Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Beginning with a pledge to make health care more accessible to millions of Americans, Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill have instead made millions of Americans into serfs of the insurance companies who paid for their Senate seats. Not only did Obama predictably dump on seniors, a demographic that didn't vote for him, but he managed to stab the same youth vote that got him to where he is today in the back by forcing them to buy health insurance in order to subsidize his social welfare programs. The combination of Obama's sense of political invulnerability and a Democratic congress desperate to stave off midterm election defeats during a depression brought us this far. And pork got us the rest of the way. And what the Democratic congress got is a final bundle of pork to take with them on their way out the door. Nancy Pelosi and those Senators and Congressman ensconced in safe liberal parts of the country may be safe, though even their constituents are increasingl

While most of the news narrative about Israel focuses on its daily struggles against terrorism, a more subtler international controversy is brewing as Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz continue to insist on enacting corporate tax reform, cutting corporate and high income bracket taxes, despite opposition from domestic sources and the International Monetary Fund. The media while focusing a great deal of attention on capitalism's "failings" abroad, particularly in Iceland, has ignored success stories such as Israel's as inconvenient to their socialist agenda. Yet in his second term, much as in his first term and his tenure as finance minister under Sharon, Netanyahu has gone against the conventional wisdom by emphasizing privatization and tax cuts. Teamed together with Dr. Yuval Steinitz, Israel's Finance Minister, who in the aftermath of Oslo went from far left wing protester to patriotic conservative, the results have been striking. Isra

There is of course a great deal of talk about reforming Islam these days, and just about anyone from Tariq Ramadan to the Saudi King, to people who actually see what is wrong with Islam and want to reform it, can legitimately claim the title of the reformer of Islam. But that is because the question of what exactly "Reforming Islam" means remains open. To begin with "Reforming Islam" means one thing to Western audiences and another thing entirely to Muslims. To Westerners "Reforming Islam" means bringing it into compliance with civilized norms of conduct. To Muslims it means stripping away the corruption of later eras and returning it to the pure Islam of Mohammed. The most successful reformers of Islam within the Muslim world are not Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina or Irshad Manji... but Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab who created Wahhabism, Hassan al Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden. And while that may seem insane or absurd from a Weste

With snowstorms in the air, cities that decided to "go green" by switching from incandescent to LED traffic lights are discovering that their new "green" traffic lights don't melt snow through waste heat. The alternative requires sending crews out to actually clean off the LED traffic lights, a single such outing costs more energy and money than LED traffic lights can possibly save in a year. But the incident is more than fodder for amusement value, it's an illustration of just how inefficient, trying to be green is. A far more prominent incident is the Copenhagen summit dedicated to cracking down on global carbon emissions. Not only did the whole conference result in nothing more than a vague accord with no hard and fast details, but the conference attendees wound up far more energy than some African nations on their jet planes and limos. And while it's easy enough to mock politicians and rock stars for the hypocrisy of trying to stop carbon emission

As Obama continues the long march to ObamaCare and Copenhagen, both have come to resemble a painful death march that is bringing, what one can only call the extreme left and the left into conflict with each other. Howard Dean and the Democratic promoters of the Public Option have this in common with the street protesters in Copenhagen, in that they are unwilling to settle for anything less than the extreme. But how do you pass extreme left wing policies without gaining the cooperation of some people who may be radical, but still more moderate than you? The answer to that may well be a disturbing one, because it is clear that for much of the left, even ObamaCare and Copenhagen aren't enough, and since these programs already a democratic consensus, and since it is clear that they have no interest in gaining one, their attitude is ominous at best. Not that the so-called mainstream left is any better at this point. For blocking the Public Option, Senator Lieberman is currently bei

It is a self-evident truth that religion may seem to be on the decline, but is always present within a society and a culture in one form or another. Secularization is not the decline of religion, but rather the decline of spiritual religion in favor of cultural religion that is simply background noise. Just as atheism, though it may lack a creator figure, forms of a belief system in a particular worldview and an accompanying set of values, so too religion is very much present in a secularized society. It is simply not religion as we understand it anymore, it is popular culture, and Obama is its key messianic figure. With the decline of institutionalized religion, popular culture has taken its place as a bearer of human mythologies and values that explains the meaning of life and the nature of proper behavior to the masses. Most traditional forms of religion understand this and view themselves as openly or covertly at war for the hearts and minds of their followers with popular cultu

During the time of Chanukah, a holiday inspired by the resistance of a band of brothers to the tyranny of Aniochus IV of the Seleucid Empire, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is instead confronting the consequences of buckling under to Obama's tyranny by imposing a building freeze on hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. As police, housing inspectors and Jewish area residents scuffle over attempts to stop construction on private houses that their owner are already paying mortgages on-- the "settlement freeze" has emerged as yet another disastrous chapter in the long history of Israeli concessions meant to create peace, where there is no peace. Intended as yet another "confidence building gesture" to reassure the Palestinian Authority, which had already preemptively rejected it as well as any further negotiations, but in reality was more of an attempt to appease Obama by propping up his foreign policy credentials-- the "settlement

The thirteen US soldiers murdered at Fort Hood were killed by the bullets fired by Malik Nidal Hassan, but there were those who helped Nassan fire his bullets, who did everything but hold his gun and pull the trigger for him. The initial FBI review has found that the Justice Department guidelines for opening a criminal investigation were too high , in turn investigators have said that it now requires a very high standard of evidence in order to convict a terrorist plotter. Pursuing charges before all the evidence is in hand can backfire – suspects have sued authorities before, claiming they were falsely imprisoned victims of witch hunts... Five Muslim immigrants were convicted last year of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, but they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged they were probably months away from acting. ... In January 2006, agents watched as a young man suspected of links to terrorists walked out of an Atlanta Home De

A century ago protesters on the streets of a European city might have been marching to call attention to the plight of the poor living in slums on those same streets. Today protesters are rioting in the streets of Copenhagen, not on behalf of their fellow human beings, but for the rights of the ant, the polar bear and the crocodile. The rhetoric has not changed very much, but the core worldview has, embracing a collectivism that no longer has anything human in it. No longer is it about the poor of Copenhagen or London or New York. In modern industrialized nations, such people have in any case become increasingly hard to find, let alone portray as the victims of greedy capitalists. It is not really about any human collective anymore, but a biological collective in which humans occupy a role within the biological kingdom, identical to the one that Americans identify within the global order, that of occupiers and exploiters. For half a billion corporate dollars, the movie Avatar will

For the eight days of Chanukah, it is common to see a candelabra with eight lights and one light above it, shining here and there, in the windows of stores and hallways, in people’s homes and even on intersections. Some are filled with oil, while others are topped with candles. Some tower high overhead and some are child sized. But all have eight lights and one above it, and all commemorate the same occasion. Many nations have religious holidays and days of national liberation and independence, however rarely do the two come together quite in the way that Chanukah does. That is because Chanukah is both a commemoration of national liberation from the rule of the pagan Syrian-Greek empire ruled by Antiochus IV and a commemoration of the hand of divine influence in both inspiring and accomplishing that liberation. The Jews throughout history have had a way of getting in the way of great empires. The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians,  Babylonians and Persians had all tried to