Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

At the end of last year the media widely trumpeted the "recantation" by Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley. Muller's confession of faith was met with the unreserved glee of fanatics who believe that conversion equals validation of the True Faith. Now Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a prominent German chemistry professor and Green activist announced that he is coming out with a book breaking with the Warmist view. Naturally this recantation wouldn't receive nearly the same prominence, except when the inevitable stories kick in about Vahrenholt being a tool of the oil companies. But set aside the partisan bickering and one professor accepting a view he had formerly rejected, while another rejects a view he had formerly accepted is all part of the normal scientific debate. The journey from hypothesis to rock solid consensus is a long one and it doesn't end just because Al Gore makes a documentary or a few ads show crying polar bears. Positions are argued, mind...

The architects of the Libyan disaster in France, the UK, the United States and Qatar have decided that Syria is the next step in replacing dictators with Muslim Brotherhood allied "democratic" parties. But no matter how eager they are to roll the Arab Spring forward with a month of bombing raids, this won't be a relative cakewalk like Libya. Gaddafi isolated Libya through his own craziness and then his alliance with the West, which left him with no friends when Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama turned on him in the name of Arab Democracy. Assad is often described as isolated because the Arab League has taken a firm stand against him, but he has a firm ally in Iran, which has few options and is likely to do whatever it takes to keep him in power. Next up is Russia, which has lost most of its Middle Eastern allies and doesn't have that many options besides Syria, where it has a naval base and any number of secret and not so secret outposts. That will provide a pipeline...

The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter. The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn't big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn't want guns, but they didn't want butter either. They wanted a third thing. The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don't care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowe...

WASTED PRIMARIES Ideally the primaries should have built momentum for the emergence of a winning candidate to represent the Republican Party, instead they have dampened enthusiasm and made everyone involved look worse for just being involved. The best hope for winning a national election is the hope that few non-Republicans were paying attention or will remember what went on. Much of the blame goes to Romney and the Republican establishment which was determined to win at any cost and went negative hard and fast. The rest is history. Obama's standing is improving and he's tipped to win the election. The game will change once the primaries are over and the party has a nominee, but it's clear that the acrimony and pettiness has alienated a lot of people. Instead of competing on a vision for the country, the candidates, with media help, spent months hurling smears at each other. Among the candidates, Romney benefited the most from that type of campaign, but Obama is th...

The Obama Doctrine can be summed up as the assertion that for the United States to have influence and standing on the global stage, it must first abandon its interests and its allies. The doctrine is rarely described as bluntly as that by its proponents who employ euphemisms like multilateral policies and honest broker to mean much the same thing, denouncing the previous administration and all the preceding administrations going back to old Tom Jefferson for alienating the world by pursuing American interests and cutting deals with non-progressive allies. The easiest way to spot the problem with this approach is to try and distinguish it from the UN. That's hard to do because except during the occasional pro-forma trade dispute there is no distinction. It's the same policy of multilateral human rights interventions, global mediation and stability, and promoting the welfare of the angrier parts of the Third World. And if America's agenda is identical to that of the Uni...

The liberal deconstruction of Zionism begins with the Jews as the victims and ends with the Jews as oppressors. To understand their mindset it is enough to see a protest banner of the Star of David transformed into a Swastika paralleling the journey from concentration camp victim to concentration camp guard. There is a certain amount of historical revisionism in play here, and not just the obvious kind.  The left had been calling Zionists, Fascists and later Nazis, before there was a modern State of Israel and before the left was hard at work pretending that it cared about Muslim militias and clans who would later be rebranded as the Palestinian people. A meaningless name up there with the South American people. The reason why the left damned the Zionists as fascists had nothing to do with oppression and everything to do with the left's rejection of a unique national identity for the Jewish people. Even the left leaning Zionist movements still linked nationalism and ethnic id...

Racism is about many things but it isn't about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren't speaking in the genetic sense, what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another. The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden. Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old cl...

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn't want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran's nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place. Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn't get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital H. Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it's on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don't think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move. Being on the right or wrong side of history...