Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

It wasn't long after Obama's victory that liberals began trying on patriotism like an old ill-fitting coat, admiring themselves in the mirror, and even denouncing conservatives as unamerican (yes it happened). Caught in the afterglow of their win, basking in the radiance of their man addressing the country, beaming down from the carefully arranged set pieces and choreographed events, guzzling the myth like hopeandchangey brew-- they could almost believe that the great clock of history had wound back to the Kennedy Administration. Before the Vietnam War or the shot in Memphis that killed Martin Luther King. That golden moment between FDR and LBJ, only briefly broken by McCarthyism and Ike, when hating your country hadn't yet become the mandatory liberal position. When it was still possible to look up admiringly at the flag and be a liberal, even if Phil Ochs and the SDS might mock them for it. When America to them was still the hope of the world, not the shame of the world. ...

Airline travelers flying the unfriendly skies are presented with two options, that are actually only a single option, to have themselves and their children degraded in public in order to spare Muslim feelings. That we have a ban on profiling travelers, but no ban on molesting or humiliating them, tells us everything we need to know about why we have the current system that we do. In a war we terrorize the enemy. In a siege we terrorize our own. And we have been terrorizing our own for a long time now. In 1999, we dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Yugoslavia, bombing trains, fuel depots, homes, bridges and people. We did that in order to give the Muslim drug dealing terrorists of the KLA their own state. Today that state is a gateway for drug trafficking and sex slaves into Europe, and a training ground for terrorists. Since 1991, we have been bribing, intimidating and pressuring Israel to give the Muslim-Marxist terrorists of the PLO their own state. Flip open any newspa...

Plenty of people don't quite know how to feel about Julian Assange. On the one hand he's a clear and declared enemy of the United States. On the other hand Wikileaks has released diplomatic cables that provided helpful information. And the main damage has been done to Obama and a left of center diplomatic corps. That alone has made Assange seem like the enemy of my enemy. But that kind of thinking is problematic. The showdown between Assange and Obama is more proof that the left is a bottomless pit. That as bad as you think it's going to get, there's still another level beneath that. And another level beneath it still. Obama and his administration are not the basement. There is another basement beneath them where Assange lives. And still another basement beneath him. And another one below that. If there's a bottom floor to it all. A place where there could be no greater possible evil, no deeper hatred of America and no wider assault on civilization. Then we haven...

Liberals have never been too fond of democracy. Even when they win elections, they prefer to treat those victories as "historic events" that are almost supernatural in nature, to avoid dwelling on the fact that what really happened was that the votes were counted, and they racked up more than the other side. Instead they condescendingly describe their victories as a sign that the country has reached a new level of ethical and intellectual awareness. Like a kindergarten teacher handing out gold stars, liberals pat the country on the head (at least the right parts of it) for making the right decision. As liberals see it, their high level of moral and intellectual awareness, and compassion for all creatures great and small, gives them a permanent mandate for social change. Elections sometimes interfere with the implementation of that mandate, but the mandate itself still goes on. Liberals can't possibly lose the mandate, since it derives not from the "will of the peop...

(Image courtesy of the Daily Gator ) When lefty stalwarts Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann decided to jump to the defense of an accused rapist, relying on such authorities as Bianca Jagger, they were either thinking that whether Julian Assange raped two women was irrelevant, because he was doing more important progressive duty. That was the same justification used to support Roman Polanski for his brutal rape of a 13 year old girl. It's more convenient to claim that the rape thing was a CIA plot,  as Bianca Jagger did (while keeping "rape" in quotation marks) and Olbermann retweeted. Predictably thin-skinned, Olbermann reacted to a feminist Twitter campaign with shrill insults, before eventually huffing and puffing and abandoning Twitter. Michael Moore penned an open letter to the Swedish government accusing it of ignoring rapes in general. It's a cynical pose that lets him play rape victim advocate, while defending a particular rapist. What Moore ignored is t...

"Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!",  Gee Officer Krupke, West Side Story When you replace the morality with class warfare, you also replace good and evil with poor and rich. Actions are no longer good or bad, except within the context of class. Murder is a crime for the rich, but not for the poor, or the rich who claim to be fighting for the poor. Under class warfare morality, there are two types of criminals. The depraved and the deprived. The depraved are well off. The deprived are not. When the former commit a crime, it is because they are depraved. When the latter commit a crime, it is because they are deprived. And being deprived, they bear no responsibility for what they do. The practical application of this form of left-wing morality is all around us. When justifying terrorism, the left argues that the terrorists are deprived, but the soldiers who shoot them are depraved. The Israeli civilians who are murdered by terrorists are depraved, on the other h...

Following in the footsteps of Chavez and Castro, Argentina and Brazil's regimes have declared that they recognize Abbas' Palestinian Authority "as a free and independent state within the borders defined in 1967". The Palestinian Authority is of course neither free nor independent. It's a dictatorship that refuses to hold free elections. Or any kind of elections at all. It has neither freedom of speech nor freedom of religion. Or any kind of freedom at all. Nor is it independent. The Palestinian Authority is funded by the United States and the EU. It has no economy. The only notable employers are the Palestinian Authority itself (subsidized wholly by foreign donors), the UNRWA (subsidized wholly by foreign donors) and Israel. If Brazil and Argentina had declared that the Bronx was now a free and independent state, it would have more credibility, because the Bronx has more of a local economy and a higher standard of human rights, than Arafat's old Fatah gangster...