Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

  “America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages. The Carter administration had undermined the Shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power and then prevented the embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim ‘student’ groups who claimed to be coming in peace. The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the US nonsense is clear: they cannot do a damn thing in this matter,” he echoed his regime’s founder.’ Carter’s failure to defend Americans had turned Khomeini’s taunt into a confident slogan. America couldn’t stop its diplomats and soldiers from being taken hostage and paraded through the streets. In subsequent decades, future administrations couldn’t stop other Americans f...

  In 2015, a decade after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza leaving it, as terrorist apologists in the media insisted, an “open-air concentration camp”, weight loss centers began to pop up. Gaza’s Arab Muslim population was overeating badly. A 2013 study found 1 out of every 5 adolescents in Gaza was overweight or obese which was comparable to rates in the United States. By 2020 in the combined ‘Palestinian’ occupied areas of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, overweight rates shot up from 20% to 34% among boys and from 24% to 32% among girls. If the Arab Muslim populations were living under oppression and terror, how had their adolescent obesity rates gone from 1 in 4 to as much as 1 in 3? And it’s not just the adolescents. A global nutrition report found that nearly 30% of men and 42% of women in the combined areas are obese. In Gaza specifically, 64% of mothers were overweight or obese. How could this wave of obesity be reconciled with the simultaneous claim that 60% of households in Gaza ar...

Over 150 years the concept of the Great American Novel was invented in The Nation magazine. The mission of this proposed literary “American epic” was to capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” Today, The Nation is a hodgepodge of woke rants. The magazine no longer believes in the greatness of America. And how can there be a great American novel without a great America? America, as a recent essay at the magazine mocking the idea of the Great American Novel puts it, is an “absurdity.” The American novels that the magazine and its leftist ilk praise are either outrages or absurdities. The topics under discussion are identity, race and class, that indeed appear to make any notion of a single America singularly absurd. That now ancient essay calling for a Great American Novel in the aftermath of the Union’s supremacy in the Civil War had assumed that there was to be a unified America, but the Confederacy’s multicultural great-grandchildren reject the Union as anyt...

  Last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told an enraged crowd of Islamists that President Trump’s statements weren’t even “worthy of a response.” As the crowd chanted “Death to America”, Iran’s leader called Trump a liar, and warned that, “America should leave the region, and leave it will.” Then he called for the destruction of the Jewish State while the crowd chanted, “Death to Israel.” The only question was whether America and Israel would take the regime’s threats seriously. That question was answered when Israel, after two decades of trying to get the mostly fictitious “international community” to do something about Iran’s nuclear program, finally took action. The endless negotiations in pursuit of an impossible deal that would somehow allow Iran to have nuclear technology without nuclear weapons were based on refusing to listen to what the Islamist terror regime said, as recently as weeks ago, and refusing to believe that it meant it. To believe in a nuc...

  2024 might as well have been 2004 or 1984. In the two-decade cycle, Democrats wake up shocked to discover that their policies of treason, taxation and social collapse are unpopular and retreat to summits at expensive hotels with consultants to discover what went wrong. The party’s public discourse blames everything on Biden. And Biden, whose picture will be featured in next year’s political encyclopedia under “Senile Old Coot”, is an easy target. But it’s not as if Biden was at the top of his game in 2020 or 2016 when Obama discouraged him from running in favor of the much more popular and crowd-pleasing charms of Hillary Clinton. Biden isn’t the reason the Democrats lost. He’s the fall guy for it. Swapping in Kamala didn’t save the Democrats. And after the election, the party remains historically unpopular. Most of the country votes for candidates based on core issues, usually economic, not how well they speak. Running two presidential candidates in one election, ...

“It is an American oligarchy,” Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the Trump administration. But it’s California’s Democrat elite who much more closely resemble an oligarchy. Take Gov. Newsom, the son of Judge William Alfred Newsom III a friend and lawyer of the Getty clan, whose father Newsom II had been a crooked political machine man who financed and ran future Gov. Pat Brown’s campaign. Gov. Pat Brown held down two terms in office. His son, Gov. Jerry Brown also held two terms and his daughter, Kathleen Brown became the State Treasurer. Newsom II’s daughter, Barbara Newsom-Pelosi, married Ron Pelosi, the brother of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for twelve years. Newsom III, Gavin’s dad, and Ron Pelosi both ran for state senate. And Rep. Nancy Pelosi is the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, a congressman and the 41st mayor of Baltimore and the sister of Thomas D’Alesandro III, the 44th mayor of Baltimore. The Newsom-Pelosi families...

In 2021, a Syrian Muslim gunman opened fire at a Boulder supermarket killing ten Americans. Ahmad Al-Issa, the gunman, had been convinced that Americans were ‘Islamophobic’ and his family had moved from what would become the ISIS capital in Syria . The Al-Issa family lived in Arvada, a refugee sanctuary city near Boulder that had also previously produced Shannon Conley , an American convert to Islam who tried to join ISIS and scouted a local church. Boulder authorities blamed gun violence and mental illness. Now, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian Muslim, set elderly Jews on fire at a march to free hostages held by the Hamas terrorists whom he supported, while shouting “Free Palestine”. “We are not calling it a terror attack at this point,” Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn told the media. “It is way too early to speculate a motive.” But Mohamed not only shouted his motive during the attack, he recorded a video explaining that he did it for Allah. “Allah is greater than the Zionis...

Samidoun, a group that the United States Treasury described as a “sham charity” that serves as a fundraiser for terrorists, had some thoughts on the recent D.C. leftist terrorist attack. It reposted an open letter to its Telegram group declaring that “Elias Rodriguez’s act was fully justified” when he shot Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in the back. “It is justice.” “May it redound to teach a lesson and set an example,” the letter wrote of the brutal murders while describing Islamic terrorist supporters as “struggling behind enemy lines, inside the US”. Samidoun leaders described the killings as a “natural consequence” and warned that “genocide has to have consequences.” There is no shortage of terrorist supporters in this country, but this group of terrorist supporters continues to benefit from tax-exempt donations despite years of reporting by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and even sanctions being imposed by the Treasury Department. Samidoun was designated as an arm of the P...