Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

PETE SEEGER FULFILLS LIFELONG DREAM OF MEETING STALIN - Unfortunately Stalin hates the banjo HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO Strip away the year and it’s hard for the listener to tell whether he’s listening to a cut from the 2008, 2011 or 2014 SOTU album. Clip all the static about competing with China by building bridges so that babies with Asthma can attend free pre-K with Google and you catch snippets of the new stuff. The Justin Bieber of politics cannot change and before long he’s back to threatening a unilateral campaign against the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and invoking Marx’s hoary old specter of class warfare sleeping under a bench in Zuccotti Park after a long day of wandering ominously around Wall Street. Michelle Obama’s starvation lunches for schools and jazzercise tour have lowered obesity levels, according to her husband, and ObamaCare is a huge success, according to the guy it’s named after. Afghanistan is a success. The economy is a success. Unemploy...

There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to redistribute everything. The progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite. There is nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living. Both the quest ...

There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your insecure feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world that you live in. The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories; Never Again and Teach Tolerance. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora. There were Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a transformative event, but the responses to it came from old debates. The pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense, between the Universal...

In real life, terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything but. America's fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than Muslim terrorists. Before September 11 broke up the party, 24's Jack Bauer was fighting the international menace of Serbian terrorism. Serbian terrorists also showed up in 1999's Diplomatic Siege when their "Serbian Liberation Front" took over a US embassy and in 1997's The Peacemaker with George Clooney rushing to stop a Serb from detonating a nuke in New York City. The United States has remained unscathed by Serbian terrorism, though the same can't be said for Peter Weller, the star of Diplomatic Siege, and Mimi Leder, the director of The Peacemaker, but not by Muslim terrorist attacks. Despite September 11, the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings, Hollywood has however resolutely kept its eye...

In the last century, the United Kingdom has become an astounding tapestry of cultures hanging on a multicultural loom in a lunatic's attic filled with an array of astoundingly diverse garbage. Every year people from around the world arrive in the UK and many of them move to Tower Hamlets and begin threatening to behead all the other cultures for being much too multi. But it's nothing that can't be handled with an uncomfortable visit to a mosque by a few government officials, some online courses about fighting extremism and a new Muslim character on EastEnders. The ghost rat cannibal ship approaching the shores of the United Kingdom is no different. Yes it is a ghost ship and it may be full of cannibal rats who have been eating each other for so long that they have food critics (Hank was just too dry), foodie blogs and an ethical cannibalism movement to eat only locally sourced rats, but that is no reason to allow ourselves to be panicked by it or by them. Each culture...

The problem with our problems is usually their solution. If we were to take a closer look at many of our problems, it would turn out that many of them are actually solutions that were meant to solve those very problems. Our War on Poverty has spread poverty. Our attempts at fighting racism have perpetuated it. Our campaigns for energy efficiency invariably waste more energy than they save. We tried promoting populism to solve terrorism in the Middle East and got even more terrorism for our troubles. The more resources we put into education, the more the educational system runs backward. Every attempt at creating jobs seems to vaporize more jobs than it creates. Solving problems isn't a bad thing, but the place to start is at the problem, not the solution. Listen to enough celebrities at fundraisers, politicians thumping podiums with manicured fingernails and thought leaders spinning their little grey wheels and you notice that they assume that the solution is obvious, self-ev...

THE PRICE OF DIPLOMACY An autopsy report found that he had been starved and had suffered multiple lethal injuries that could have caused his death.  The skin on his face had been partially removed along with his tongue and he had also been castrated. Fred Hof, a diplomat who had been a friend of the murdered man, said, “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death. If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.” “The State Department, not the Defense Department, had the lead. That meant diplomacy, not military might. It meant no retribution, no retaliation, no rescue,” Robin L. Higgins, his wife, wrote. American Blood on Iranian Hand s OBAMA'S NUMBERS Obama began his first term with an approval rating of 68 percent; a figure unmatched since JFK. No Republican had enjoyed a starting approval rating above 60 percent in 60...