Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

In Vienna, toward the end of the Age of Aquarius, a father bought his little girl a baby crocodile for her birthday. The child had become enchanted with the reptile after seeing a picture of it in a storybook and when all the other presents were opened, her new pet was presented to her. The little girl was delighted with the present. She began to play with the baby croc and then tried to kiss it. The croc bit her on the nose. The little girl began to cry and had to be taken to the hospital. And the angry father went off to dispose of the nasty little beast. On the next day, the police responded to reports of a strange creature in the Danube canal, that arm of the great river which flows timidly through the locks and into the city. Vienna being full of animal lovers, the crocodile was rescued from the canal while the father was reprimanded for nearly causing the creature, used to the warmer climes of the east, to perish of a cold in the chilly waters. The matter was worried over in...

Two out of three governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.  "Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address. But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that in response to the terrorism, Bostonians won't spend the rest of their lives locked in their homes, at least not until the next time there's a terrorist on the loose. But then again neither are Rwandans or Sudanese. This isn't so much an inspirational message as a pat on the back from a government that once again failed in its duty to keep Americans from being terrorized. If America had refused to be terrorized, the T...

SEVENTY-TWO In support of the farfetched theory that the Muslim terrorists were Muslim terrorists is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s YouTube Channel. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had three named playlists. One was called “Islam”, one was called “Terrorists” and one was called “Timur Mucuraev”. We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad is the Timur Mucuraev song that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev added to his playlist. Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture From above the duty calls you/to fight boldly in the way of Allah Forget sorrow and take in eternity/The bright road of Jihad waits for you Paradise’s rivers softly chime/The 72 virgins lovingly whisper Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Favorite Song: “ We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad ” CALL IT SLEEP  The Tsarneavs need not have been sleepers. It is enough that they were Muslims. Like so many others, they were ticking time bombs who could at any moment decide that the Jersey Shore lifestyle so many Muslim youth adopt in the ...

The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay. On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 bucks to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about being force fed during his hunger strike. On April 15th the bombs went off. The attacks of September 11 introduced a dividing line between awareness and disregard. There was the world of September 10 and the world of September 11. In one world the planes passing in the sky were a minor reminder of our technological prowess. In the other, we were at war. There was no such clear dividing line when September 11 faded from memory and we returned to a September 10 world. Nor is there an exact date for when we will return to an April 14 world in which it is okay to pay a terrorist in exchange for his propaganda. But if the media has its way, that day can't come soon enough. A ...

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he. A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder. While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.   The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attack...

“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.” Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview. The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution. The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free mark...

"Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel." Numbers 23:10 The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops , the people stop , and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day. What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year's dead and wounded to the scales of history. A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee...

Somewhere toward the end of "A Few Good Men" comes the only scene from the movie that anyone actually remembers. It's the one where Jack Nicholson in a uniform begins chewing the scenery and turns a dreary Aaron Sorkin adaptation of an Aaron Sorkin play into a memorable movie while inflicting Sorkin on the entertainment industry for the next two decades. The familiar thesis of  Nicholson's Colonel Jessup is that he does what needs to be done and what no one wants to talk about needing to be done. His existence may be "grotesque and incomprehensible to you", but he does the ugly things that make it possible for everyone to go about their day. The speech is an extended wordy distillation of a familiar quote that was variously attributed to Churchill or Orwell. "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." In the urban battlefield of Philly, one of those rough men doing violenc...