Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

THE OBAMA WAY OF GOVERNMENT There are four stages to the Obama way of government. Stage 1: Ignore the problem - "We're in a recovery." Stage 2: Deny the problem - "The private sector is just fine" Stage 3: Blame Bush - "I inherited a bad economy." Stage 4: Cry Racism - "It's because he's black." We are now finally reaching the third and fourth stages with Fast and Furious. There is the Blame Bush claim and the racism claims are creeping forth. But what exactly is more racist, killing hundreds of Mexicans or criticizing a black Attorney General? DEATH OF A MUSLIM HONOR KILLER In 1992, Abdul Awkal, a Lebanese Muslim, met up with his wife and her brother at the Family Conciliation Office in the sprawling Lakeside Courthouse. Awkal’s wife had filed for divorce after years of physical abuse and a sexually transmitted disease that she contracted from him. In response, Awkal had bought a gun and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t come bac

At the beginning of Sweeney Todd , the chorus of his murdered victims sings, "He served a dark and a vengeful god." In Egypt, an Islamic Sweeney butchered his wife after an argument, cut her up and sold her mutilated body as lamb chops. Around the same time as Mohammed Sweeney was selling pieces of his wife to customers stocking up on meat before Ramadan, Egyptian voters made their own offering to the dark and vengeful god by voting for Mohammed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoots such as Hamas and Al-Qaeda have a murder toll that beggars anything the real or fictional Sweeney could have aspired to. Morsi's election platform was ending the last light of freedom in Egypt by implementing full Islamic law and in a country where 84 percent believe that heretics should be killed, 82 percent believe that adulterers should be stoned and 77 percent believe that thieves should have their hands cut off, the candidate of Allah, the dark and vengeful

Israeli demographics have always made for a chaotic political culture. While to the outside world, it's a nation of Jews, internally it's a nation of Russians, Anglos, native Sabras, Yemenites, Syrians, Persians and a hundred others. Even the smallest group has its compartmentalized identities: the delicate differences between immigrants from a single country but different towns, the countless distinctions among its religious communities in their own way are united and disunited.   The politics of such a country encompass too many groups to list. There are the 19th Century Hungarian immigrants who came in preparation for the coming of the Messiah and have resented all other Jews who came before them or after them as usurpers: these form much of the Neturei Karta, a fanatical group that rejects the State of Israel. There were the German Jews who brought with them an equally fanatical efficiency, building chicken processing plants that were as clean as operating tables. There

The main weapon that progressives wield against traditionalists is their ability to break down the values that make up their worldview by challenging norms of behavior and thought, with the goal of using cultural friction to slowly replace traditional values and mores with their own. This is a weapon that progressives have explicitly disavowed using against Islam. In Europe there are some hesitant attempts at promoting integration, but it's a fitful self-doubting effort that consists of the authorities telling everyone who listens that integration is moving along smoothly, while the No-Go Zones grow, black ghosts haunt the alleyways of major cities and the mosques go on crying Jihad from minaret loudspeakers rising above European capitals. There is the occasional burqa ban, a nervous ban placed on the most extreme of the extreme clerics, an occasional investigation of a school that teaches that infidels are animals to be killed, and a cautious warning from some putatively con

Let us suppose for a moment that Obama's endorsement of gay marriage was a courageous step, rather than an admission of an opinion that everyone but a few dupes knew he already held. Now let's allow that moment to pass, because if, as liberals say, it was the right thing to do, then why did he wait so long to do it? (A preview of the next Newsweek cover) When Obama first came out against gay marriage, he was doing it to pander to voters. Now that he came out for gay marriage, he was pandering to a different set of voters. A small set with deep pockets who needed a reason to cheer him and donate to him. No matter how many rainbow halos Newsweek sticks around his photoshopped head, there is no escaping the inescapable conclusion that Obama's alternating opposition and support for two men holding hands in a Las Vegas chapel while an Elvis impersonator pronounces them man and man, has nothing to do with his ideals and everything to do with precise political calculation

In Gotham, Michael the First, King of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and the rebellious province of Staten Island, has returned from celebrating his successful campaign against large sodas, to consider expanding the ban to large popcorn and milkshakes. Los Angeles has voted to ban the plastic bag and add a 10 cent fine for paper bags. Where does the future of the Nanny State lead? In Sweden, the Left Party is calling for men to be banned from urinating standing up. And why not? If the government should have a say in what food you eat and what you carry the groceries you buy in, why not have it complete the cycle and tell you how to eliminate them? We have laws that strictly control every aspect of the production, packaging, distribution and sale of food. From there we moved on to laws controlling the consumption and consumer transportation of it. Once every step in the process from planting the seed in the earth to actually putting it in your mouth has been legislated and reg

Finally France has a leader you can set your watch by. (Feel free to contribute your own caption.) ( Dissident Frogman ) WHACK The Arab Spring, the Tahrir Square, the entire works boiled down to a choice between a military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood. Those of us who actually understood the region warned that this would happen, warned people not to listen to the Arab Springers or the Twitter activists and not to agonize over the latest riot casualties. We said the Neo-conservatives were wrong. We said the democracy promoters were full of hot air. We said that anyone claiming that the United States could not hold back "democratic change" was an idiot without a clue about the region. Now it looks like the whole glorious circus is about to end with a limited military dictatorship pushing the reset button back to where it was before, but without Mubarak. And that's a best case scenario. It means that things are still worse than they were before. The e