Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The West is almost as in love with improving the world, as the Muslim world is with conquering it. These two contradictory impulses, the missionary and the warrior, come together in the Clash of Civilizations. The Muslim world has two approaches to the West; underhanded deceit and outright terror. The practitioners of the former are considered moderates and the latter extremists. The West has two approaches to the Muslim world, regime change and love bombing. With regime change we bomb their cities to save them from their rulers and with love bombing we shamelessly flatter and appease them in our own cities to save them from themselves. Westerners worry a great deal over who runs the Muslim world. Muslims do not care very much who runs Western countries. They prefer weak liberal Western leaders to strong ones, but they do not believe that there is truly a moral difference between them. Even a Hussein in the White House has not improved America's ratings in the Mu

Like stray dogs drawn to an open sewer, after a bitter election, the Democrats and Republicans have found themselves drawn together to illegal alien amnesty. Amnesty has an obvious appeal for both Democrats and Republicans. It's a means of putting a lot of cheap votes on the table. The Democrats have been using immigrants as cheap votes before the invention of the telephone. And the Republicans think that they can begin scoring 39 percent of the Hispanic vote in all their elections again without considering what 11 percent of 11 million will do to their margins in even the reddest red states. Big business has always supported cheap labor, which is why the Republican establishment has always been eager to dash away from its base to back the latest amnesty gimmick. Illegal alien amnesty however is even more damaging to the voting base for the Democrats, but that hasn't stopped the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, organizations whose members will take a severe beating from an illegal

The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there. The Cold War was even worse. The moderate left never came to terms with Communism. From the Moscow Trials to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left slowly disavowed the USSR, but refused to see it as anything more than a clumsy dictatorship. The only way that the left could reject the USSR was by overlooking its ideology and treating it as another backward Russian tyranny being needlessly provoked and pushed around by Western Europe and the United States. Having failed the test twice, it is no wonder that the

I'M NOT FULL OF MYSELF, I'M A SOCIALIST In 1986, at the closing session of the Communist Party shindig in the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Castro had declared, “Let no one think that what I have here is a lengthy speech; it is the party’s program.” He then went on to speak for 7 hours and 10 minutes. Obama’s ridiculous 6600-word marathon is also not a lengthy speech; it is the party’s program. As out of touch with the rest of the country as if he were speaking at the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Obama claimed that spending was under control, the national debt was no longer a problem, the war in Afghanistan had been won, the economic recovery was here, unemployment was fading and Al Qaeda was a shadow of its former self. There were more calls to fix all those broken bridges, which he had somehow been unable to fix for four years, despite running trillion dollar deficits. And finally a proposal to really help the economy take off by legalizing 11 million illegal alie

Over a decade after thousands of New Yorkers were murdered by Muslim terrorists, the city's mayor is declaring victory in the War on Salt. Next up he plans to wage a spring offensive on Styrofoam cups. After that, who knows? We live in surreal times. In the Middle Ages, cats and rats were put on trial. In this modern age, we began by waging wars on poverty and drugs, both of which we lost, and have now retreated to fighting wars on food ingredients, the bags we carry them in and the containers out of which we eat and drink them. There's no telling what surreal enemy our wise and brilliant leaders will declare war on next. Shoes? Pepper? Umbrellas? Mathematics? The color blue? There's just no way to know anymore. The United States has lost the War in Afghanistan, a minor matter that no news outlet can find the time to report on because they're too busy covering a breaking story about a Republican Senator taking a sip of a water. Maybe a War on Water can be next

Sitting in the CNN studio today, with an earpiece jammed in one ear and a microphone clipped to my jacket, the disembodied voice of some CNN guest urgently proposing that the government take advantage of historically low borrowing rates to invest in infrastructure howled in my ear. Without a monitor, the voice had no body belonging to it. It was the muse of liberalism. The idiot angel standing on the shoulder of Uncle Sam crying out, "Spend, spend, spend." In 1 Time Warner Circle, all the elevators play the CNN feed in small monitors. On the floor, there is more of the same. There's no escaping CNN in the tower of the corporate parent of CNN. Like some cheap production of 1984, it's everywhere and nowhere, one long commercial break for the country's least popular news network, whose most famous figure is doing his talk show on Hulu, still in his trademark suspenders while his third-rate British replacement shrieks nightly about gun violence. CNN is irrelevan

After the 2012 Waterloo, Republican consultants retreated to some party boats and hotels, and began planning their comeback. Bereft of ideas, they took the media's explanations for why they lost at face values. What they have delivered is a liberal's eye diagnosis of why they lost and so they debuted a plan to win over Latinos with amnesty and to end their negative image with a new gentler look. Mostly what they have proven is that they are even more clueless than they were a year ago. Senator Marco Rubio seems like a nice guy, but if the Republicans are counting on him to deliver the Latino vote, they might want to take a closer look at his Senate win. While Rubio did indeed win the Cuban Latino vote, he only won 39 percent of the non-Cuban Latino vote. That's the same Latino margin of victory as Rick Perry got. It's the usual best score that Republicans get among Latinos. Marco Rubio could be a guy named Mark Richardson for all the impact that he made among La

A picture used to be worth a thousand words in that fanciful interval between the court painting and the photoshop when a photograph was thought to have an unfalsifiable quality. That too was an illusion and the Communists were doing their own crude photoshops, removing purged leaders from photos around the same time as the invention of the ballpoint pen. But now the photo is a thing that is hard to take seriously. They are too easy to fake and the proof of authenticity involves a debate so technical that it becomes easier to tune in to an argument about quantum mechanics. The photograph and the video have become collections of pixels that can be tampered with to make the unreal, real. Like all realities now, photographic reality is entirely subjective. There is no reason to believe in a photo. Not when even major news organizations routinely run photoshopped news photos from their stringers. The linguistic side has more than kept up with the technological side. Bad arguments are