Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

After the Hamas atrocities, experts scurried to explain why it had embraced “ISIS tactics”. Many saw the attacks purely as a way of sabotaging Israel’s talks with Saudi Arabia. Others argued that Hamas had tried for a small attack that escalated when Israel failed to promptly respond. Some express bafflement at what Hamas could have hoped to gain from such an attack. The experts as usual are wrong because they don’t understand Hamas. And their ignorance stems from their inability to grasp Islamic terrorism because they don’t understand Islam. Hamas, like the PLO and other Islamic terrorist groups, had spent much of its existence promising to do exactly what it tried to do, invade Israel, and seize and occupy its territory, taking Jewish villages and towns by stages over the years until one day besieging Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, funded by American taxpayers, still airs Arafat’s old speeches in which he calls for “millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem”. Americans and Is...

In 2021, State Department officials warned that “there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza” and asked for a special exemption from sanctions on funding terrorists. In 2022, Biden met with Palestinian Authority terror leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.” While the Biden administration kept the assessment that it was at high risk of funding Hamas secret, the results could be seen in real time. After the Trump administration and congress cut off foreign aid to the terrorist areas in the West Bank and Gaza, the number of terrorist attacks dropped sharply. So did the casualties. In all of 2020, only three Israelis were killed. In 2021, when Biden restored aid to the terrorists, Israeli casualties shot up 900% . They have since consistently risen every year Biden was in office, up another 82% f...

Picture a large family living in one house. They may have been a cozy tight-knit family once, but years of resentments have turned them against each other. The mother and father are both having affairs. The in-laws have long resentments built up that evolved into seething hatred. The kids are dysfunctional, anti-social and escaping into their own delusional fantasy worlds or getting high on drugs. And then one evening, someone opens fire on the house. Shards of broken glass and shrapnel fill the living room. Many of the family members are injured. Some are killed. In the throes of the crisis, they put away their grievances and hostilities. Wounds are bandaged and last words are whispered. Some drive to the hospital while others set out to look for the perpetrator vowing to avenge the dead. The feelings hold strong for a few days, a few weeks and maybe even a few months. But then life goes back to normal. The perpetrator is never found. The old hatreds, always much nearer, are embraced....

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail. Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others. Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with what we’re fighting. The barbarism of murdering women and children, taking them as hostages, and posting photos of their dead bodies to social media, is not a byproduct of Islamic warfare, it’s the whole point. Cruelty, beheading, burning to death, torturing and mutilating are the essence of Islam. This is how Islamic warfare was practiced beginning with Mohammed for over a thousand years. It’s how it continues to be practiced, whether it’s ISIS fighting other Muslims, Azebajani troops killing Armenians, Hamas attacking Israelis, or Islamic terrorists plotting carna...

As highly civilized people, we're lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war. We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that's because we don't fight them. Instead we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war. To win a war, you have to fight one. If your enemy is fighting a war and you're fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win. Police actions, nation building exercises and the like have vague and poorly defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones. Wars are either won or lost. That's why modern governments rarely like fighting them. Or doing anything that has clear and measurable results. Once you declare a war, you know you have to win. We fight things that are not wars t...

(This is a commentary on what the Jewish religious response should be. Some terms may be unfamiliar.) Today, I deviated from the synagogue 'nusach' by reciting Tachnun. If there is any time to call out to G-d, to ask for His Mercy, to fall on our faces in prayer, it's this one. We cannot afford to continue running on autopilot politically, militarily or religiously. Too many synagogues responded to the attacks with some recitation of Tehilim if even that. When they should have taken down the parochet, declared a fast day and cried out to G-d, the singing and dancing went on. While women were raped and children were caged, we stuffed our faces at lavish kiddushes. Our only defense is that we did not know all or the worst of it. Hatanu. We erred. Myself among them. That excuse is gone. We should have been told, but now we know. And we must do more. In times past, we would declare a communal fast day. This was true for both Jews and Americans in general. From the day of King S...

