Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has touched off a great deal of outrage by the same media organizations and countries that typically ignore the murders committed by Islamic terrorists. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was a Muslim Brotherhood member and a co-founder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the "armed wing" of Hamas. Essentially Mahmoud was a co-founder of the terrorist sub-group responsible for more than half of the murders of Israelis that have taken place over the last decade alone. If you're wondering what that long string of syllables, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, means. It's in memory of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim religious leader who founded the " Black Hand " terrorist group, the first modern day Muslim terrorist group in Israel, which murdered Jewish farmers and tried to launch an uprising in order to create an Arab-Islamic in place of Israel. The good Sheikh worked together with the Mufti of Jerusalem, who went on to hel...

America faces two major policy challenges today, Government Reform and the War on Terror. And neither of them are optional. We have to reform government to create a leaner and meaner America, that offers more personal freedoms and much less spending. And we have to fight the internal and external Jihad converging on us. If we choose only one of those, we lose. It's that simple. Fighting the War on Terror with the same kind of bloated, politically correct nation building approach of the Bush Administration is a formula for a prolonged conflict that will fail to destroy the sources of Islamic terror and leave us vulnerable to another attack. It will crank up the deficit and cost thousands of lives without producing definitive results. It will leave us vulnerable on the homefront while CAIR officials trot in and out of the White House, just as they've done under two administrations. To win the War on Terror, the nature of government needs to change to one that is leaner, meane...

Sprightly Ahmadinejad tours nuclear facilities, having stolen an election he marches on as his police batter and protesters. And everywhere he goes, he smiles his trademark loopy smile. The smile of a psychopath or a saint. Why is Ahmadinejad smiling? The answer is not a terribly complicated one. With every step he takes and every day that he remains in power, he discredits the most deeply held ideas of Western liberals about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and internal civil disobedience to achieve peaceful regime change. Despite years of diplomatic and hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets-- Ahmadinejad's grip on power remains as secure as ever. Walking over the bodies of student protesters, of political dissidents, of the thousands killed by the wars he has touched off, he continues to taunt the rest of the world to do anything about it. And the rest of the world has done nothing except talk. And as Ahmadinejad has demonstrated, talk counts fo...

With great fanfare, Michelle Obama kicked off a national anti-obesity campaign, which if it goes half as well as her toxic vegetable garden, will be forgotten in a week or two. But the problem is that we do need an anti-obesity campaign, just not against people who enjoy an extra hamburger during lunch, but against the politicians in Washington D.C. who have shown no ability to control the rate at which they consume public funds. Anyone who tripled their weight within one year, would probably be a target of Michelle Obama's finger wagging-- but what about her hubby, who tripled the national deficit in only one year? Someone who eats more than average is only consuming his own food, by contrast Barry Hussein has thrown a party for himself and all his backers, and they've gorged themselves like mad on the United States Treasury. Obama's new budget has over 46 trillion dollars in spending over the next decade. And we're not done yet. Meanwhile Obama's phony promise...

Wednesday afternoon, the sky over New York City was a falling sheet of white. Temperatures had dropped sharply and the blizzard was underway. But nowhere in the city was the blizzard more pronounced than in Central Park, which had been designed in the 19th century to create a miniature forest in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world. The trees were layered with coats of snow and visibility had vanished into a cloud of  whiteness. And walking along a path in the Ramble, I heard a woman lecturing her children on the dangers of what else, but Global Warming. There is a kind of madness to walking through a blizzard, while wearing a thick coat and picking the moment  to discuss Global Warming. A theory according to which we should be sliding toward the tropics, awash in fleeing polar bears and Florida style temperatures, instead of frantically shoveling our driveways. Such an attitude has very little to do with science, and a great deal to do with faith. Because whi...

Witnessing the end of the Kennedy era is a little like seeing the fall of the Berlin Wall. The retirement of self-destructive Kennedy scion, Patrick Kennedy, will now mean that for the first time in a long time, there will be not a Kennedy in the Senate or in the House of Representatives. Patrick Kennedy, may have retired to dodge some larger scandal, though considering the scandals he has already been involved in, it's hard to imagine what else there might be. Or he might simply be trying to protect his "legacy" by leaving before the voters kick him out. One notable way Democrats have been dealing with the problem of incumbency unpopularity in the midterm elections is by purging some of their own incumbents behind the scenes by encouraging them to retire, rather than face a party endorsed challengers. While the DNC or Rahm Emanuel can't be blamed for "retiring" Murtha, some of the retirements of incredibly unpopular figures like Senator Dodd or Patrick ...

What if the sympathy for terrorism and the drive toward socialism, the falling birth rates and cultural bankruptcy in civilized countries, the economic decay and decline of the family all had a common cause? What if that common cause lay behind the multitude of ways that we can see civilization collapsing around us. Following that cause will require a brief journey, not into the realm of geopolitics or global economics, but into the human spirit. They say that the child is father to the man. But what becomes of the man when the child never grows up? That is the unfortunate question that civilization as we know it, is confronted by. That is the question it will have to answer if it wants to survive. The journey from child to man occurs in three stages. ADULATION. REBELLION. INTEGRATION. The child looks up to the parent. Then as the adolescent is forced to begin transitioning into the adult role, he responds with rebellion. When he takes on into his adult role, integration occurs. Genera...

Since taking office, Obama's key objective on terrorism has been to transform the public perception of it from an international military conflict, to a limited domestic criminal problem. Renaming terrorism to the bureaucratically euphonious term, "Man Caused Disasters" was straight out of the first rule in the textbook of organizational coverups, to phrase your sentences so that the identity of the perpetrators of the crisis remain as vague as possible. Focusing on everything but terrorism, while shutting down Gitmo and dispatching top Al Queda terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to civilian trials, was meant to restore the illusion of normalcy, while doing away with the terrorism focus of the Bush Administration. There was a reason that once in office, Obama showed a very limited interest in pushing for the prosecutions of Bush Administration officials, as the left wing expected him to. Unlike them, Obama understood that the best way to shift the conversation was by...

Yesterday Paul Krugman penned an article for the New York Times, which in summary argued that America was lost because the Senate had too many procedures that could allow Republicans to block Obama, Reid and Pelosi's idea of what is good for America. Lest you think this was mere hyperbole on Krugman's part, he compared the United States of 2010 to 18th century Poland, to 18th century Poland, which in Krugman's assessment was destroyed because of excessive democracy. While Krugman's article is as cartoonish as one might expect from the beloved Nobel Prize winning Enron adviser, whose only solution is to demand that Obama spend even more money to create even bigger deficits-- this newfound hostility to democracy and the system of checks and balances has been coming from a lot of liberal quarters lately. Of course the liberal affinity for democracy tends to be a very selective one, even under the best of circumstances. The same people who wailed that Florida had been ...