Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

AND AWAY WE GO... As regular readers know I am headed out to LA to speak at the Skirball Center on "Israel 50 Years Later". The event presented by Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the David Horowitz Freedom Center will take place at 7 PM on Tuesday March 20th at 2701 Sepulveda Blvd. You can register and find more information at the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors website . Here's a brief excerpt of the topic. We read the headlines and each day brings the news that Israel appears to be standing over an abyss, between terrorism, nuclear weapons, international delegitimization, social problems and a host of other challenges, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Israel will survive. But to look back at Israel’s history is to recognize that its situation has always been precarious, that it has always faced existential challenges that seemed on the verge of tearing it apart. Israel has faced destruction time and time again, and while today’s...

While terms like "The Marketplace of Ideas" are still tossed about occasionally like confetti out of a tenth story window,  they mean about as much as the soiled mass of tape that everyone has stepped on by the time the parade is over. The age of ideas, when issues might actually be debated, instead of answered immediately with talking points derived from an inflexible ideology whose only two poles are outrage and guilt, ended some time ago. Today we live in the age of consensus. The cultural elites no longer debate opposing points of view, they dismiss them as racist or ignorant, ridiculing not only the argument, but the arguer and the very premise that there can even be an argument. The "marketplace of ideas" is replaced with "I'm offended that we're even having this discussion" or "Only ignorant people believe that." These alternating poses of victimhood and superiority make it illegal or pointless to even discuss the subject and...

When I went to sleep last night, little did I know that while outside sirens competed with car alarms in the symphony that is New York City, I had already been declared a hate group. Being declared a hate group wasn't in my plans for the day, but like winning the lottery, it seems to be one of those things that happens when you least expect it. Except that as the little bald man in front of the bodega tells you, you have to play to win, but you don't even have to buy a ticket to be declared an official hate group. My first response on finding out that I was now a hate group was to look around to see where everyone else was. A hate group needs the group part and one man and a cat don't seem to be enough. Even when the cat is a well known bigot who hates mice, birds, car alarms that go off in the middle of the night, the plumber and sudden noises. Still the Southern Poverty Law Center had listed, "Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield" as one of their Act...

The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone, is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent. There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat. Air strikes are for days gone by. The American soldier in the ISAF is expected to patrol and retreat, to smile and reach out to Afghans while they shoot him in the back. After risking his life to hold back the Taliban, he is expected to take it calmly when his government announces that it is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. As he waits out the final months until withdrawal, seeing his fr...

Rarely have Republican voters made it as obvious that they would rather have anyone else than the inevitable nominee. Romney has the delegates summons all the voter enthusiasm of Taft and Ford combined. The establishment, as usual, isn't paying attention or pondering the implication of a situation where Rick Santorum is repeatedly beating out Romney, not just because of his message, but because any non-Romney is capable of doing the same thing. And has done it. The history of these primaries has been a list of alternative candidates to Romney who is winning because the candidates have either been personally destroyed by the media and/or the establishment, or because they have gotten in each other's way. Romney has not gotten this far on merit. Had he been up against a leading competent candidate all the way through, he would now be in the same position that he was in 2008. The electorate wants change. The party doesn't. The electorate wants principles. The party doesn...

The old paradigm that a country has the right to decide who enters it has been decisively overturned in Europe, it's under siege in such first world countries as America, Canada, Australia and Israel by the creed that says it's the human rights obligation of every nation to accept every refugee. Given a chance a sizable portion of the third world would move to the first, a minority because of oppression and a majority because the opportunities and freebies are much better there. Even low ranked first world nations still find themselves swamped with refugees looking to move in. International law does not assign any priority to a nation's citizens over any person who happens to stray across the border. At the ground level that means the end of borders and the end of citizenship which is why immigration isn't just a touchy issue in Arizona, it's a touchy issue in Sydney, Tel Aviv and Birmingham. You can hardly open a newspaper of the liberal persuasion without be...

THE ELECTRIC DC CAR TEST It seems as if the Obama Administration will mainly be remembered for two things. Turning over the entire Middle East to the Muslim Brotherhood and badly mishandling the automotive industry. Controlling what cars people own and how they work is a basic means of social control. Trying to seize control of the industry was a golden opportunity for the nudgers to nudge us into our corner. But the post-bailout GM is acting like the pre-bailout GM, senselessly buying up pieces of foreign car companies that it doesn't actually need, but this time it's doing it in the name of the sustainable energy mantra. Corporate buying sprees are usually about two things, an incompetent CEO trying to outrace failure with a spurt of activity that convinces the shareholders that he might really be a visionary by picking up companies which are a bad fit (see AOL/Time Warner or AOL/Huffington Post) and they're about a company that can't move its product trying...