Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

(The posting of this article has become an annual tradition at this blog since it appeared in 2012.) The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours. In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate. While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past. December 31, 1912. The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. The word gay is employed with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, o...

To understand ISIS, you have to understand the difference between terrorists and Islamic terrorists. Ordinary terrorists have two goals; to compel the enemy to meet their political demands and to rally their supporters to consolidate their class, race or national identity group behind them. Islamic terrorists are not interested in the “political demands” part. They will occasionally accept concessions and even offer Hudnas, temporary truces, but no permanent separate peace can be achieved with them. It’s why Israel’s peace process with terrorists has gone on failing for decades. It’s why the attempt by Gaddafi to achieve peace with the LIFG ended in a civil war and his death. It’s why Obama’s attempts to negotiate with the “moderate Taliban” failed miserably. Al Qaeda and ISIS are not “negative” protest movements formed in response to our foreign policy. That’s a foolish self-centered idea held by foolish self-centered Westerners. Al Qaeda and ISIS are “positive” movements that s...

Israel is facing a grave "king" crisis. Never mind the Muslim terrorists stabbing, slashing and shooting any Jews in range. The real threat was uncovered by Shabak's Jewish section, a gang of Jewish youths had plotted to "appoint a king". It's a lucky thing that Shabak had prevented the "return of the king" through the usual measures of planting informants and torturing detainees. Just think, if they hadn't arrested and detained those "right-wing extremists", Israelis today might be forced to take orders from an undemocratic king instead of an undemocratic Supreme Court. After Rabin's death, Kikar Malchei Yisrael, the Square of the Kings of Israel, was renamed Kikar Rabin. The kings of Israel had to make way for the eternal celebrations of outrage for the murder of the Labor PM at the hands of a pawn of a Shabak employee. That killing led to the same ritual cries about the threat of "right-wing extremism" which was s...

Each and every act of Muslim terrorism is followed by a wave of denial.  The politicians who have done the most to cause the latest disaster are the eagerest to blame it on something, anything else. The San Bernardino Muslim massacre was blamed on postpartum depression at CNN. Bill Nye blamed the latest Paris attacks on Global Warming. According to Hillary Clinton, Benghazi was a movie review with artillery. Islamic terrorism was blamed by the State Department on a lack of jobs, but Syed Farook had a good government job and his wife was the daughter of a wealthy family. After rummaging through their big brass chest of excuses, Obama and his media allies have settled on gun control as their latest weapon of mass distraction. California has the toughest gun laws in the nation. Unlike Ted Kennedy, the terrorists weren’t on the no-fly list that has become the latest desperate meme of mass distraction. And, despite Obama’s claim in Paris that mass shootings don’t happen in other c...

Around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon. Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King". After the "Peace of the King" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." Bentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain "power over mind" a reality. In a "quantity hitherto without e...

The following are videos and transcripts of two talks that I recently gave on Muslim migration. The first was at the Freedom Center's Restoration Weekend panel . "Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia come True?" from DHFC on Vimeo . Daniel Greenfield: There's an old Hemingway quote about going bankrupt. How did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. Here in the United States, we've had a front row seat to gradual bankruptcy. What does that mean? Under Obama, good policies have been replaced by bad policies. Good money has been replaced by bad money. Debt has been piled up in every state of the union. We have the same speech. The state of the union is strong. We're investing trillions of dollars in Muslim, green energy self-esteem. Of course, that's not an investment because an investment is when you get money back. It's just spending, but that's how you go bankrupt. And at the end of the day, the bill come...

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are. Many of those celebrating Chanukah celebrate a holiday that does nothing more than celebrate 'celebration', the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don't remember and a little family fun. Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama's war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus's war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness. The great irony of Chanukah is that those likeliest to strip away its historical and religious meaning would have been fighting against the Macabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture that the left attacks. Today's struggle for Jerusalem, for Judaism, for freedom of religion and a mean...