Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL What went wrong in Benghazi? The same thing that went wrong across the Arab Spring. We made a deal with the devil and the devil took his due. The consulate was supposed to be protected by the Martyrs of the Feb. 17 Revolution Brigade, instead of the US Marines. The Feb 17 Brigade is Islamist and its leader is a member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. This story is still developing, but you can see some of it up on my post at The Point, and more will come out in the days and weeks. As I wrote before, the real story of Benghazi is the story of the Arab Spring and the dirty deal that Obama cut with the Muslim Brotherhood to get the "dangerous" Islamists off our backs in return for giving in to the political "moderate" Islamists. Gaddafi made the same deal with the Brotherhood to transition the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from Al Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood and that deal ended up killing him. Our deal thus far ended up killing

Gaffe, a word that temporarily came to be associated with political misstatements, has returned to its origins as a social faux pas, such as saying something at a dinner party that everyone knows to be true, but that know mustn't be said out loud. The media is still doing its best to pretend that a gaffe is a mistake, when they are actually using it to mean the telling of inconvenient truths. Obama's reign of error is a constellation of inconvenient truths, economic, security and legal, that cannot be discussed in public. The telling of these inconvenient truths has been met with cries of racism, no matter how little they have to do with race. Now they are being met with cries of "Gaffe, Gaffe", when Romney brings them up. Did Obama skip presidential intelligence briefings on the most serious national security threats for a week before September 11? Did the Benghazi consulate lack basic security in a city where Islamist militias were running rampant and attack

While Maureen Dowd warns that the neo-conservatives are coming back, an event surely worse than the siege of American embassies and the murder of American ambassadors, she can rest her head easy on that account. The neo-conservatives died  in the siege of Benghazi, much like Mubarak they are still around, but completely irrelevant in the way that most ideas are once they lose their meaning. Dowd would know better than to celebrate the death of neo-conservativism, if she understood what that really meant, beyond the shadowy menace that her dinner party guests tell her about before the main course is served. In the Middle East, neo-conservatives offered a middle ground between appeasement and belligerence that blended Cold War politics and Third World democracy outreach. The ideas that made so much sense when former liberals were confronting the nightmarish repressive powers of the Soviet Union met their end in the Middle East for reasons that neither they nor their ideological ene

(I first wrote this article in March of this year . It unfortunately remains all too relevant in light of recent events,) What does a Koran cost? You can get a full color one for the Kindle for only 99 cents, just don't expect it to feature any pictures of old Mo. If you want to go deluxe, you can get a hardcover edition that runs three different translations side by side for around 40 bucks. But if you want to be more practical about it, the price of a Koran is the lives of six American soldiers. That butcher's bill doesn't count the soldiers who burned the Korans, who despite following procedure will be penalized on orders of the White House which thinks that punishing American soldiers will somehow satisfy the Koran fueled bloodlust of men who aren't satisfied with their corpses. The nature of the marketplace of human affairs is that a thing is worth what we will pay for it. Once upon a time Americans decided to pay any price for freedom. The pri

The past week has shown us what a Post-American world looks like and it isn't a batch of treaties that lead to men and women from around the world meeting to decide how to feed the hungry, clothed the naked and take everyone's guns away to banish violence from the world. It's mobs of violent savages ransacking embassies while their suited brethren use it to explain to our decadent leaders that the only way we will have peace is if we let them decide what sections of the Bill of Rights we get to keep. Forget the UN, the Post-American order isn't a blue flag, it's a black flag with Mohammed on it. There are far more people in the world who believe in a world order based on the violent ravings of a 7th Century madman than the number of people who believe in a world order based on 19th Century European wishful thinking. And it helps that the supporters of 7th Century violence over 19th Century internationalism are far more willing to use murderous violence to get th

AND NOW A BRIEF UPDATE Some readers may have noticed fewer articles went up this week, and there was no roundup last Friday, this was due to a medical emergency in the family, there will also be fewer articles this week but that will be due to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, that will take place on Monday and Tuesday. But there should be more than enough articles here to make up the absent wordspace. OF DEAD HORSES AND DEAD AMBASSADORS Obama condemned unilateral war in his speech, but it did not occur to him that if war can be unilateral, then a cessation of hostilities cannot be. You can stop your horse in the middle of the track and tell the other riders that horse races need not be exclusive or competitive, that all riders can learn techniques from each other and skip the racing and just exchange trophies congratulating each other on making a good effort. And that is a good way to lose the race. Islamists would not be Islamists if they did not believe that their

Obama's clean war in Libya, the one that was won by lying to the UN and then dropping bombs and flying away while ragged bands of fighters whittled away what was left of the decrepit Libyan military, doesn't look so clean anymore. The bloodless victory has seen its first blood shed as those same fighters coddled and protected by American jets and drones tore into the temporary consulate set up to liaise with the rebels, set it on fire and dragged the body of the ambassador who had helped their rebellion succeed through the streets while posing for snapshots with his corpse. Those four dead Americans in Libya won't be the last casualties because there is no such thing as a bloodless victory. Afghanistan and Iraq were both won with fairly light casualties through devastating displays of firepower. But what the United States is willing to do in the opening stages of a war, it is rarely willing to do once the dust has settled and its planners have drawn up flowcharts of how

On these shores, Americans commemorated the cold-blooded gleeful murder of thousands of their fellow men and women by bowing their heads and enlisting in one of the free work projects of the National Day of Service listed at Serve.gov, a combination that says all that needs to be said about our present day relationship with our government. In newly liberated Benghazi, the city that Obama named as his moral imperative for fighting an illegal war against the will of the American people, gunmen opened fire on the American embassy and killed an American security guard. That dead man is the first American casualty in the Libyan War-- a casualty that will be acknowledged and honored around the same time that someone in the media calls the Libyan War, a war, instead of sticking to the shameless lie of a No Fly Zone. In Cairo, a mob of a thousand climbed the wall, tore down the American flag, tore it to pieces, burned it and tried to replace it with their own flag with the words, “There