Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

  What does the future hold? Let's turn back the clock to the end of a year over a century ago.  Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out. 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. While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, 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 large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year ha...

 Islamic terrorism is the outcry of the oppressed, apologists tell us. If the perpetrators only had access to more advanced weapons, they wouldn’t feel the need to massacre civilians with everything from machetes to rockets. Terrorism is a local phenomenon, not a global one. Jihadist terrorism only grabs our attention when it occurs on a large scale, like 9/11 or Oct 7, and then its allies, apologists and appeasers quickly redirect attention by indicting the response to the attacks as ‘oppression’, faking atrocities, complaining about ‘Islamophobia’ and a police state, and quibbling over legalisms until they have successfully obscured the original atrocity. Meanwhile the smaller scale terror plots and attacks that follow are swept under the rug. Last year however France’s Fondapol think tank, a somewhat conservative group, issued a report chronicling 45 years of Islamic terrorism around the world with an estimated 249,941 victims. The killing of nearly a quarter million people is ...

In the 1990s, Captain Michael Cronin, a Navy pilot who had been captured and tortured in Vietnam, began to lobby for a bill that would hold his Vietnamese torturers accountable. The ‘War Crimes Act’ was passed and Cronin died in 2020 without his torturers facing justice. The bill, originally sold as a way to hold torturers of Americans accountable, did nothing to stop abuses of American prisoners, either by Communist or Islamist foes. Its criminalization of Geneva Conviction violations was never going to matter to our enemies, instead it became a weapon used by them, and their radical allies in the United States, against our troops. Republican House and Senate majorities allowed the ‘War Crimes Act’ to sail through even though it had been loaded with the biggest poison pill of all, applying its provisions to American soldiers, and President Bill Clinton, a former anti-war protester, gleefully signed it into law. The ‘War Crimes Act of 1996’ was the fever dream wishlist of every anti-Vi...

On July 13, 2023, Mohamad Barakat, a Syrian refugee, packed up several rifles and handguns 1,800 rounds of ammo, a hand grenade, and a car filled with gas cans on the way to carry out an Islamic terrorist attack at Fargo’s Downtown Street fair aiming to kill thousands of Americans. Instead the terror refugee got into a confrontation with police and died in an exchange of fire. North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley insisted that there was ‘no evidence of political, racial or religious motivation’. “At this point it seems [no] more notable that he’s Muslim than I’m Lutheran,” he bafflingly argued. He also dismissed footage of Mohamad holding a Koran. “I can’t discern, from the evidence that we have, any other motivation,” he claimed. A year before, Fargo had gotten its first Somali Muslim mayoral candidate, the head of a social justice group, who had been photographed meeting with top state officials. And no one was looking to offend the state’s growing Muslim population who were wi...

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” Osama bin Laden said at the beginning of his talk taking credit for the 9/11 attacks. The line launched a thousand geopolitical analyses, was quoted by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times and was pored over endlessly by experts who completely missed the point. Osama bin Laden was not talking about great powers or nations, he was talking about Islam. “There is only one goaL,” Bin Laden continued, the supremacy of Islam. He followed that up with a quote from a Hadith that is known to virtually every Muslim, but to all too few non-Muslims. “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.” The 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden went on to explain, brought many non-Muslims to convert to Islam. “Some of them said that in Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the...

When environmentalists first claimed that polar bears would be extinct by 2050, it seemed like a fairly safe bet. The claim made in 2007 was pegged to 43 years away. Practically an eternity. By 2050, we’d have flying cars, colonies on Mars and Martian environmentalists protesting them. Media headlines blared “Most Polar Bears Extinct by 2050.” Public school kids were barraged with crying polar bear propaganda and told to recycle or all the cute white bears would die. But nearly twenty years later, global warming has a major problem. The bears are still here. With another 25 years on the clock, you would think that there would be signs that a major species is disappearing. Instead the 22,000 polar bear population from 2007 is now estimated at 26,000. The numbers for polar bear extinction, like Gaza genocide, are going the wrong way. Population numbers for those facing extinction or genocide are generally supposed to go down. ‘Climate experts’, a class of people whose accuracy rate is up...

Millions of Americans want to move to Canada. While few have actually left the country after Trump’s latest victory, they fantasize about living under a leftist government with free health care. And during the recent debates about ObamaCare’s self-destructing subsidies, every self-respecting liberal vehemently denounced America’s backward ‘paid’ health care. Every civilized country has free health care, they insist. Just look at Canada. Canada does have free health care in the sense that there are government insurance systems that cover “medically necessary services” funded by paying 70% more in taxes than Americans. This ‘free health care’ comes with a 3 month wait time for a referral to a specialist, and another 3 months to get treated, with 2 month wait times for a CT scan, 4 months for an MRI and over a month for an ultrasound. Mostly it’s just easier not to bother. Half a million Canadians left ERs without seeing a doctor. And, in one year, over 23,000 patients died waiting ...

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears no different. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs. Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee. And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish resistance fighters from a small town in the hinterlands and the Hellenized elites of the big city, between those who wished to be Jews and those who wanted to be pawns in an empire, between the traditio...