Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

To be genuinely outraged about something, you need to actually believe in something. Without principles, outrage is just tactical anger, or bullying in plainer language. Principles, values and codes are universal. That is if you are angry about a dog being mistreated by riding on top of a car, then you should at least be equally angry at dogs being eaten. If a man shooting another man after a confrontation and not being charged for it angers you, then it should anger you regardless of the color of his skin. For that matter if racism or sexism offends you, then it should offend you regardless of whether it is directed at a woman or a black man who is a liberal or a conservative. It's child play to notice that the game doesn't work this way anymore. That the media engages in displays of tactical anger, serious-face inquiries into issues that they are concerned about only when they benefit their side, manufactured outrage that is not based on any deeply held beliefs, but onl

PLANET LIBERAL On Planet Liberal this man is the embodiment of white racism. On Planet Earth, he came into the courtroom much as you would expect a man who had not wanted to be in a lethal confrontation and did not spend his time licking his chops at the prospect of killing a black teenager. On Planet Liberal this was supposed to be some inverse version of To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill and every other of the numerous entries in that genre. On Planet Earth, it's looking like a weak case with an incompetent and unethical prosecutor whose own team is unable to answer the question of who started the fight between Martin and Zimmerman. But living on Planet Liberal requires believing twelve impossible things before breakfast. To live on Planet Liberal, you have to believe that only white people can be racist, that going deep into debt is the only way to fix the economy and that freedom means forcing other people to do things for you. To live on Planet Liberal you ha

Last week I was able to observe some of the top police brass doing what they do and it struck me how similar Community Policing is to Counterinsurgency. Both are methods used to control violence in fragmented multicultural areas by building trust and winning over tribal leaders in the hopes of lowering their group's participation in crime and terrorism while getting them to cooperate with the local forces and act as informants on the bad guys. In Afghanistan it may be a matter of navigating the Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks, and their various families, while in Brooklynbad, Al-Minneapolis or Londonistan it's Somalis, Turks and Lebanese, but it's still much the same game. The big brass, in coordination with local activists who claim to represent the community leadership, unveil a new strategy which involves lots of face time, aid and respect for the assorted cultures involved. The boys in blue or khaki fall in line, but know that it mostly comes down to having enough bo

Many people have noted that Obama's rhetoric often feels off, but fewer have looked into why that is so. A great part of Obama's success has been his ability to invoke values detached from belief systems. To break away symbols and ideals from religious and national value systems, and mix and match them into his own soundbites. Like the famous Hope poster, that mixed patriotic color schemes with socialist realism, or Obama's own logo, which mixed corporate branding with national politics-- Obama's "brand" was built out of a barely coherent mishmash of clashing elements. The only thing they all have in common is that they are bricks in the wall of Obama's image. They all combine together to promote him. None of this could have succeeded if context mattered, but Obama's people were piggybacking on a culture where context had ceased to matter. Where growing numbers of people could not be bothered to understand and would not care about the different ele

Last month I appeared at an event organized by the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the David Horowitz Freedom Center on the topic of "Israel in 50 Years" that explores how Israel will make it to 50 years from now. Below you can read some adapted excerpts from my talk and see the video of the remarks. Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) paints Israel in 50 years from CJHS on Vimeo . Before we begin, let me tell you a little about myself. I'm pro-Israel. Now these days there's all sorts of debate about what pro-Israel means. Is Obama's pro-Israel? Is J-Street pro-Israel? Is Arafat's ghost pro-Israel? There are two kinds of pro-Israel. There's the old-fashioned kind of pro-Israel people who think that Israel should survive and defend itself. And the new kind of pro-Israel who think that it shouldn't. I'm the old fashioned-kind of pro-Israel. I think it should survive. And now let's discuss how it might do that.       

Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. What he neglected to mention was that they were just as likely to be infamous. Zimmerman had decorated his flyers and website with the famous quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is that good men do nothing." His activities reveal a man who took those words to heart, who put his time, money and safety on the line to become one of those good men who do something. But the problem was that Zimmerman had been reading Burke, when he should have been reading Kafka. "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." That is the famous opening sentence to Kafka's novel, "The Trial", words that have far more to do with the way we live now. George Zimmerman is not on trial because he shot a black teenager during a scuffle. It's not the facts of the case t

As another Passover comes to an end and the cycle of the year continues its brief spin, the echoes of "Once we were slaves and now we are free" and "Next year in Jerusalem" fade into the background noise of everyday life. We can board a plane tomorrow and fly off to Jerusalem, some of us are already there now, but will that make us free? Since Egypt we have become slaves again, lived under the rule of iron-fisted tyrants and forgotten what the very idea of freedom means. And that will likely happen again and again until the age ends. What is this freedom that we gained with the fall of a Pharaoh and the last sight of his pyramids and armies? Freedom like slavery, is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is possible to be legally free, yet to have no freedom of action whatsoever. And it is possible to be legally a slave and yet to be free in defiance of those restrictions. External coercion alone does not make a man free or slave, it is the degradatio