggle when everyone has the right to vote, drink from water fountains and do everything else. After that it's all imaginary territory. You aren't really expanding the borders; you're just paving over swamps, slopping split level housing all over them and pretending that the next lawsuit over racial profiling or the article over pay inequities is just like those people in the black-and-white photos marching at Selma. Ra...

Others have already pointed out the absurdity that gay marriage is becoming a right in places where plastic bags and large sodas are becoming against the law. This sort of next wave civil rights step is only an expansion of freedom if you aren't paying attention. All the arguments over the differences between civil unions and marriage are largely meaningless. Once gay marriage is recognized, then marriage becomes nothing more than a civil union. The real casualty is the destruction of the word "marriage", but the left is adept as destroying language and replacing meaningful words with meaningless words. There was no word in Newspeak for freedom. We can look forward to an English language in which there is no word for marriage. And what does freedom mean anyway in a country where most things are banned, but we are constantly throwing holidays to celebrate how free we are? But if marriage is no longer refers to a natural social institution, but now means a civil union...

A BRIEF PERSONAL NOTE Due to the Passover holiday and family medical issues, blogging has been lighter as usual, comment moderation has taken longer than usual. I haven't been able to answer many emails, tweets, etc.. My apologies. NEVER LOOK BACK Desmond Tutu has been busy lately. Two weeks ago he wrote an editorial calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. A week later he joined an international anti-tobacco campaign. Last month he condemned American drones for killing Muslim terrorists. Last summer he denounced a military-themed NBC Reality Show. A grinning and giggling social butterfly, Tutu is always going somewhere and expressing his opinion on something. One minute he’s in Myanmar and the next minute he’s weighing in on Bradley Manning. Wait a little longer and there will be a Tutu column, video or letter on climate change, the death penalty or the price of tea in China. Last week, while Tutu was joining his campaign against tobacco, a 7-year-old girl w...

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed. The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West. The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriag...

Iraq and immigration have one thing in common. Both are founded on the assumption that national political philosophies can be universally applied to any population with the same results. The same leftists and radical libertarians who mocked the idea that Iraqis could be successfully transformed through democracy insist millions of illegal aliens from countries every bit as violent and unstable as Iraq can be successfully transformed by giving them legal status and the vote. Both assumptions were and are wrong. They are both symptoms of an internationalism that assumes  a favorite political philosophy that works in the United States can be applied internationally without regard for culture. And internationalism invariably undermines the nation by prioritizing an ideology over the rights and interests of the citizenry. Internationalism is always unsustainable. Even the USSR was not able to sustain the call for a World Revolution for very long. Early efforts on the part of Am...

As another Passover begins, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" resound briefly and then fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem. Some of us are already there now. But will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh and the last sight of his pyramids and armies? Freedom like slavery, is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is possible to be legally free, yet to have no freedom of action whatsoever. And it is possible to be legally a slave and yet to be free in defiance of those restrictions. External coercion alone does not make a man free or slave, it is the degradation of mind that makes a ...

Forget the World's Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour. Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction. Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now. Environmentalism has degenerated into a conviction that all human activity is destructive because the species of man is the greatest threat to the planet and all life on it. Each death, each act of undoing and unmaking, each darkness that is brought about by the cessation of humanity becomes a profoundly environmentalist activity. Kill yourself and save the planet. Put out the lights, tear down the city and let the earth revert to some imagin...

DON'T CALL IT AMNESTY Amnesty is bad. Everyone agrees on that. Even the senators who support amnesty claim not to support it. Instead they support “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” with “A Path to Citizenship”. They support a comprehensive solution that will be compassionate and work as an immigration policy for the 21st century. No one uses the term “amnesty” anymore except opponents of amnesty for illegal aliens and their more vociferous advocates. This makes for some confusing speeches and press conferences. The most bizarre argument that advocates of amnesty are making is that we have “de facto amnesty” now. The argument goes that since we have de facto amnesty now, we should just have the real thing and get it over with. A lack of proper enforcement is not de facto amnesty. Amnesty is legalization. What Rubio and Rand Paul call de facto amnesty is the difference between not arresting a drug dealer and legalizing heroin. The big sales pitch for 2012 was overall elec...