Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

A magazine features a cover photo of Obama with a halo beaming behind his head in the likeness of the murals of medieval saints. Women faint on hearing his speeches. He delivers those speeches with lines and cadences borrowed from his mentor, a radical clergyman. "In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He's sort of god. He's going to bring all different sides together," proclaimed Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. Barack Obama is of course a messiah, one of the latest in a long line of socialist messiahs, men whom socialists and liberals believed were meant to radically reform the world, to teach people to overcome selfishness and greed, and unite as one. The phenomenon of the quasi-religious worship of Obama is only shocking to those who fail to understand that socialism is itself a religion. Henri de Saint-Simon, the French 18th century thinker who coined the term socialism, described it as "The New Christianity". Like many early so...

From the fluttering blue flag of the U.N. with its stylized symbol of the map of the world enclosed by olive tree branches, to the whole collection of global organizations and imagery right down to posters featuring children from every country holding hands, and the rest of the globalist propaganda-- Americans have been imprinted as never before from a very early age with the idea that they are part of a global community, rather than merely one nation. But behind the olive branches and the posters of smiling children, lies a very different truth entirely. The entire notion that there is a world community is itself mostly a myth. The United Nations does represent most of the nations of the world, except for the really unpopular ones. But it does not represent the peoples of the world, only the heads of their regimes. And since most of the UN consists of nations that are not democracies and that do not have truly free and open elections-- the UN's much ballyhooed global community ...

Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practicing intolerance, signaling that anyone who challenges the leaders of an embattled America is cynical, political and -- isn't this the subtext? -- unpatriotic... We should dread a climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent. Maureen Dowd, New York Times, September 30, 2001 That was 2001, the Republicans were in the White House and liberals were busy lecturing us on the dangers of a climate where dissent is considered unpatriotic. Now it's 2009 and the liberals hold Congress and the White House and are busy creating a climate where dissent is un-American and the subtext is... criminal. Where the worst that people like Maureen Dowd or Jacob Weisberg could dig up as examples of the Bush Administration creating a climate of intimidation was an offhand comment about Bill Maher praising the courage of the 9/11 terrorists or putting a positive spin on news from Iraq...

In a clear demonstration of just how "progressive" they really are, the Anti-Israel left is hard at working trying to revive the medieval blood libel. First the Swedish daily Aftonbladet repeated Palestinian Arab propaganda about medically impossible organ thefts, and then the left wing Counterpunch magazine run by Saddam supporter Alexander Cockburn printed an article actually using medieval blood libels against Jews as proof. There is something striking about an Anti-Semitic radicalization on the left so extreme that after being accused of using organ thefts as a modern day blood libel, it actually tries to revive and legitimize medieval blood libels. Leftists like Alexander Cockburn naturally claim they're not Anti-Semitic, but rather Anti-Zionist. Indeed Alexander Cockburn published a book "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" dedicated to that premise. But as implausible as the premise that an enthusiastic defender of Saddam Hussein like Cockburn and so many...

Last week was Columbus Day, once considered a major event, the holiday has been undergoing a decline in recent years. Columbus Day parades have met with protests and some have been deemphasized or outright eliminated. In California, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds vaguely like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday. But while it's tempting to put that down to California's political correctness, in South Dakota, Columbus Day became Native American Day, and that is a trend that other states are likely to follow, as protests mounted under the aegis of La Raza (The Race- the Hispanic KKK) continue to grow. And while none have thus far followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which indeed is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect. About the on...

Shabbat night update - Parshat Bereishis - The Sacrifice of the Shabbat The Torah begins with G-d creating the world. Day by day we are told what is created, and then on the seventh day after having created everything from all the stars in the universe to the tiniest bugs and finally man, G-d rests. But why does G-d rest? Is he a man that he becomes tired and needs to take a day off? The Lord does not weary and falter. And the Sabbath is more than a day defined by negative, by the absence of work. The Sabbath is not merely the absence of work. It is the completion of work. All too often we tend to think of the Sabbath in terms of what we can't do, but that is not what the Sabbath is. The Sabbath is the culmination of a properly spent week. For six days G-d had brought material life into existence. On the seventh and final day he declared a rest from the material in favor of the spiritual. The first week though marks the expulsion of man from the Garden of Eden, and the end of...

What happens when a politician takes a look at the demographics and realizes that he has a serious problem with one particular group? In this case the politician is Barack Hussein Obama, and the problematic demographic are senior citizens. Obama's strongest base of support was among voters age 18 to 29, which is a fancy way of saying voters who didn't have enough experience with lying politicians to know better and were easily awed by stadium rallies, social media and stylized posters. Over 30 it was already a dead heat, and over 50 the voters trended McCain's way. And 2008 only worked because of a large youth vote turnout, a demographic that traditionally doesn't do big voter turnouts. To win in 2012, Obama must either maintain that level of youth turnout or somehow reduce the voter turnout by senior citizens. A tricky problem either way, one that nationalized health care is meant to solve. In the past politicians have tried segregation, redistricting and voter su...

Islamists are sworn to make war on the West, to drive out freedom and democracy, replacing them with the mandated tyranny of Islamic law.They declare all laws and all nations that do not originate or abide by Islamic law to be invalid. And they reserve the right to make war on them by any means necessary, from the political to the economic to the terroristic. And yet it might surprise many people to realize that most Islamists are not haggard fanatics living off dried goat meat in caves. Instead many of them are doctors and lawyers working in major American and European cities, they serve as advisors to Western politicians and write newspaper columns. Their organizations are treated with respect and given veto power over the policies of governments whose existence they reject. And that in a nutshell is the trouble of it all. Because Islamism should carry a price, instead it only carries rewards. Islamists in Europe and America do not actually have to be isolated hermits working out ...