Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Naila Amin was only thirteen years old when she was married off to her Pakistani first cousin twice her age who beat and raped her. “He dragged me about twenty feet - the whole length of the house - by my hair,” she relates. “He began kicking me in the head and it was so hard I saw stars.” She described how, “My mother would watch my husband and my father kick me together in the head.” Even though Nalia was a United States citizen, she was engaged to be married when she was eight years old. And at thirteen, her application to bring her rapist to the United States was approved by USCIS. By the age of fifteen, she was being raped and beaten in Pakistan. While Nalia is the youngest of the “child brides” in the Senate report, “How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages”, the young abused American citizen is one of thousands of young girls who are either trafficked into this country or who are used to bring their older “husbands” to America. Between 2007 and 2...

America is full of visible and invisible walls. In the first half of the last century, our politics had been dedicated to tearing down the walls between classes, races and genders. And then in the second half of the century, radicals terrified of what that meant for their plans, began building them up again while adding new divisions until every city, workplace and even family is divided by many invisible walls. Walls represent divisions. Whether you support or oppose a particular wall depends on whether you believe a division is legally, morally or philosophically legitimate. The walls that the radicals want to tear down are the walls distinguishing and defining concepts that they don’t believe in, such as nations and genders, while building walls of segregation to separate races and classes. When Speaker Pelosi calls a border wall immoral, it’s not because she believes that physical structures of steel and stone are immoral, but that the concept that a wall protects, that of the n...

Scrolling through my feed, I see the title of a New Yorker piece, "Does Journalism Have a Future?" And then I keep on going, knowing exactly what's in it without having to read it. That's true of most media products. Journalism doesn't have a future. It doesn't even have a present.  Journalism isn't the opposition research, hit pieces, narcissistic blogging, conspiracy theories and viral scandal manufacturing, with its satellites of hot takes, that passes for journalism these days. Those are the eviscerated lifeless organs of journalism. There are still individual journalists, but there's no profession. And there hasn't been one in a while. It's hard to know exactly when the line was crossed. Was it Woodward and Bernstein, the Pentagon Papers, Bill Clinton, Dan Rather, Obama's media entourage? It's hard to know and it doesn't really matter. You don't need to know exactly when Rome fell when you're st...

"Is ‘Likability’ in Politics Sexist? Yes. It’s Also Outdated," the New York Times blared. "The issue with Elizabeth Warren isn't likability. It's sexism," The Guardian bleated. "Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the 'likability' media narrative," NBC wailed. "Talking About Elizabeth Warren’s Likability is a Way to Tell Women to Sit Down and Shut Up," the Daily Beast ranted. Lefties like to believe that the essential elements of human nature, economics, aspiration and biology are outdated, having been disproven by some professor in an obscure TED talk or Marxist tract. Likability was apparently discredited in a panel discussion, but we went on liking people and never realized it. There’s no surer sign that Warren is walking down Hillary Clinton Boulevard to the ditch of history than that a mere 3 days after she announced her run, her defenders are already accusing critics of sexism. And it’s even s...

"Bullets and booze don't mix," Alderman Edward Burke growled. Then the Chairman of the Finance Committee vowed to fight the NRA. He had spent much of his 50 years in power fighting for gun control. And the man dubbed “Alderman-for-Life”, whose wife who sat on the Illinois Supreme Court, had the heft. Five years ago, Chicago had lost yet another of its serial gun control battles. But Burke and the Democrat machine were vowing to go on fighting with more laws attempting to restrict the Second Amendment. Burke, an Obama and Blagojevich ally, and the godfather of Chicago politics (dubbed its real mayor), hated and loved guns at the same time. He had nearly as many guns as he had gun control bills. When the FBI raided the offices of the powerful Chicago Democrat, they found 23 guns. That’s a lot of guns for one man. Especially for a man who had worked hard to ban handguns in Chicago. "What it does do hopefully is put a freeze on the number of handguns that are pr...

After the Cold War, what is the biggest threat to America? The debate between Obama and Romney famously bogged down over the question of whether Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. While Obama slammed Romney’s answer as a Cold War relic, after losing the next election, his party defines its foreign policy and domestic opposition around the fear that Russia is now more of a threat than ever. Answers by other politicians have ranged from the structural, the national debt and internal divisions, to the inanimate and absurd; Bernie Sanders’ claim that global warming is our top national security threat. But assessments that name conditions rather than threat vectors are unhelpful because even when they are right, they tell us to address a weakness or failure, rather than meeting an external threat. Being able to name and define external threats is vital for reaching informed national security decisions. The debates over border security, Syria, Afghanistan, and Russian information...