Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

It was probably the cottage cheese protests that gave the left an idea about how to regain a fraction of relevance. The notion was simple enough, shift away from the pro-terrorist protests and union strikes to a cost of living protest movement. The Israeli left still commands international funding and attention, but it lacks domestic political representation. The Labor party is on its deathbed and the radical left has no hope of gaining anything beyond the usual handful of mandates. That leaves Kadima, the non-party created by corruptocrats, Sharon and Olmert. Unsurprisingly for a party that only existed to ratify the personal power of its leaders, it has no real ideology. Kadima's only real platform is to get elected. Its leader by default, Livni, makes Olmert seem like a genius. Watching Livni try to give a speech, or even make a statement, tempts you to pit her in a binoculars competition against union thug and former defense minister Amir Peretz, who couldn't tell whi...

The flash mobs in America or the Blackberry mobs in London have one thing in common. It isn't race, though they tend to predominantly be minorities. It's identity. The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70's, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of. These are the children of the welfare state with little in common except a rejection of the commercial way of life. Neither the entitled white university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has any interest in working. The businesses they smash are an alien thing to them. Small businessmen do not go about smashing stores. The people who do think of commodities as something they trick or intimidate others into giving to them. And that covers eve...

The warrior's tale is a simple enough thing. Strong as steel, but fragile as chance. It is the wind in his soul and the wall we build around ourselves to tell us who we are. Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones-- the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale. The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will nev...

Joe Biden has compared the Tea Party to terrorists. Maureen Dowd compared them to cannibals and vampires. Then having run out of mythical monsters, or monsters they believe are mythical, there was nothing to do but roll out a few more articles about the Republican Party being taken over by Dittoheads from Outer Space. What's interesting about all this Pravdaesque bile is that the focus of liberal rage and terror is aimed at the grass roots. The left dismisses the Republican party as an organization of bankers and capitalists counting their money in between making orphans sweep their chimneys, but then when a populist wave sweeps across it-- they pen dismal articles longing for the days when reasonable country club republicans ran things. Say what you will about the closeted northeastern establishment which donates to gay rights in between golfing sessions, it knows how to be reasonable. Sometimes it's so reasonable that it scares itself. But in between listening to Chamb...

MESSAGE RECEIVED Obama and the Democrats sent a message by refusing to accept any deal that would involve serious spending reform and a balanced budget. The message is that if you want those things, you're going to have to vote them out first. Let's see how much of the public got the message in 2012. BACK TO BREIVIK Anders Breivik’s attack on the youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party​ has its most obvious precedent in the Maalot Massacre​ when Palestinian Muslim gunmen attacked an Israeli elementary school, taking over a hundred children hostage, and then using automatic weapons to kill as many of them as they could. But the link between Maalot and Utoya is more than casual. The Workers Youth League which ran the camp had a long history of supporting the same kind of terrorists who had perpetrated the Maalot Massacre. Lars Gule, is the Secretary General of the Norwegian Humanist Association, and a defender of Muslims having the right to discriminate against women and gays. (...

It's a long way from Arizona to Oslo to Tel Aviv, but all three places have been the sites of major blood libels against the right. And a reminder of what to do in these situations. 2011 has seen the launch of two major blood libels aimed at the American and European right. The Breivik shootings and the Giffords bullseye. In both cases, the left tried to politicize an unstable man's shooting spree to silence and intimidate the political opposition. But my own experience goes back to the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. A blood libel on an epic scale. There are common lessons to be drawn from all these events. Each event played out in three phases. Shock media coverage that splattered the full details everywhere, followed by calls for the right to accept moral responsibility for the killer's actions. In the final phase, the right atones by practicing self-censorship so that, "nothing like this can ever happen again....

In the budget debate, government amateurs took on government professionals. And the professionals won. This is only to be expected. Professionals usually have the inside track in whatever field they're in. Not only do they hold the higher ground, but they know all the loopholes and how to shape the dialogue. In most fields, the only way that amateurs can beat professionals is by undercutting them. Which is why professionals create guilds which set certain standards of training and apprenticeship for anyone who wants to enter the field. And they also set prices to avoid being undercut. In the budget debate, the amateurs offered government for less. And the professionals warned that cutting the price of government would lead to catastrophic results. Global defaults, loss of credit rating, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together and the usual mass hysteria. This is how professionals defend against amateurs competing on cost. By warning that going cheaper will lead to disa...

When Benjamin Franklin was asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention, "What have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” His answer was, "A republic, if you can keep it." What has come out of the debt ceiling talks is not a republic, but tyranny on the installment plan. The choice today is whether we will have a nation or a pile of debt created by the uncontrolled spending of the ruling elites and their political machines. And the outlook isn't sunny. The mishandled budget battle has ended in a predictable deal with cosmetic cuts. The issue isn't just about right vs left. It's about whether we'll have a functional nation or a bankrupt welfare state. A nation that has gone so deep into debt to fund social and corporate welfare that it has no chance of recovery. We have Two Americas, to borrow John Edwards' stolen slogan. The America of the worker and the America of the government. These two Americas are on a collision course. The debt economy...