Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours. In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate. While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past. December 31, 1912. The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. People use the word gay with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.  There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown

There are two types of things that we put money into; the things that we need and the things that we don't. The former represent our physical needs and the latter our spiritual needs. Food for the body and food for the mind. We need to eat, but we don't need to see a movie. We need a house to live in, but we don't need a house of worship. We need a car to get to work, but we don't need a painting on our wall once we get there. Culture isn't a luxury, even the poorest of the poor have it. It doesn't mean a night at the opera, it can just as easily mean sitting under a tree while the village elder explains where fire came from. But it is optional in the sense that we choose where to put our money or pine cones and those choices are our values economy. The values economy consists of the culture you support. It's the books you buy and the movies you see, it's the paintings on your wall and the house of worship you attend. It's the concerts and ga

It took some 22 hours for American help to arrive in Benghazi after all the t's had been crossed and the i's had been dotted, and the body of America's ambassador to Libya had been dragged through the streets by "rescuers" stopping along the way to pose for cell phone pictures with his corpse. By way of comparison it takes about 16 hours for a boatload of Libyan illegal immigrants to row to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Support for the Americans under fire in Libya would have arrived sooner if a few former members of the Harvard Rowing Team had gotten in one the many rowboats beached on the shores of Lampedusa and pushed the oars all the way to Benghazi. It says something about the current state of asymmetrical warfare that not only can Al Qaeda throw together a coordinated string of attacks on American embassies around the region without anyone  being the wiser for it, but boatloads of migrants from Libya can reach Europe faster on muscle power than Ame

CASHING IN ON THE DEAD The left's plan has always been very simple. Find a grievance or create a crisis, in whatever order, and then cash in on it. Whether it's the economy or the murder of children, the left's response to any tragedy is to find a way to shamelessly try and cash in. Recently a woman was charged with falsely raising money by claiming to be setting up a fund for some of the dead children of Newtown. This is the sort of thing that's illegal if you're an ordinary person, but perfectly acceptable if you happen to run the American Red Cross which raised a ton of money on the backs of hurricane victims, another fund that raised money for the victims of the Batman shootings and then decided not to give it to them, and Bill Clinton who has claimed another success in Haiti. In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above P

Spain has begun deportation proceedings against Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan, for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby threatening the national security of Spain. If Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face the death penalty proving that it's a short step from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani Inquisition. The United States has a man sitting in prison for making another blasphemous movie, which the government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks on American embassies. And he isn't the first man persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam. Offending Islam has become a national security issue involving all levels of government. When Bubba the Love Sponge, a Tampa DJ, proposed to burn a Koran, the commander of the Afghanistan war contacted his girlfriend, who would later be stalked by Petraeus' girlfriend, to contact the Mayor of Tampa to keep Bubba from burning a Koran. Instead of explaining how the American system w

From 1977 to 1980, BBC One ran "Citizen Smith", a TV comedy about an aspiring young revolutionary who wore a beret and a Che T-Shirt and did his best to create a Communist Britain while heading up the Tooting Popular Front, consisting of six members, by virtue of shouting "Power to the People" and making up lists of the people he would put up against the wall on the day of the glorious revolution. This is finally Citizen Smith's time where the lazy and cowardly aspiring revolutionary can create his own Tooting Popular Front, camp out in a public park for a few months, and earn generous media coverage. And for those too lazy to camp out in the spring and summer, there's always hacktivism, the truly lazy man's revolution, download a denial of service program, aim it at a site and watch it go down for a minute, an hour, or perhaps even a day or two. Social media is full of Citizen Smiths, dressing up in Che avatars and shouting their "Power to th

"A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah." New York Times , 1997 In 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi, the head of the Arab-American Committee and the National Council on Islamic Affairs, lobbied to have a crescent and star go up at the World Trade Center during the holiday season. His wish was granted, despite the fact that Mehdi had been an adviser to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. In the name of diversity and political correctness, an adviser to the religious leader behind the World Trade Center bombing, was allowed to plant an Islamic symbol of conquest in the very place that had been bombed. Long before the Ground Zero Mosque was even a twinkle in the eye of a violent ex-waiter and a slumlord Imam , the World Trade Center allowed Mohammed T. Mehdi to bully it into flying the symbol of Islam. By 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi had become an unambiguously ugly public figure. He had bee

There was a temporary interval in American life when a shooting spree by a madman would have been viewed as the crime of one man. The dead would have been mourned. The killer, if he had been taken alive, would have been punished, and while the memorial might have been accompanied by some leading sermons, the country would have been spared the media exploitation and blame-a-thon that invariably follows such events. The trouble is that there are no more individuals. Or rather the individual is no longer recognized as having any standing. "All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger," Roosevelt declared in 1940 to the Democratic National Convention  And the repeal never seems to have been repealed. Instead all private plans and private lives are being constantly repealed by a turmoil of overriding public dangers, most of them sociological in nature. A shooting takes place and the media urges that millions of firearms b