Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

There are two models for fighting terrorism. We can see the terrorists as an external invading force that has to be destroyed or as an internal element in our society to be managed. In the War on Terror, Bush saw terrorists as an external force that had to be fought while Obama sees them as an internal element to be managed. And while both men signed off on some of the same tactics, their view of the conflict at the big picture level was fundamentally different. The differences express themselves in such things as detaining terrorists at Guantanamo Bay or backing Islamist democracy. If Muslim terrorists are an alien force, then detaining them without trial is no more of a problem than detaining Nazi saboteurs was during WW2. And if Islamic terrorism is driven by alien impulses, then it has nothing in common with us and attempting to accommodate it cannot succeed. Obama and the Europeans see Islamic terrorism as a social problem whose root causes need to be resolved rather than de...

For most of human history, men and women have derived their moral dimension of life from the family and religion. Both of those are now dead or dying in the West under the influence of its new moral and ethical system. That system is one that we know in its various forms as the left. The left can be summed up as moral materialism. It is a secular religion that claims to add a moral dimension to materialism. Its obsessions are largely economic, from its early class warfare focus to its modern environmentalism. Even its racial politics code class warfare by skin color. Kill off religion and what do you have left? The answer can be seen in China. You're left with materialism and family interests.. Cast off the shackles of the family for individualistic consumerism and you're left with nothing except materialism as can be seen in any major Western city. Modern urban man is much too "smart" for religion. At least his own. He wants to add an ethical dimension to life ...

“We can not win this war by killing them,” Marie Harf said on MSNBC.  Reversing thousands of years of battlefield experience in which wars were won by “killing them”, the State Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat ISIS by killing its fighters. "We can not kill our way out of this war,” she said. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs." War is one of the few things in life we can reliably kill our way out of. The United States has had a great track record of killing our way out of wars. We killed our way out of WW1. We killed our way out of WW2. The problem began when we stopped trying to kill our way out of wars and started trying to hug our way out of wars instead. Progressive academics added war to economics, terrorism and the climate in the list of subjects they did not understand and wanted to make certain that no one else was allowed to unde...

Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history. Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them on by promising that the Middle East would be just like Europe and then ISIS tore up their Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and chopped off their heads. But ISIS also believes that it’s on the right side of history. Its history is the Koran. The right side of its history is what Iraq and Syria look like today. It’s also how parts of Europe are starting to look. Progressive politicians and pundits trying to cope with ISIS lapse into a shrill incoherence that has nothing to do with their outrage at its atrocities and a lot to do with ...

Turkish President Erdogan’s claim that Columbus encountered a mosque in Cuba (the explorer actually saw a rock whose shape he compared to the dome of a mosque) and a Saudi Imam claiming that Columbus had sailed to America to attack Muslims are typical of an emerging genre of Muslim revisionist history that lays claim to America based on an imaginary earlier Muslim presence here. While these examples may be laughable, Muslim historical revisionism has taken root in academia. It can be found in PBS broadcasts and in a recent New York Times piece. In the New York Times, Peter Manseau asserts that, “There is an inconvenient footnote to the assertion that Islam is anti-American: Muslims arrived here before the founding of the United States — not just a few, but thousands.” The description of Islam as anti-American has nothing to do with the Muslim date of arrival. Instead it refers to Islam’s theocratic erosion of the line between mosque and state, its theological doctrines of violenc...

Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush. George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials. It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11. The Democratic Party was out of ideas. The politicians who would become some of Bush’s most fevered critics ...

One of the reasons that Romney lost is that he failed to take on the media. The ultimate lost opportunity came when CNN’s debate moderator Candy Crowley directly inserted herself into the argument between Obama and Romney to declare her favorite right and Romney wrong. Romney had won the Republican primaries, but had failed to absorb the lesson of his most tenacious opponent. Newt Gingrich did not treat the media as a neutral moderator, but as a debate opponent, challenging its premises and agendas. And so Romney was left unprepared for Crowley’s attack. On the road to 2016, the latest crop of candidates appears to have learned nothing from Romney’s failure. In response to the media blowing up his vaccine comment, Christie issued a sensible clarification that provided more fuel for the media narrative. And the media narrative is what most people know. They know that Christie was behind Bridgegate even though the Democrats pushing the story provided zero evidence of it. They know ...

In a speech at the Department of Homeland Security, Obama declared that he wants to “replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America”. Those “smart” investments scattered across a gargantuan $4 trillion budget include a $500 million Green Climate Fund for the Third World and $105 million to help the government build better websites. Obama is fond of putting the word “smart” in front of stupid ideas to make them seem less stupid. The $4 trillion budget is actually as stupid as the new left-wing Greek government elected on a platform of not paying its debts. This new government intends to replace the old policy of getting money in exchange for cutting spending with a new policy of not cutting spending and demanding money anyway. So far this new policy has been rejected by every country from Germany to China. Greece has managed to spend itself into a debt that stands at 175 percent of its GDP. But of course we’re Americans. Our “smart” government with its “...

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible. He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted. These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina. His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired. “You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.” Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet h...

Last year, the New York Times predicted the end of snow. This week, its employees had trouble getting to work because of a travel ban caused by the blizzard. And those New Yorkers still subscribing to the print edition of the Old Gray Lady of Eight Avenue were even more out of luck. Snow wasn’t over, but the New York Times was. A few days after the New York Times forecast a snowless future in 2014, a major snowstorm (which didn’t read the paper and wasn’t aware of the 97% scientific consensus) hit shutting down airports, causing major accidents and killing dozens of people. Thirteen inches of snow fell over the city. A week after warning of the end of snow, the New York Times was instead forced to report on “downed power lines, stranded travelers, abandoned vehicles and yet another mess of snow, slush and ice.” CBS This Morning, which originally broadcast claims that the snow was going away, has now been forced to put its staff up in hotels near the studio and bus them in. Don ...