Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Over the last year every time the media sensed that it might be on the losing side of an argument, it began shouting "Bigot". When ObamaCare and the Big Bailouts began floundering in the polls and meeting up with populist protests, the media began running stories accusing the protesters of being bigots, while claiming that "Socialist" was actually a racial slur. Now the media and its political agenda is once again on the wrong side of the American people over the Ground Zero Mosque, and once again the media is playing the bigotry card. At times like these it's all too obvious why liberals have been so determined to co-opt race, because it gives them an open ended smear to use in virtually any situation. In the Obama Era, the media has been certain that the very presence of a half-black politician behind their agenda, meant they had an unlimited use of the race card. They were wrong. The media's smears have resounded only inside liberal echo chambers, and t...

Many foreign policy experts have dismissed Obama's START treaty with Russia and his prattle about a world without nuclear weapons as a post-cold war sideshow, a way to register something resembling a foreign policy accomplishment, 20 years after this kind of thing was relevant. And while that's not entirely inaccurate, it ignores the real need for nuclear deterrence. To those who grew up during the Cold War, nuclear weapons were part of a balance of power between the US and the USSR, creating the Mutually Assured Destruction checkmate that prevented WW3 from becoming anything more than a book and TV miniseries. But the need for nuclear deterrence did not end when the Soviet Union collapsed. The truth is that the need for nuclear deterrence never went away. Any basic defensive strategy begins with at least weapons parity. That is if the other side has a gun, you had better also have a gun or a really reliable bulletproof vest. During the Cold War, America stocked up on ICBM ...

Democratic governments derive their legitimacy from popular support in direct elections. Non-Democratic governments derive their legitimacy from a "special duty" to protect the country as embodied by a particular racial or economic group, in accordance with a set of overriding values. Such governments will typically explain that they cannot have democracy, because open democracy would endanger the groups and values that they are trying to protect. Democracy becomes the enemy, a threat would unleash the very evils they are trying to prevent. They will claim that at some future time, when all the threats have been purged, democracy will become possible. But not now. The paradox at the heart of this is obvious. If the non-democratic regime really represents the people, then why not allow the people to have the final say? The regime will have two answers. 1, The people are not mature enough to be able to make an informed decision. 2, There are destructive elements in the countr...

The media is all worked up over a poll that shows the majority of Americans don't think Obama is a Christians and nearly a 1/4 of Americans think that Obama is a Muslim. Naturally the "mainstream" conservative blogs are embarrassed by these results. Politico is calling it a new Birtherism. Left unasked is the question of why people might think that. There's Obama own statements on the topic in which he emphasized his family connections to Islam. This is what he said in Turkey; Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them. This is what he said later in Cairo "Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk." This time Obama included the mention that ...

It's a testament to the intelligence level of liberals that they prefer nursery rhymes to ideas. Whether it's Auden's "Those to whom evil is done, Do Evil in Return" (a verse from a Communist poet partially justifying Hitler's invasion of Poland, that he later disavowed) or "What Would Gandhi Do?" (give up and hope his enemies felt bad while cutting off his head) or the most famous nursery rhyme of them all, "First they came for the Communists." This particular nursery rhymes endeavors to explain Nazis from a leftist perspective, in which Hitler's triumph occurred because no one spoke out when Communists were being imprisoned. When in doubt, the left and various useful idiots routinely trot out revised versions of this nursery rhyme. The current popular formulation on the left is "First they came for the Terrorists." (The Cato Institute's attempt to write one called "First they came for the Sex Offenders and then th...

After crunching the numbers and realizing that backing a mosque near Ground Zero, plays to average Americans about as well as flag burning on 4th of July, the Dems have emerged with a new talking point. The Republicans are "politicizing" Ground Zero. Thanks to the exposure of Jornolist, we've already seen how liberal media pundits and Democratic campaign strategists collaborate to develop and distribute talking points in response to a setback. Now we're seeing the same thing at work as Time's Mark Halperin goes around promoting the "politicizing Ground Zero" talking point. It's already been picked up by Senator Robert Menendez and Governor Christie , who worked to help Hamas linked Imam, Mohammad Qatanani, stay in America . But let's talk about who's really been politicizing Ground Zero. The mosque's biggest supporter, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had aggressively tried to politicize Ground Zero back in 2005 with the International Freedom ...