Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

We are better than them. When all the other arguments for why we can't fight back have been exhausted this is the one that remains in the background presenting our moral exceptionalism as the reason we shouldn't fight to protect ourselves. "Fight back? But then we'd be no better than them?" If we waterboard then we are no better than the headchoppers and mutilators. If we profile then we are no better than the genocidal jihadists. If we treat our friendly Pakistani and Saudi visitors the way they would have been treated a century ago-- then we would be guilty of being un-American. But is that really the difference between us, that we treat everyone equally even when they are cutting our throats, and the moment we deviate from the standards of the Trial Lawyers Association then we're no better than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Does our exceptionalism derive from our laws, in which case if we compromise our laws then we given up the only worthwhile thi...

Government is a business like any other. It is the company that through the contract of the Constitution or the local contracts that cover the operations of states, municipalities and communities carries out certain functions on our behalf. Officially government is a non-profit, and like most non-profits this status means there is no owner or  group of shareholders that reaps an overall profit, but that its board and employees find working for it to be very profitable. And so like most non-profits, it is run for the benefit of its board and employees... and the friends and associates of the board. Not only don't its shareholders receive any profits from its operations, despite its vast resources, but they are also its customers and are billed annually at constantly increasing rates, even though the services they receive rarely equal the money they pay in. And the way the company is being run, it seems unlikely that they will even receive the pensions and health benefits they ...

The Shalit deal will release some of the worst murderers in Israeli history, including those responsible for the Dolphinarium disco bombing which killed over a dozen teenagers, the Sbarro pizza bombing which wiped out an entire family, the lynchers of two Israeli reservists and the Passover Massacre at the Park Hotel . This is Israel's worst military defeat in its modern history and it is being celebrated with grins and cheers, not just in Gaza but in Tel Aviv. What the deal really means is revolving door terrorism is back. Kill Israelis and you stay in prison only long enough for other terrorists to kidnap an Israeli and win their release. Those 25 year sentences mean nothing. A life sentence doesn't mean life, it means however many years it takes the Israeli government to give in to blackmail. As over a thousand terrorists are freed, it is time to recognize that every Israeli institution has failed to deal with terrorism. Its court system packed with career leftist...

All week I have been getting requests from protesters looking for Wall Street. Like the anecdotal New Yorker who when asked how to get to Carnegie Hall replies "Practice", I've been tempted to reply with "Get a Series 7 License". But the reputation of New Yorkers for rude helpfulness isn't unearned and so I point them the right way. The ones who are asking are very obviously not New Yorkers. Rarely even are they from this coast. Not only do they usually manage to walk the wrong way, but their dazed expressions and social awkwardness scream Portland or Pot in equal measure. A couple smiling blissfully with the look I have only ever seen before in videos and photos from the Age of Aquarius asks me how to get to Wall Street. Their cuttoffs are completely wrong for the weather and if they keep going straight they will end up in the East River. Another couple barely speaks English, the male of the group is gangly, unshaven and French. The protests are attract...

The ultimate symbol of Muslim Democracy may not end up being the purple fingers of the Iraqi ballots but the smoke from burning churches and dead Coptic Christians in Egypt. While Iraq was tenuously balanced between Shiites and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds, there is no such balance in Egypt. The average Egyptian is a Sunni Arab and thinks Christians are dogs. Church burnings are as close as Egypt is ever likely to get to democracy and we should be happy for that. The Muslim world is so enthusiastic about democracy because it allows the majority to slap around the minority-- at least more so than it's already doing. And when there isn't a clear majority to sit in the driver's seat, they throw in musical chairs coalitions of different ethnic and religious factions in between bouts of civil war. That's the situation in Lebanon and in Iraq, but those countries are lucky because the minority there is a sizable enough to have a shot. That's more than can be said for Egyp...

Christie has endorsed Romney and Perry has turned out not to be as far to the right as people wanted to believe. Cain leads until the next slip. Palin will be courted by the front-runners and she will likely step forward to campaign for one of them. The big money is still on Romney who knows that he can wait out all the broken hopes and dreams to accept the nomination with a plastic grin. And why should it be any different? Politicians are lawyers by training, actors by necessity and and negotiators by practice. Their job is to satisfy their top supporters, keep the system chugging along and smile for the cameras. They know that when the speeches are done they will have to go into a small room with a heavy wooden table and talk out the details with their opposite numbers. Defense lawyers have more in common with prosecutors than they do with their defendants. That's why the image of the crusading lawyer has as much truth to it as that of the crusading politician. When they...

Columbus Day, once considered a major event, has been undergoing a decline in recent years. Its parades have met with protests and some have been deemphasized or outright eliminated. In California, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds vaguely like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday. But while it's tempting to put that down to California's political correctness, in South Dakota, it was renamed Native American Day. No American state has followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect. Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too c...

No sooner did Anwar Al-Awlaki, former go to guy for mainstream media heads in need of a quote about the peacefulness of Islam, go to his virgins courtesy of a beautiful aerodynamic drone, then the State Department called the family of one of his co-terroriststs offer their condolences and apologize for not calling them sooner. And if they had only called sooner, the nearest and dearest  could have been treated to a condolence countdown. You are about to be bereaved in 5-4-3-2-1... our condolences. Some governments are notorious for having one hand that doesn't know what the other is doing. Our government has one hand that apologizes for what the other did. "By the way folks, we just blew up your husband, father and second-cousin, is there anything we can do to make up for it?" When Hitler went to the great grease bucket in the ground, Churchill didn't stop by the German embassy to offer his condolences. The President of Ireland, Eamon DeValera did, which tells ...

"You're either one of the 99 percent of one of the 1 percent," reads a sticker on a lamppost near my house. The implication being that if you're not one of the 1 percent, you should be packing your class warfare kit of cardboard signs, camping gear and iPods loaded with a copy of Paranoid Android and head on over to Wall Street. Soak the rich isn't an original slogan, but in this age of NGO's and a massive white elephant civil service, who are the rich exactly? Elizabeth Warren explained that the rich are people who build factories but aren't grateful enough to pay their fair share. Whatever that fair share might be. Warren has good reason to be outraged by business owners who just aren't paying enough. She's the one they're paying the money to. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau refused a Freedom of Information Act request to release her salary, but we do have the salary ranges for two assistant directors of sub-offices at the C...

PSHHHT You wanna know how to really sock it to Wall Street? Make a city on the edge of bankruptcy spend 2 million bucks arresting your stupid trustifarian asses while you whine and bitch about how the cops interrupted your autonomy. That 2 million? It ain't coming out of Wall Street, it's coming out of New York City schools, libraries and hospitals. Send an email to MoveOn.org, Communities for Change (aka ACORN), SEIU and the rest of the Soros gang to stop taking money from schools and go back to their full time jobs running food blogs. ROCK OF RACISM With Palin and Christie both having made it clear that they are not running, the race is all but frozen early on. Romney's long game leaves him the favorite, while his opponents rise and fall. Cain has now all but certainly secured himself a VP spot with whoever the nominee will be. While Perry has been under fire, Romney has been able to sit back and plan an actual campaign. His status as the liberal Republ...