Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Race riots usually begin with criminality and end with criminality. They're protests by criminals on behalf of a dead criminal. The stores with smashed windows aren't the means to express outrage, but the end. The purpose of criminality is criminality. The police exist so that stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting random white people. The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were. The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70's, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of. Divestment is the common denominator. Neither the white leftist nor the lower-class black rioter

Immigration has become the third rail of American politics. At a time when the labor force participation rate has fallen to 62 percent and the employment growth for the last 15 years has gone to immigrants, opposing the Super-Amnesty of 12 million illegal aliens is still considered an extreme position… in the Republican Party. So when Scott Walker merely suggested that Congress should make immigration decisions based on “protecting American workers and American wages”, he was denounced for it by… Republicans. Walker’s belief that immigration should be based on “our economic situation”, rather than an ideological mandate for open borders, has become an “extreme right” position. And yet this scary “extreme” position that foreign workers shouldn’t be brought in to displace American workers is part of our immigration law. It’s just one of those “extreme” parts that, like the illegality of crossing the border, is being ignored. It’s not just being ignored by Obama. It’s also being ign

" 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

The left is winning, but for the left winning is indistinguishable from dying. The West didn’t defeat Communism; it held it at bay long enough for it to defeat itself. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China crushed Communism more decisively than Goldwater could have ever dreamed of. The embargo didn’t turn Cuba into a hellhole whose main tourism industry is inviting progressive Canadian pedophiles to rape its children. Castro did that with help from the dead guy on the red t-shirts.  “One of the greatest benefits of the revolution is that even our prostitutes are college graduates,” Castro told Oliver Stone. In real life, his prostitutes are lucky if they graduated from elementary school. American admirers eager to get to Havana claim to be worried that Starbucks will ruin their Socialist paradise. What really worries them is that American businesses might give Cuban teens an economic alternative to sexually servicing decrepit leftists from Berkeley for $10 a night

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed. The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West. The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriag

A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge. The quote itself, like the latest Grassian screed, does not matter. Grass, like Gandhi and King, was one of the favorite go-to guys for the left's sticky sheets of paper. When you want to write a suicide note, then you reach for a line from Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, but when you want to write a national or civilizational suicide note, there's always Gunter Grass. As a writer, Gunter Grass is a blacksmith, hammering together graceless and shapeless lumps that aren't good for much except hitting people over the he

Suppose that you are a Soviet agent in 1955. Your cover is that of an insurance salesman. Of your two "jobs", the Soviet agent part is more important, but you need to be a good insurance salesman to maintain your cover. Being a good insurance salesman doesn't clash with being a good Communist, because your job selling life insurance allows you to pursue your real job. And you cannot conflate the two jobs. You can't sell insurance to your KGB bosses or pitch Communism to your insurance prospects. If you do that, then worlds will collide. But if Communism is on the way up, then you can stop selling insurance and tell everyone who walks into your office that Communism is their best insurance. You are no longer a Communist who sells insurance. You are just a Communist running an insurance agent's office. This state of affairs has applications beyond Communism and life insurance. Suppose you are a liberal in the 1950s. You don't support some gang of red

For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream. It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate. Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish. Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.” Tel Aviv is ground zero for any Iranian nuclear attack. Its population density makes it an obvious target and Iran threatened it just last month. A nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would not only kill a lot of Israelis, it would also wipe out the country’s left. H