Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud." For people who grew up at a certain time with a thick glowing monitor casting light on their faces these were the closing words of their own Declaration of Independence. For those people the internet was not a layout of graphics and flash videos blaring from every website, but amalgams of text. The internet before the internet was an elitist place, like Linux, it was part puzzle and part love of taking intangible things apart and putting them back together again. Like most revolutionaries they were doomed to be made irrelevant by the consequences of the forces that they had set in motion. The curiosity that was their code of honor has been overtaken by the world that they helped open up. And that world is an amazing place. Freedom of information is no longer an idealistic slogan, it's a commonplace reality. So commonplace that it's hardly worth mentioning. People once fo

Two photos are being circulated of Gingrich shaking hands with Arafat, one from 1993 and one from 1998, with the context stripped away, to imply that Newt was formerly friendly with Arafat and then "changed" his position. The 1998 photo is the easiest to address because it is the most amply documented. That photo was taken during Gingrich's trip to Israel and I will let the news stories from the time speak for themselves. After days of angering Palestinians by publicly siding with Israel, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was upbeat about his talks yesterday with Yasser Arafat and insisted he was just trying to help move the peace process forward. Later, the Georgia Republican alluded to his outspoken speech Tuesday to Israel's parliament, when, veering from U.S. policy, he declared Jerusalem "the united and eternal capital of Israel." Yesterday, Gingrich said it was his guess that Arafat himself knew Jerusalem would always be the capital of Israel. From

I'M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD It used to be that you were supposed to win a Super Bowl before celebrating with a trip to Disney World as a public figure, but Obama can't stop doing his touchdown dances even as the country sinks faster. The similarities between Obama and Captain Francesco Schettino are a little too obvious. The Captain ordering dinner as his ship is sinking and the elected leader of the United States partying on as the debt hits completely unsustainable levels are behaving the same way. Obama sinking the United States economy to do favors for his friends and Captain Schettino sinking a ship to wave to his buddy are the product of the same egotistical mentality. If someone could just convince Obama that America was going down, then he would be on the first plane to wherever the good life is. MUSLIM HATE GROUPS ON CAMPUS My pamphlet on Muslim Brother hate groups on campus has been published and is available at the David Horowitz Freedom Cent

The lawyer has more in common with the prosecutor than he does with his clients and Republican and Democratic politicians have more in common with each other than they do with the people who come out to support them and vote for them. The hopes of ordinary people for the future, their ability to earn a living and their fears are only a job to the politician. This doesn't mean that politicians are villains, only that like the police officer and the ER nurse, other people's urgent calls are just another day at work for them. Mediating them and dealing with them day in and day out gives them a different perspective that is detached from the present and rooted in the realities of their profession. The police officer and the nurse know that everything is an emergency, that everyone has problems all the time and that it's never really the end of the world. Cynicism comes with the job. So does seeing the people they encounter as foolish folk who have trouble taking care of t

Fact checkers and truth squads are the media's latest tool for blurring the line between the editorial page and the new page. The ubiquitous fact checks are editorializing dressed up as verification. While on some occasions there are actual facts to verify, for the most part the fact checks defend a partisan liberal viewpoint on a particular issue.  So no sooner did Rick Perry suggest that Turkey had no place in NATO and that some perceive its government to be run by Islamic terrorists than the media rolled out its fact checks. In the spirit of fact checking the fact checkers, let's have a fact check of our own. CNN Statement: "Turkey is not ruled by Islamic terrorists. It is led by a party with Islamist roots, the Justice and Freedom Party, or AKP." Those are the facts according to CNN's Truth Squad, which took its name from a certain book by George Orwell. But let's look at the actual facts. The Facts: The AKP emerged out of a series of banned Isl

After having exhausted the indignant possibilities of protesting the extinction of whales, pelicans and polar bears, the left has found a new endangered species to be outraged about. Iranian nuclear scientists. It's one thing to hug a polar bear or a tree, but it's another to embrace an Iranian nuclear scientist, who may well be a jolly and colorful fellow with a family and a paint by numbers coloring kit of an atom, but also happens to be a participant in a plot to kill millions of people. The left which has all the moral sense of a squashed peanut would like us to feel outraged because someone somewhere has been knocking off the engineers of death in a project whose goal is genocide. Yet if you point out to them that just last week a member of the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorist group was arrested in Thailand for plotting a terrorist attack, you can wait a week until they shrug. At The Atlantic, Ali Vaez and Charles Ferguson assure us that assassinating Iranian nucle

If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region. The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearheaded by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night. The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly

Back during the early days of the Tahrir Square protests I wrote , "59 percent of Egyptian Muslims want democracy and 95 percent want Islam to play a large part in politics. 84 percent believe apostates should face the death penalty. That is what Egyptian democracy will look like. A unanimous majority that wants an Islamic state and a bare majority that wants democracy. Which one do you think will win out? A democratic majority of the country supports murdering people in the name of Islam. Mubarak's government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will. Why? Because it's the will of the people." Here we are almost a year later and we have gotten the democratic Egypt that anyone who understood the realities of the region should have expected. An Egyptian parliament divided between the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a country divided between the Islamists who want to chop off heads now and the Islamists who think that it&#

A LITTLE URINE WASHES OUT In case you haven't heard some US soldiers might have urinated on dead Taliban fighters. Hopefully they did it facing in the direction away from Mecca, as American soldiers have been ordered to do to avoid offending Muslims, and that the dead Taliban didn't have Korans in their pockets at the time or it'll be a holy war. Oh wait it already is a holy war. McCain, fresh from being saddened by the Communist attacks on Bain Capital, announced that he was saddened by the video and wanted the marines punished. Because having trials and routing that sort of thing through a military justice system rather than through the fiat of sad senators isn't how we do things anymore. Good news though, the Taliban have announced that the video will not prevent them from accepting our surrender anyway. Noted kleptomaniac and humanitarian Hamid Karzai denounced the video as "completely inhumane." Speaking of "Completely inhumane", th