Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The "peace process" which created two terrorist states inside Israel may have begun in Oslo, but it ended in Cairo. Normalizing relations with the rest of the Middle East was one of the carrots that got the Jewish state hopping down the appeasement trial-- and that carrot is now officially off the table. The days when Thomas Friedman and his Saudi buddies could talk about normalization have passed. The Arab Spring saw to that and with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and an unknown number of others sliding into the Islamist camp, and out of reach of negotiations, there's a New Middle East that has even less in common with the old gentlemanly diplomacy model than the old one did. Some of the dimmer Israeli leaders may still believe that peace is possible with the Islamists of Turkey's AKP, but not even they think that peace is possible with the Brotherhood. If Western diplomats could offer regional acceptance twenty years ago, today that has all the credibility of a Rolex s

Some political systems are based on beliefs and identity. The American congress is built on spending money. The spoils system long ago became the spoiled system with money as the lubricant of politics. The legacy of a leader used to be measured by his accomplishments, today it’s measured by how much money he managed to extract from the collective pool of real and imaginary money held in the sweaty hands of the legislatures. Much of the money is imaginary, but in the minds of the politicians it’s all imaginary. Unreality is an elementary tool of price inflation. The more outrageous the markup, the more the merchant works to create an atmosphere where money does not seem to exist and reality bends at the seams. It’s not a new game of a particularly clever one, but the unreality bubble now covers much of Washington D.C. In the unreality bubble, numbers don’t really mean anything. 2 + 2 does not equal 4, sometimes it equals 1, sometimes a 100, sometimes any number you want it to

The assorted "Occupations" may be drawing to a close as even liberal mayors have lost patience with the occupation of public space and the budget drain created by aging radicals, wannabe hippies and random homeless people, hucksters, scammers and professional activists, but it isn't over because it never really began. To the left protest is an identity, which is also why the Occupations never seemed to have much of a coherent message. The purpose of their protests is to protest, the romance of the protest is all the justification that it really needs. Creating permanent protest encampments turned protests from an occasional activity into a theme park, and that was what Zuccotti Park really was, a protest theme park for overgrown children too old to go to Disneyland, who instead tried to go back to the seventies. The left is one long permanent protest by useful idiots whose dissatisfaction makes them seek out alternative societies in the guise of denouncing this one.

THE EGO HAS LANDED The long-awaited Gingrich resurgence has come and yet it’s all too likely that the resurgence will give way to the inevitability of Romney. So far every surge has been followed by a prolonged teardown. With Bachmann it was the messianic arrival of Perry and nitpicking over her attacks on his vaccine policy. With Perry it was immigration and a troublingly mixed debate performance. With Cain it was a combination of bad answers and sexual misconduct allegations. Gingrich’s turn is coming now. Gingrich isn’t quite the last man standing. The Anti-Romney camp can always default to Perry, if he didn’t keep giving them reasons why he shouldn’t. And they probably will. Unlike Romney and Perry, Bachmann and Santorum have the right policies, but she isn’t likely to get a second look and he hasn’t even gotten a first. Perry still has enough money and presidential factors to get a second look and a third. The Gingrich teardown is already beginning, will it succeed? On

Israeli leaders and generals certainly don't mind smiling knowingly every time a top Iranian commander meets an untimely accident, which has been happening surprisingly often these past few years, but the explanation is likely to be more complicated than Mossad secrets agents operating behind the scenes. The logistics of infiltrating people on the ground to carry out assassinations isn't easy, anyone viewing the chronology of the Dubai hit for one man in a hotel room, can only begin to imagine what it would take to pull off more complicated operations in Iran, which sees far less foreign travelers and has much tighter security. There's no doubt that Israel has its hand in it, but it's also unwise to underestimate the meltdown of the Iranian revolution which began with Ahmadinejad's fraudulent reelection and has turned into a complex power struggle between the Ayatollahs, Ahmadinejad and a populist movement that draws on student protests and brings together refor

As the ObamaCare Mandate winds its way up to the Supreme Court, which will decide whether we still have the freedom to look after our own health in our own way without compulsion from the authorities, it's still only the tip of the positive rights iceberg. When entitlements are transformed into positive rights, this creates a universal reciprocal obligation, first of all to pay for them, and second of all to participate in a planned economy that provides those entitlements as cost effectively as possible. The Mandate is a typical consequence of the process. The health insurance industry will provide affordable insurance for those who need it most, in exchange for the government delivering recalcitrant consumers who aren't interested in buying their products. The same principle can be used to make checking accounts more affordable if banks agree to remove minimum balance requirements in exchange for the government compelling everyone to sign up with a bank. The industry ge

The multiple incidents of sexual assault in the Occupation tent cities are as ugly as they are inevitable. The absence of theft, assault and other forms of attacks is not a natural phenomenon, it is the outcome of a system that protects individual rights. The Occupy tent cities are not concerned with the rights of the individual, but with the grand collective right of the "99 percent" to demand private property on behalf of the government. And collectivist movements are notoriously unconcerned with what happens to the individual. The collectivist response to the allegations is to urge the victims to remain silent to avoid harming the reputation of the movement. This is a commonplace institutional response to rape allegations. It is not concerned with the individual, but the group. You have to break some omelets to make some eggs and you have to cover up some rapes and assorted bits of ugliness to have a society where everyone's masters degrees are subsidized by the st

There is no surer path to Muslim violence than through the legitimization of Muslim grievance. And once you accept the legitimacy of the grievance, then you are also bound to accept the legitimacy of the violence that follows. Violence begins with grievance. Grievance is the pretext for violence and the narrative for the violence. Liberals make a fetish of separating the grievance from the violence, emphasizing constructive means of resolving the grievance. But what do you do when the grievance and the violence are inseparable? Grievance is the stories that Muslims tell themselves to justify their violence. To explain why they kill children and why they murder the innocent. The list of grievances is an endless as the violence. Every act of violence carries its own narrative. The endless Muslim conflicts throughout the world all carry their burden of history. But it isn't a history that can be resolved with a tolerance session. Muslim grievances are the frustration of conque

Sprightly Ahmadinejad tours nuclear facilities, having stolen an election he marches on as his police batter and protesters. And everywhere he goes, he smiles his trademark loopy smile. The smile of a psychopath or a saint. Why is Ahmadinejad smiling? The answer is not a terribly complicated one. With every step he takes and every day that he remains in power, he discredits the most deeply held ideas of Western liberals about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and internal civil disobedience to achieve peaceful regime change. Despite years of diplomatic and hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets-- Ahmadinejad's grip on power remains as secure as ever. Walking over the bodies of student protesters, of political dissidents, of the thousands killed by the wars he has touched off, he continues to taunt the rest of the world to do anything about it. And the rest of the world has done nothing except talk. And as Ahmadinejad has demonstrated, talk count

What's the real danger of Islamophobia? Think of it as a license to kill. the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, you have taken the first step to justifying violence as a response to that problem. That is how it began in Israel, once the narrative of Muslim suffering under the “occupation” was accepted; Muslim terrorism became legitimized as a resistance to the occupation. Once you accept that Muslims in France have been marginalized by an Islamophobic society, then criticizing their religion marginalizes them further and justifies their violent response. ... That’s the Orwellian Doublespeak of Islamophobia: we are to be afraid of being afraid and if we are afraid enough, then perhaps we won’t need to be afraid anymore. The left’s twisted politics endorse militant t