Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Obama's stated logic behind compelling all Americans to buy health insurance was that the system wouldn't work, unless everyone was compelled to be part of it. Conformity is of course is a major requirement for big government solutions, they don't work unless everyone is forced to take part in them. And they don't work unless everyone lives mostly the same. Without individual choices that might take them off the graph. (They still don't work even then, but the numbers look better up front.) And this is how big government solutions lead to the pursuit of a "More Manageable People". What enlightened Europeans used to admire about America was its world of possibilities, free from the old burdens of feudalism, of people who were expected to knuckle to their betters and know their place. Americans instead made their own place. The open "New World" gave birth to a staggering explosion of wealth, technology and culture, precisely because it was much l...

This Sunday, April 11th is the 67th Yom HaShoah, a Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, the National Socialist attempt at imposing a solution on the Jewish problem. But the idea that there was a Jewish problem that needs a solution predated the Nazis. Pharaoh had the same notion that there was a Jewish problem that needed solving. And countless nations and ideologies followed in his footsteps. Today the socialists of the Democratic Party and the EU again want to impose a solution on that pesky Jewish problem. The interconnection of the Jewish calendar is such that it is difficult to forget all this history. Two weeks after we are done celebrating Passover, our remembrance of divine salvation from Pharaoh's final solution, comes Yom HaShoah, when we remember the final solution that came in our own time. And in between these, Obama is moving to impose his own final solution, after a meeting with six national security advisors who like the missing participants at the Wannsee Confere...

Our allies hate him. Our enemies are laughing at him. Nearly two years after Obama's World Tour in which he did his best to convince voters that he understood global challenges with a high profile tour of a lot of foreign countries (a approach that if it worked should convincingly make every internationally famous rock star a foreign policy expert), his biggest global accomplishment is still his ability to travel around the world to high profile destinations on the taxpayer's shrinking dime. His attempts at diplomacy consisted of delivering vicious slaps across the faces of longtime allies, from England to Israel, and pathetic love notes to tyrants in Iran, Russia and Venezuela, who responded by openly mocking him. Last week, in a scene almost worthy of the Godfather, Russia decided to stage a coup in Kyrgyzstan at the same time that Obama was signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia's Medvedev. While Obama was exchanging good wishes with the titular head of the ...

Obama's festival of surrender, aka the Nuclear Summit proceeds with our allies on the sidelines or sitting it out, and our enemies up there front and center. Just yesterday we witnessed Obama's high profile signing ceremony with Russia's President, even while Russia was pulling off a coup in Kyrgyzstan meant to eliminate the local US base there that serves to supply Allied troops in Afghanistan. Even while Obama was being treated like the chump he is by the Russians, the new coup leader, a former Soviet diplomat and top ranking Communist party member was thinking Putin for his assistance. But completely unaware, Obama a day after the US has suffered a major setback, demanded to know what Sarah Palin's credentials were for criticizing his policies. After yesterday and his whole year for that matter, Obama has as much credibility in matters of foreign policy, as John Edwards aide, Andrew Young has lecturing about ethics. No, really . Please join the Evans School for...

Whatever else Hamid Karzai may be, he's always been a survivor. And now he's trying to survive the Obama Administration. Karzai knows that unlike Bush, Obama has no commitment whatsoever to Afghanistan. What Obama wants is to pull out as quickly as possible in time for his own 2012 election. And he wants to do it without the appearance of a disaster and a defeat. And there's only one way to do that, cut a deal with the Taliban. To that end the Obama Administration is operating on two tracks. Track 1, the public and visible track, is the  military approach that Obama got pushed into, a temporary surge to push back the Taliban and allow him to declare victory ahead of a pullout. Meanwhile behind the scenes Track 2, the invisible diplomatic track, is meant to sideline Karzai with a coalition of pragmatic "moderate" Taliban, who will end the fighting and provide an appearance of normalcy for the pullout to come. The surge was supposed to be a show of force, to for...

In 2008 the Democratic Party hoped that Americans were insecure enough and unhappy enough with the way things were in Washington D.C., that they would buy the "Change" brand sight unseen. But it's 2010 and the American People are quickly waking up to the real price of change. The American People had thought that "Change" meant responsible management and a wake up call to the establishment, instead it proved to be the ad slogan that greedy and partisan Democrats used to fool the public long enough to claw their way and start spending money like drunken sailors. This alone might have been bad enough, though the public has become all too used to congressmen and presidents treating the US Treasury as if it was play money. But ObamaCare was one straw too many, because it was not just another decimal in the national debt anymore, it was a burden placed directly on the taxpayer, it was a tax added directly to household income, it was an attack on the health care syst...

The term Moderate Muslim is a misnomer, because it is the equivalent of describing him as a Secular Catholic or a Liberal Conservative. Muslims who pride themselves on sticking to the Koran view extremism as a virtue, not a fault. Islam's reform movements that succeeded were not movements that made Islam more liberal, but that made it stricter, harsher and more unfeeling. Aside from the original Sunni-Shiite schism, which has its basis more in power politics than in theology, the spectrum within Islam itself always runs to the more extreme. A new alternative mosque that succeeds is likely to be a place more conservative and more hostile to the outside world. A new Islamic movement is usually one that calls for more blood and guts, and a lot less women walking around on the street. A movement that fails to do that rarely survives or essentially is forced outside of Islam if it does. And so what the West's pursuit of moderate Muslims really does is push them toward more extre...

How did the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt begin? Pharaoh announced a Public Works Project and called upon them to volunteer to labor for the public good. To set an example, he was the first to arrive and personally wielded a shovel to show his commitment to the project. The Jews came as well to volunteer as well and anyone who complained about the work being too hard was pointed to Pharaoh, who wore a brick mould around his own neck, and asked, whether he was less willing to contribute than Egypt's own ruler? For the first week Pharaoh showed up to "work" every day. Then the next week there was no more Pharaoh. The month after that everyone but the new slaves and their taskmasters were gone. The chains were placed on them and their quotas were based on the labor that they had voluntarily done, which had been tracked and recorded, and was no longer a matter of choice. They were not slaves. That is indeed how slavery begins. It may not always be with a public works p...

WND is reporting that the Obama Administration encouraged protests against Israel in Jerusalem . While there is no way to verify that, it would generally be in line with the Administration's take, and whether or not they understood that such protests would be violent, well that too is up in the air. Keeping in mind the radicalized anti-Israel attitude in the Obama Administration, something that has taken even many Jewish Obama supporters aback, it's possible that they would have approved even rioting and violent confrontations. This brings to mind the mandate days when Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jerusalem while chanting, "The government is with us." And this is a consequence of what the Obama Administration has been doing A resident of Yitzhar was wounded Thursday evening when Palestinian Authority Arabs threw a large rock at a car just outside the Samaria village. The rock hit his head as he sat in the back seat of the vehicle, next to his two children. The...