What should a nation do when its women and children are murdered and taken hostage. Israel has the same choice it always had. That choice becomes clearer each year and with each atrocity. It can carry out another "limited incursion" into Gaza, bomb the homes of some terrorists and then go home, hopefully with the hostages, and wait for something like it or worse to happen again. Or it can actually go to war and win. Israel, like America, doesn't win wars anymore. It has operations. It takes out terrorist leaders and occasionally terrorist cells. And then it goes home. But when home is within a stone's throw of where monsters live, then there's no way to go home. Home is where the monsters are. A war ends with victory. The destruction of the enemy. The Islamic terrorists have been waging a war meant to end in victory since Israel was reborn. Unless Israel fights to win, it will be lost. What does a war look like? It is not "proportionate" or "limited...

After the latest round of Chinese attacks on America, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta. The two men could not be more different. Wang Yi, one of the public faces of Chinese’s hyper-aggressive style of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, is a 69-year-old member of China’s Communist politburo while Sullivan was a Hillary Clinton hanger-on who got lucky enough to be advising Biden on foreign policy after Hillary left. While Wang Yi made his name by aggressively barraging enemy nations, Sullivan made his through appeasement most notably on Iran. After his shameful record on Iran under Obama, Sullivan went so far as to propose lifting sanctions on Iran under Biden on an interim basis. But Sullivan’s serial meetings with Wang are where he really shines. At a meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in 2021, Sullivan unctuously welcomed Wang with a completely inappropriate recitation of the economic triumphs of the Biden administration while the C...

Biden spent 12 minutes on the UAW picket line. “You guys, the UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before,” he told the striking automotive workers. “Wall Street didn’t build the country. The middle class built the country.” And then he flew off to San Francisco for a fundraiser at Atherton, California, the most expensive area in the Bay Area, for a fundraiser at the $33 million home of Mark Heising: a Democrat megadonor who is also the Chair of the Environmental Defense Fund. Heising’s Medley Partners manages funds for his father-in-law and Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simmons who has been described as “the greatest modern day moneymaker on Wall Street.”. So much for the pretense of choosing the “middle class” over Wall Street. Biden may spend 12 minutes and speak for 87 seconds at the UAW picket line, but he spent hours raising money in the Bay Area which is the force destroying the automobile industry. In Michigan, Biden pays tribute to the middle class, ...

In 1938, New York State held its eighth and penultimate constitutional convention. Little did the various power brokers attending the event know that what they had really accomplished was to fire a bullet that would destroy the City of New York some 85 years in the future. The state constitutional convention was dominated by New Dealers who were busy inserting their socialist agenda everywhere. The ideal of the American Constitution, that freedom comes from government non-interference, was considered laughably outmoded in a ‘modern’ age.. Instead, Senator Robert F. Wagner, a key New Deal figure, argued that, “the threat to freedom… comes from another source — from poverty and insecurity, from sickness and the slum, from social and economic conditions in which human beings cannot be free.” The 1938 Constitution threw in a Labor Bill of Rights and Article XVII on Social Welfare. The wording was more aspirational and idealistic than legalistic. “the aid, care and support of the needy are ...

In 2016, Ariane Tabatabai co-wrote an article arguing that the United States should ally with Iran against ISIS. The Iranian immigrant suggested the United States Air Force could “provide air cover for Iranian-backed militia” and “the US and Iran can share intelligence on targets”. Finally she warned that “excluding Iran, the region’s major Shia state, from the international coalition built to fight ISIS worsens the regional sectarian conflict, ultimately playing into ISIS’ hands.” Tabatabai’s bio now describes her as the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. Up from a Senior Advisor last year. The ASD(SO/LIC) office advises the Secretary of Defense on counterterrorism and it’s hard to think of a better place for a woman accused of being an Iran regime apologist to find herself in. Almost as good as her former role representing the United States in the Iran negotiations. In 2021, when the State Department had brought i...